SF Mayor London Breed Outlines Plans For Downtown Recovery In State Of The City Address

San Francisco Mayor London Breed gave her annual State of the City address on Thursday, outlining her plan to save the Downtown area of the city amid record low office occupancy, tens of thousands being let go from Bay Area tech firms, a continuing crime wave, more workers deciding to work from home, and a $728 million budget deficit.

With all those problems on the table, Mayor Breed admitted in her speech that downtown San Francisco will never look the way it once did due to the massive changes and post-COVID shifts in working. However, she also noted that San Francisco had faced dire challenges to recover before, such as after the 1906 earthquake, and did so quickly.

“San Francisco downtown as we know it is not coming back. And you know what? That’s OK,” said Mayor Breed on Thursday. “It’s a call to action, to reimagine what our future holds. Empty office buildings have fueled dire predictions about economic doom and screaming headlines about the death of downtown. In 1907, downtown was mostly rubble and ash. That’s considerably worse than today’s shift in how people are working,

“We have our challenges, but this isn’t an end to downtown. It’s a call to action, to reimagine what our future holds, what we can be, to think about what kind of city we are and what kind of city we can be.”

The combat against all the cities current economic problems, as well as fight back against recent studies finding that remote workers in the city jumped from 7% in 2019 to 46% in 2021, and that San Francisco has had the weakest recovery of any city from the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayor Bred announced a multi-pronged ‘Roadmap to Downtown San Francisco’s Future‘ on Thursday.

My Roadmap to Downtown SF's Future will help us create a Downtown that is:

•Economically diverse and a resilient job engine
•Welcoming, clean, and safe
•A dynamic destination
•A world-class transportation experience
•An equitable economy https://t.co/I6lwYrBvME

— London Breed (@LondonBreed) February 9, 2023

In it, Mayor Breed identified a number of new areas to work on, including improving safety and cleanliness, attracting and retaining a diverse range of industries and employers, finding new uses and flexibility in empty buildings, making it easier to start a business, growing the workforce, making downtown more of a cultural and entertainment hub, enhancing public spaces, improving transportation, and focusing on the positives of the city to attract new residents and businesses.

A new plan in San Francisco

While each area of her plan has multiple tactics, none came as more of a surprise than her proposal to change the city’s tax structure – something previous administrations traditionally refused to do to the booming tech industry.

Specifically her plan calls for permit costs going significantly down, tax increases paused for most businesses remaining in the city, and new businesses to get three-year tax breaks. For developing downtown into more of an entertainment hub, Mayor Breed even proposed getting legislation passed to allow for outdoor alcohol consumption.

“I’m proposing legislation to protect our existing companies by pausing tax increases on our retail businesses, our hotels, manufacturing sectors and arts and entertainment,” Breed said on Thursday. “The revival plan will also prioritize arts and culture to bring the streets alive.”

“Building a stronger and more resilient Downtown and City, will not happen overnight and it will take work and partnership with all of our business leaders and workforce. This Roadmap lays out 9 key strategies to do just that.”

Also noteworthy is a new commitment to police and sanitation efforts, including crackdowns on street vendors, going after open air drug dealing in areas such as the Tenderloin, more arrests of drug dealers and more help for uses through treatment and housing.

“I want to make one thing very clear, I am not OK with open air drug dealing in this city period,” Breed said.

In addition, Breed said that new affordable housing units need to be built, and that some former office space in the city will be converted to housing to help meet the citys’ affordable housing needs, with more flexible zoning allowing for more mixed commercial and residential buildings in larger structures downtown.

Breed received widespread praise for her speech. Even previous detractors admitted that it was a good thing that Breed was finally pushing to change economic and business policies that have long been derided. However, critics quickly pointed out that her plans could take years to even begin to plan to implement. Some noted that areas such as getting the city to be “clean, safe, and inviting” were easier said than done, while others noted that pausing taxes and increasing funding for the police and sanitation would only increase the city’s budget deficit.

Questions over the economic recovery of San Francisco’s downtown

“The problem is that there is just so much to do throughout the city that even in specific districts, like Downtown, it requires so much to be done,” Thomas Schaeffer, an economics researcher in New York who focuses on revival plans for cities, told the Globe on Friday. “A lot of cities have more basic plans of revitalizing the waterfront or attracting a sports team, or something to reinvigorate that economic engine. San Francisco isn’t just facing a declining economy and a high crime rate. They’re facing the loss of their main industry. They’re  losing people living there very quickly. They’re in the red. It reads almost like a rust belt city.”

“Plus they’re facing problems that cities just haven’t faced before, like half the workforce suddenly working from home and office vacancies popping up all over. All the things the Mayor pointed out out yesterday, they all need to work in order for San Francisco to go into a turnaround. But even then, so many cities planned to revitalize their downtown only to fail. Or they tried to focus on entertainment, only for it to blow up in their faces when it turned out that most of the new jobs were minimum wage and relied on continued public interest. I’m surprised they didn’t push more on tourism, as that is usually more solid.”

Mayor Breed said on Thursday that it would be a long road ahead and that “There won’t be any one specific thing that saves downtown.” But many, including business owners, had at least some hope renewed on Thursday.

“We’ll see if any of it actually comes from fruition,” said Tonilla Morgan, a small business owner in San Francisco’s downtown on Friday to the Globe. “But a lot of us here are hoping that this works. We’re beginning to see a speck of light at the end of the tunnel now, but we also know not to get our hopes too much up. We’re not sure if this will work, but we damned sure want this to work.”

More details on the Mayor’s plans, including solving the budget deficit, are expected in the coming months.