By the Numbers

[JFW657]

Nevermind.

Edited December 17, 2022 by JFW657

[JFW657]

Think DTO is the only downtown with problems? 

Quote

What Comes Next for the Most Empty Downtown in America?

SAN FRANCISCO — The coffee rush. The lunch rush. The columns of headphone-equipped tech workers rushing in and out of train stations. The lanyard-wearing visitors who crowded the sidewalks when a big conference was in town.

There was a time three years ago when a walk through downtown San Francisco was a picture of what it meant for a city to be economically successful. Take the five-minute jaunt from the office building at 140 New Montgomery St. to a line-out-the-door salad shop nearby.

The 26-story building, an art deco landmark that was once the tallest in the city, began its life as the headquarters for the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. Decades later, it served as the home of local search company Yelp. The nearby salad store was part of a fast-growing chain called Mixt.

Yelp and Mixt had little more than proximity in common, which at that time was enough. Yelp was an idea that became billions of dollars in value on the internet. Mixt was a booming business serving lunchtime salads to the workers who traveled on electrified trains and skateboards to their jobs in downtown cubicles.

Their virtuous cycle of nearness, of new ideas becoming new companies, feeding other ideas that become other companies, was the template for urban growth. Businesses such as Yelp took root in the high-energy, high-density city; chains like Mixt flourished alongside them as their workers ventured out for lunch. As downtowns have emptied out, their once-symbiotic relationship is coming undone.

“This area was always packed with people,” recalled Maria Cerros-Mercado, a Mixt manager who built her career in food service downtown. “People would get off the BART, buy coffee, buy this, buy that. There was always just so much walking.”

Today San Francisco has what is perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America. In any given week, office buildings are at about 40% of their pre-pandemic occupancy, and the vacancy rate has jumped to 24% from 5% since 2019. Occupancy of the city’s offices is roughly 7 percentage points below that of those in the average major American city, according to Kastle, a building security firm.

More ominous for the city is that its downtown business district — the bedrock of its economy and tax base — revolves around a technology industry uniquely equipped and enthusiastic about letting workers stay home indefinitely. In the space of a few months, Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, went from running a company rooted in the city to vacating Yelp’s longtime headquarters and allowing its roughly 4,400 employees to work from anywhere in their country of residence.

“I feel like I’ve seen the future,” he said.

Decisions like that, played out across thousands of remote and hybrid work arrangements, have forced office building owners and the businesses that rely on them to figure out what’s next. This has made the San Francisco area something of a test case in the multibillion-dollar question of what the nation’s central business districts will look like when an increased amount of business is done at home.

“Imagine a forest where an entire species suddenly disappears,” said Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies urban real estate. “It disrupts the whole ecosystem and produces a lot of chaos. The same thing is happening in downtowns.”

The city’s chief economist, Ted Egan, has warned about a looming loss of tax revenue as vacancies pile up. Brokers have tried to counter that narrative by talking up a “flight to quality” in which companies upgrade to higher-end space. Business groups and city leaders hope to recast the urban core as a more residential neighborhood built around people as well as businesses but leave out that office rents would probably have to plunge for those plans to be viable.

Below the surface of spin is a downtown trying to adapt to what amounts to a three-day workweek. During a recent lunch at a Mixt location in the financial district, the company’s CEO, Leslie Silverglide, pointed to the line of badge-holding workers and competition for outdoor tables.

It was also, she noted, a Wednesday — what passes for rush hour. On Wednesdays, offices in San Francisco are at roughly 50% of their pre-pandemic levels; on Fridays, they’re not even at 30%.

The lunchtime business downtown is not, and may never be, what it used to be. But if workers aren’t going to return to buying their $17 salads downtown, Mixt will follow them home.

Which is why on a recent Wednesday morning, one of Mixt’s managers, Cerros-Mercado, 35, stood on a mostly empty sidewalk waiting for an Uber (another company that told most of its employees they can work half their time from home).

Cerros-Mercado lives in San Francisco and used to walk downtown for work but now manages a Mixt branch in Mill Valley, a Marin County suburb that has 14,000 people and $2 million starter homes.

Many of the former office workers who live there have yet to return downtown en masse, but their purchases over the past three years have shown that they still want downtown perks and services such as a freshly prepared lunch. Mixt opened the Mill Valley location this year as part of a push to generate more business in residential neighborhoods and suburbs.

Continue reading:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/comes-next-most-empty-downtown-151113414.html

 

[spenser1058]

 

Florida is the fastest growing state, Census data shows

The Sunshine State saw a 1.9 percent population increase from 2021 to 2022.

https://apple.news/AW8oVkR4kSIO2UMc6x57cCw

From POLITICO
 

Edited December 23, 2022 by spenser1058

[spenser1058]

Dec 2022 License Plate Sales:

UCF: 35,138
Miami: 30,728
cow u: 14,615 (they keep losing plate sales)

Charge On!

Edited December 23, 2022 by spenser1058

[spenser1058]

Did you know the UCFMarching Knights have 400 members, one of the largest bands in the country?

Charge On!