Dire Warning Issued on Major City’s Economy: ‘Doom Loop’

Fishing boats can be seen at Pier 45 in San Francisco on March 20, 2023. Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP Photo

The San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board issued a warning this week that office workers staying home to work rather than commuting to the city will spark a “doom loop” that will erode its tax base.

“Experts say post-pandemic woes stemming from office workers staying home instead of commuting into the city could send San Francisco into a ‘doom loop’ that would gut its tax base, decimate fare-reliant regional transit systems like BART and trap it in an economic death spiral,” the paper’s editorial board wrote, specifically referring to downtown San Francisco.

“Despite our housing crisis, it was years into the COVID pandemic before our leaders meaningfully questioned the logic of reserving some of the most prized real estate on Earth for fickle suburbanites and their cars,” the editorial also said. “And so we wasted generous federal COVID emergency funds trying to bludgeon, cajole, and pray for office workers to return downtown instead of planning for change. We’re now staring down the consequences for that lack of vision.”

The Chronicle’s editorial board suggested making more investments into office-to-housing conversions. It also recommended that some office buildings be demolished to make way for new projects, but it said that such moves would require assistance from the California state government.

In the opinion article, the city’s paper of record claimed that the Newsom administration needs to “do its long-neglected part to help San Francisco address the behavioral health crisis on its streets,” referring to rampant drug usage and homelessness. “In the meantime, San Francisco should address the roadblocks that have hampered it from spending the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for homelessness and prevented it from filling hundreds of empty housing units,” it said.

The board drew a comparison between San Francisco’s post-COVID-19 reality and Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. After the 2001 incident, New Yorkers feared returning to work in Lower Manhattan skyscrapers.

The Chronicle said that subsidies allowed Manhattan to rebound following the attacks. San Francisco hasn’t made such changes, it argued.

The city’s mayor, Democrat London Breed, responded to the Chronicle’s prognostications of doom-and-gloom. “It’s easy to throw out dire predictions about the death of downtown. But that’s not our reality and it’s not going to happen,” Breed said, although she did not provide evidence to the contrary.

Meanwhile, in recent years, San Francisco has developed a reputation for being dirty and fraught with drug addicts as well as homeless encampments. Last year, the city recalled left-wing District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was accused of taking a soft-on-crime approach, and replaced him with District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, considered by many to be a moderate.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Cash App founder Bob Lee was stabbed to death in San Francisco, sending shockwaves through the tech world. A number of tech billionaires, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and current owner Elon Musk, weighed in.

Musk, whose social media company is based in San Francisco, said that crime is out of control. Lee was reportedly stabbed to death in an affluent part of the city, not in a more irreputable spot like the Tenderloin district, which has been notorious for its open-air drug markets and high violent crime rate.

“Very sorry to hear that. Many people I know have been severely assaulted. Violent crime in SF is horrific,” Musk wrote on Twitter this week.

Some residents said to local media outlets several weeks ago that surging crime and dirty streets remain a serious problem. Oscar Gonzalez, who operates a restaurant in the Mission District, told CBS Bay Area that it “can’t go on like this. It’s just getting worse ... there has to be a positive change.”

“The situation in The Mission is terrible,” resident Guadalupe Hernandez chimed in. “It’s sad. I remember 21 years ago when I came to live here, and The Mission was so pretty, but now everything is ugly, sad, dirty.”