How the pandemic changed S.F. in 3 years
The coronavirus pandemic fundamentally altered San Francisco’s future when, three years ago Thursday, health officials and Mayor London Breed ordered residents to shelter in place. The health crisis and unprecedented shift to remote work hollowed out downtown and triggered a calamity for residents, business and property owners, transit agencies and city leaders. Devoid of office workers and tourists, restaurants and shops closed permanently and streets were eerily empty.
The scars of the pandemic are still visible, with downtown still a shadow of life before the virus. There are scores of empty seats on public transit, and more still among the quiet floors of the city’s office towers. But things are changing. Here are charts that show the pandemic’s toll on the city, and the uneven, sluggish recovery that remains very much a work in progress.
San Francisco had one of the lowest death rates from COVID among major U.S. cities, which experts have credited to the swift public health response to the pandemic and a high vaccination rate. But another crisis, drug addiction, continued to worsen and overdoses killed more than 2,000 people in the past three years, almost double the city’s total 1,170 confirmed deaths from COVID.
Despite a relatively low death rate from COVID, the city’s population dropped by more than 55,000 people in the past three years, wiping out a decade of growth. San
Francisco had the biggest percentage population loss of any city in the nation during the first year of the pandemic, according to census data. Experts cited the city’s high housing costs combined with the rise of remote work for mass out-migration, as well as many lowwage service jobs disappearing during shelter in place. A huge drop in international immigration, which helped fuel population gains before the pandemic, exacerbated losses.
San Francisco’s notoriously expensive apartment market remains stuck in a major downturn. Rents dropped the most out of any major U.S. city during the early pandemic and are seeing the slowest recovery, according to Apartment List. The February median rent was 13.2% below March 2020, and the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas are the only two in the nation with rents below pre-pandemic levels.
The office market flipped from being one of the strongest in the country to one of the most troubled, as companies sought to vacate a staggering amount of space in the age of remote work. The vacancy rate, which is tied to the amount of available lease and sublease listings on the market, is more than seven times higher than it was before the pandemic, to a record high of 27.6% at the end of 2022. Asking rents have dropped only 8%, but almost no major new leases have been signed in recent months.
With everyone stuck at home, screen time shot up, enriching the already rich tech giants and powering some of the biggest hiring sprees in modern history. Some tech companies more than doubled their workforces during the pandemic, riding a seemingly boundless growth trajectory and helping fill San Francisco’s tax coffers despite a major shift to remote work. But rising interest rates, high inflation and an advertising slump sparked more than 100,000 global layoffs at companies headquartered in the Bay Area since last fall, led by huge cuts at Meta and Google. Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has laid off or fired roughly 70% of Twitter’s 7,500 workers since taking over the company. The big exception: Apple, the world’s most valuable company, which hired more conservatively during the pandemic and hasn’t announced any layoffs.
A brief two-month recession triggered by mass shelter-in-place orders and business closures walloped the economy. Each of the nine Bay Area counties saw unemployment rates above 11% in 2022. But strong tech growth and the full reopening of the economy brought rates down to pre-pandemic levels, in some cases even below 2%. Unemployment rates did rise across all counties in January, suggesting the economy is softening again amid mass tech layoffs.
Bay Area public transit ridership numbers were devastated by early pandemic shelter-in-place orders and contagion concerns, but remote work has prolonged the pain even as the viral threat has lessened. After plunging to less than 10% of pre-pandemic levels in early 2020, BART ridership remains stagnant at around 40% in the past year. The fiscal consequences could be brutal, as BART is more dependent on fare revenue than almost any other U.S. transit agency. A doomsday scenario could include mass layoffs, the end of weekend service, station closures and trains running only once per hour.
The global pandemic shutdown froze almost all leisure and business travel, but almost all countries are ready for travelers again, with China fully reopening to visitors this week. That’s a critical market for San Francisco, which saw Chinese tourists spend the most money out of any group before the pandemic. Domestic travel was strong last fall, when airplane boardings at San Francisco International exceeded 80% of pre-pandemic levels. But passenger volume has dropped since then, suggesting sky-high ticket prices to popular destinations may be deterring some potential travelers.
The pandemic hit San Francisco’s hotels harder than any other real estate sector. Occupancy and pricing data for the first months of the pandemic aren’t available because so many hotels shuttered, and many workers lost their jobs. But the return of major business conferences significantly boosted hospitality: The 40,000-person Dreamforce conference last September lifted hotel occupancy to 82.8% for a week, briefly higher than 2019’s 79% rate, and the average daily room rate to $391. The smaller but high-spending 8,000person JPMorgan healthcare conference made daily rates soar to $782 per night in January. There’s more to come: The Game Developers Conference kicks off on Monday.