Pedestrians walk past the headquarters of First Republic Bank, which was seized by regulators and sold to JPMorgan Chase Bank, becoming the latest San Francisco company to go bust. (Godofredo A Vasquez / Associated Press)
Downtown San Francisco is in distress. Indicators of well-being in the city are pointing in the wrong direction: office occupancy, BART drivers and retail foot traffic have all declined, as has the city’s population. There’s news of another high-profile departure every week: Recent closures include a flagship Whole Foods and Nordstrom store that announced the end of its 35th year on Market Street due to changes in downtown “dynamics.” First Republic Bank, another San Francisco success story, went under after failing to retain its wealthy customers and was sold to JPMorgan Chase. The future of its branches, the well-known green and gold downtown presence, is uncertain.
Hardly a day now goes by without the San Francisco Chronicle or some other publication pointing out a “snake of misfortune” in the city. There is plenty of blame, but no consensus on how to solve real problems, including a deepening homelessness crisis, unsustainable living costs, or a property crime rate that’s consistently higher than similar metropolitan areas. If you see people smiling downtown, they’re probably tourists on double-decker buses — and even that could be deceptive. Hotel occupancy remains well below pre-pandemic levels.
Like most people who have had a good run for too long, San Francisco didn’t expect it. i understand why When I moved here from Boston in 2003, I fell unconditionally in love with this glowing city that looked like a cross between JRR Tolkien’s Gondor and America’s proverbial city on the hill: an immigrant’s dream. Even then, San Francisco wasn’t exactly affordable. We ended up buying a house in the East Bay and it still cost twice what we would have paid back in the East. But that was the Bay Area, our real estate agent explained, “It’s all uphill here.”
It made sense. San Francisco was the closest metro area to a gold rush in the early 2000s – Silicon Valley – and the job market felt solid even during the recession (I got a job within four months while caring for a newborn cared for), with industries with high salaries and the seemingly endless upside potential that stock options offer. Google had just gone public, as had Salesforce and many others. The city was teeming with white collar workers who bought millions of dollars in condos near the ballpark, joining the country’s “one percent.”
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Tech fortunes grew exponentially, with IPOs from Facebook, Twitter, and Uber raising billions of dollars. With that wealth came Michelin-star restaurants and upscale malls where young tech entrepreneurs cavorted in their perpetual white soles. To accommodate this generation of millennials, First Republic Bank, whose “privilege” was to serve the city’s elite, hired me as a contract clerk in 2018. Unlike older customers, young tech millionaires preferred to do their banking online and their seven-figure scales electronically. I wrote the words that helped them.
In the 18 months that I worked at One Front, as we called the bank’s headquarters, downtown San Francisco felt like the ultimate metropolis. European and domestic coffee shops competed with juice parlors, which unobtrusively charged more than $10 a glass and still drew long lines. The wine bars and dockside cafes in the Ferry Building were packed at lunchtime, although employers often offered quality free or subsidized food. Inside, you could get lavender chocolate and Argentinian empanadas, Spanish ham and cheese from the local famed Cowgirl Creamery. Sometimes, after work, I’d pluck a fresh loaf of sourdough before squeezing onto the escalator at the Embarcadero BART station, whose entrance had to be regularly closed to accommodate the rush of passengers.
Another time, I didn’t rush home and waited for the madness to subside in the light-filled atrium of the nearby Palace Hotel, another San Francisco landmark. I met my husband there and we went to the San Francisco Ballet. The four blocks between Twitter HQ on 5th Street and the War Memorial Opera House were delicate, requiring a quick walk. But once there, one could only see the genius of the city’s artists, many of them transplants, like Shanghai-born San Francisco legend Yuan Yuan Tan. During breaks we gazed out on the mezzanine balcony and shivered in the wind, gazed at the magnificent neoclassical town hall lit up for the evening and blessed the good fortune that had brought us here to the final stop of the Go West dream train.
My last memory of downtown before the pandemic was as dreamy as it gets: Keanu Reeves filming the new “Matrix” movie at the One Front. I still have his picture on my iPhone walking through the bank’s lobby. Four weeks later, on March 7, 2020, First Republic sent us home with our laptops and a few remaining bottles of hand sanitizer for shelter. After a month of remote work, I was fired along with other contractors. During the pandemic, I often thought of “Firbie” as my paradise lost. When it’s over, I hoped that maybe I could find my way back.
But the bank that seemed as impenetrable as their city no longer exists. The technology that propelled San Francisco to the top also carried the seeds of its downfall. At the start of the pandemic, tech stocks were boosted by remote work tools. But when the shutdowns finally ended, they weakened and undid everything else—just as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank helped start the death spiral that shook trust in First Republic and eventually led to the First Republic’s demise.
As the seemingly never-ending IPO money tsunami subsided, it revealed the city’s less visible realities that had accumulated during the tech boom: homelessness, addiction, deficient public services. Office workers who provided the city with financial resources moved to the suburbs – or they were laid off. Once bustling downtown San Francisco is now a graveyard, where abandoned skyscrapers face lifeless streets, boarded up storefronts and “for rent” signs.
Meanwhile, buses continue to travel in and out of the city’s grandiose Salesforce Transit Center, which has cost the city $2.2 billion and is routinely empty. It seems that San Francisco danced on its “fat years” and failed to develop a lasting attachment to its “sea of talent,” many of whom have migrated to other cities for affordability and quality of life reasons.
San Francisco officials brush aside the bad news and say the city will recover. But no one seems to know what that looks like or what the future path looks like. Concerns about the “scare loop” do not affect all San Francisco residents equally. While it noticeably hurts downtown, things are looking up in the affluent residential neighborhoods of Sea Cliff and Russian Hill. The rich have been pulled out of their banking woes and no longer have to worry about job cuts, work visa cancellations, or shopping mall closures. Despite its progressive tendencies, San Francisco has the third-highest income inequality gap in the country.
The pandemic didn’t help. But it didn’t cause the city’s current misery – it just accelerated the existing problems. Now that the tech bubble has burst, we all have to bear the cost.
Anastasia Edel is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. @AEdelWriter
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
