Jack Mogannam, manager of Sam’s Cable Car Lounge in downtown San Francisco, relishes the days when his bar stayed open past midnight every night, welcoming crowds that jostled on the streets, bar hopped, window browsed or just took in the night air.
Empty storefronts dot the streets. Large “going out of business” signs hang in windows. Uniqlo, Nordstrom Rack and Anthropologie are gone. Last month, the owner of Westfield San Francisco Centre, a fixture for more than 20 years, said it was handing the mall back to its lender, citing declining sales and foot traffic. The owner of two towering hotels, including a Hilton, did the same.
No longer the purview of office workers, downtowns must become around-the-clock destinations for people to congregate, said Richard Florida, a specialist in city planning at the University of Toronto. Office vacancy rates in San Francisco were 24.8 per cent in the first quarter, more than five times higher than pre-pandemic levels and well above the average rate of 18.5 per cent for the nation’s top 10 cities, according to CBRE, a commercial real estate services company.
And midwestern cities like Indianapolis and Cleveland already struggled pre-pandemic with diminished downtowns as they relied on a single industry to support them and lacked booming industries like tech, said Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto and author of the study.
Real estate experts also point to office-to-housing conversions as a potential lifeline. Cities such as New York and Pittsburgh are offering sizeable tax breaks for developers to spur such conversions.