Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

Post by acchow » Thu, Jun 16, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

Fatnino wrote: post #237

julianeon wrote: post #24

I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back. Yo…

Those residential units would be full of people remote working so the satellite businesses (cafes and what-have-yous) could theoreticaly stay in business. The reality is that a building owner doesn't want to lower the asking rent because it will devalue the building. They make more money owning a building with high rents than they lose having it sit empty. Nobody actually checks if these "high value" real estate prop…