Sufficient Empty Workplace House for 160,000 Individuals in San Francisco

As we outlined yesterday, the amount of vacant office space in San Francisco has just hit a new pandemic-era high of nearly 21 million square feet.

For context, the 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce/Transbay tower at First and Mission, which is the tallest building in San Francisco, contains 1.35 million square feet of office space spread across 59 floors. And employing the framework we introduced back in 2020, and others have since co-opted, there is now 15.4 Salesforce Towers, or 909 Salesforce Tower floors, worth of empty office space spread across San Francisco, which is roughly enough space to accommodate between 119,000 employees, based on an average, pre-Covid office density or 160,000 (a la twitter) worker bees.

And yet again, while it’s tempting to see, promote or editorialize an opportunity to convert all the vacant office space in San Francisco into housing, the conversion of existing office space to residential use still makes absolutely no economic sense for the vast majority of San Francisco buildings, due to the relative value of each use and the costs of conversion.