SAN FRANCISCO — World leaders, CEOs, protesters and thousands of others will soon descend on San Francisco for a global trade summit that could give the battered city a chance to reverse its image of an economic powerhouse now in decline.

The annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit will be San Francisco’s largest international gathering since dignitaries gathered in 1945 to sign the charter creating the United Nations.

The summit opens Saturday and runs through Friday, drawing an expected 20,000 people. Of particular note this year is a planned tete-a-tete between President Joe Biden and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the summit — their first direct engagement in a tension-filled year between the world’s two biggest economic powers.

As host, San Francisco and the city’s partners are polishing sidewalks, scrubbing away graffiti and moving homeless people to accommodations indoors. Separately, Mayor London Breed has been promoting pop-up shops, new destinations and restaurants in a downtown struggling to regain foot traffic post-pandemic.

Breed has repeatedly said she wants summit visitors to return home with memories of a San Francisco that is safe, vibrant and open for business — not the image of grime, crime and homelessness so often reflected in media coverage.

“Not to suggest that we don’t have challenges like any other major city, but we think that because we’re expecting thousands of press from around the world, that will give them a chance to experience San Francisco,” she told The Associated Press.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom joined Breed on Thursday in touting the state’s work to build a tree nursery near a homeless shelter and along Interstate 80. Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor, said the project shows the city’s resilience.

“I’m so excited about showing this off to 21 fancy foreign leaders from around the world -– tens of thousands of people that are going to come in and wonder what the hell Fox News has been talking about all these years,” he said.

As the summit looms, Chinese state media has focused on talks like Thursday’s meeting here between U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng.

But searches for San Francisco on Douyin — Tiktok’s original Chinese version — showed dozens of videos of homeless people sleeping in the city’s streets.

Besides world leaders, APEC finance ministers and foreign press, the summit is also expected to draw an array of people protesting human rights abuses, authoritarian regimes, the Israel-Hamas war and the fossil fuel industry.

Some critics complain events like APEC prioritize corporate profits over everyday people. APEC is a regional economic forum established in 1989 and has 21 member countries.

“I think it’s very cynical to be using it like an Instagram moment, basically to sell real estate in the city,” said Karl Kramer, campaign co-director for the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition.

The pandemic decimated the city’s main economic drivers of tourism and tech. Major retailers closed downtown outlets last summer, leaving more empty storefronts in a district that once bustled with tourists and office workers. Businesses complained of vandalism, shoplifting, break-ins and unresponsive police.

San Francisco boosters, however, say the “doom-loop” narrative is not only unfair but false.

San Francisco tech public relations firm LaunchSquad was hired with private summit funds to pitch journalists on stories setting the record straight. And a civic business group co-headed by the president of the San Francisco Giants launched a $4 million marketing campaign touting the city as a place for creative dreamers.

Kenya-based public relations CEO Gilbert Manirakiza was among interviews obtained through LaunchSquad to share his experience in the city during a conference last month. He said a person processing his visa warned him to be careful. But he loved his visit, seeing the Golden Gate Bridge, walking to Chinatown for late-night food, and taking a robo-taxi back to his hotel.

“The general theme there,” he said, “was a sense of ‘I can dream anything and make it happen somehow.’”

San Francisco promoters point to furniture giant IKEA, which opened on a troubled downtown block in August, and to the city’s emerging AI industry. They also herald the arrival of Chotto Matte, a high-end global restaurant chain, now serving Japanese Peruvian food from a stunning rooftop perch above a former Macy’s store.

Chotto Matte Founder Kurt Zdesar said 3,000 reservation requests poured in within the first half hour of opening last month. “It shows that San Francisco isn’t dead,” he said, adding he believes “there’s an appetite for things to change” despite negative media narratives.

But Azalina Eusope says no amount of positive press will fill her 32-seat Malaysian restaurant blocks away in the Tenderloin District, an area filled with children and immigrants like herself as well as drugs and homelessness. She said diners often cancel reservations once they find out the location.

Eusope, an entrepreneur also suggested by public relations firm LaunchSquad, opened Azalina’s last year with hopes of helping change the neighborhood. Besides serving high-end, four-course dinners, she offers deeply subsidized meals to neighborhood children and weekend cooking classes.

But already she sees more unfamiliar homeless residents camped out near her restaurant when she arrives each day, likely pushed out of their regular downtown spots ahead of the summit.

“So already I’m a little nervous. People just come inside the restaurant, we can’t lock the door, they throw a tantrum. One guy had a knife. We called 911 and they didn’t show,” Eusope said of police.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said she fears a repeat of what happened when San Francisco hosted the 2016 Super Bowl. Then, people were booted out of shelter lines to make way for those who normally reside downtown and had to be moved.

“It’s rough out there,” she said. “Folks want to get off the streets, but there’s not capacity for everybody.”

The city is not opening special homeless shelters specifically for the summit. However, a group shelter opens Friday and roughly 300 new beds will be available this month and next, said Emily Cohen with the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

Meanwhile, city boosters see grounds for optimism.

This month, Air China resumed direct flights between San Francisco and Beijing after suspending flights just before the pandemic.

Tourism from Asia, and China in particular, fuels San Francisco’s Chinatown, says Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center. He hopes the city will facilitate visits to the neighborhood and use the summit to declare that Chinatown is back, along with all the city’s other vibrant Asian American merchant communities.

“APEC really is a moment to say, ‘Hey, we’re open for business, we’re open for business, Asia,’” he said.

—-

Associated Press journalists Haven Daley in San Francisco and Huizhong Wu in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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File – A pile of characters removed from a sign on the Twitter headquarters building are seen in San Francisco, Monday, July 24, 2023. One year ago, Elon Musk began transforming the social media platform into what is now known as X. (AP Photo/Godofredo A.Vásquez, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — One year ago, billionaire and new owner Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a white bathroom sink and a grin, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what is now known as X.

X looks and feels something like Twitter, but the more time you spend on it the clearer it becomes that it’s merely an approximation. Musk has dismantled core features of what made Twitter, Twitter — its name and blue bird logo, its verification system, its Trust and Safety advisory group. Not to mention content moderation and hate speech enforcement.

He also fired, laid off or lost the majority of its workforce — engineers who keep the site running, moderators who keep it from being overrun with hate, executives in charge of making rules and enforcing them.

The result, long-term Twitter watchers say, has been the end of the platform’s role as an imperfect but useful place to find out what’s going on in the world. What X will become, and whether Musk can achieve his ambition of turning it into an “everything app” that everyone uses, remains as unclear as it was a year ago.

“Musk hasn’t managed to make a single meaningful improvement to the platform and is no closer to his vision of an ‘everything app,’ than he was a year ago,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg. “Instead, X has driven away users, advertisers, and now it has lost its primary value proposition in the social media world: Being a central hub for news.”

As one of the platform’s most popular and prolific users even before he bought the company, Musk had a unique experience on Twitter that is markedly different from how regular users experience it. But many of the changes he’s introduced to X has been based on his own impressions of the site — in fact, he even polled his millions of followers for advice on how to run it (they said he should step down).

“Musk’s treatment of the platform as a technology company that he could remake in his vision rather than a social network fueled by people and ad dollars has been the single largest cause of the demise of Twitter,” Enberg said.

The blue checkmarks that once signified that the person or institution behind an account was who they said they are — a celebrity, athlete, journalist from global or local publication, a nonprofit agency — now merely shows that someone pays $8 a month for a subscription service that boosts their posts above un-checked users. It’s these paying accounts that have been found to spread misinformation on the platform that is often amplified by its algorithms.

On Thursday, for instance, a new report from the left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters found that numerous blue-checked X accounts with tens of thousands of followers claimed that the mass shooting in Maine was a “false flag,” planned by the government. Researchers also found such accounts spreading misinformation and propaganda about the Israel-Hamas war — so much so that the European Commission made a formal, legally binding request for information to X over its handling of hate speech, misinformation and violent terrorist content related to the war.

Ian Bremmer, a prominent foreign policy expert, posted on X this month that the level of disinformation on the Israel-Hamas war “being algorithmically promoted” on the platform “is unlike anything I’ve ever been exposed to in my career as a political scientist.”

It’s not just the platform’s identity that’s on shaky grounds. Twitter was already struggling financially when Musk purchased it for $44 billion in a deal that closed Oct. 27, 2022, and the situation appears more precarious today. Musk took the company private, so its books are no longer public — but in July, the Tesla CEO said the company had lost about half of its advertising revenue and continues to face a large debt load.

“We’re still negative cash flow,” he posted on the site on July 14, due to about a “50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” he said.

In May, Musk hired Linda Yaccarino, a former NBC executive with deep ties to the advertising industry in an attempt to lure back top brands, but the effort has been slow to pay off. While some advertisers have returned to X, they are not spending as much as they did in the past — despite a rebound in the online advertising market that boosted the most recent quarterly profits for Facebook parent company, Meta, and Google parent company, Alphabet.

Insider Intelligence estimates that X will bring in $1.89 billion in advertising revenue this year, down 54% from 2022. The last time its ad revenue was near this level was in 2015, when it came in at $1.99 billion. In 2022, it was $4.12 billion according to the research firm’s estimates.

Outside research also shows that people are using X less.

According to research firm Similarweb, global web traffic to Twitter.com was down 14%, year-over-year, and traffic to the ads.twitter.com portal for advertisers was down 16.5%. Performance on mobile was no better, down 17.8% year-over-year based on combined monthly active users for Apple’s iOS and Android.

“Even though the cultural relevance of Twitter was already starting to decline,” before Musk took it over, “it’s as if the platform no longer exists. And it’s been a death by a thousand cuts,” Enberg said.

“What’s really fascinating is that almost all of the wounds have been self-inflicted. Usually when a social platform, starts to lose its relevance there are at least some external factors at play, but that’s not the case here.”

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — One year ago, billionaire and new owner Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a white bathroom sink and a grin, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what is now known as X.

X looks and feels something like Twitter, but the more time you spend on it the clearer it becomes that it’s merely an approximation. Musk has dismantled core features of what made Twitter, Twitter — its name and blue bird logo, its verification system, its Trust and Safety advisory group. Not to mention content moderation and hate speech enforcement.

He also fired, laid off or lost the majority of its workforce — engineers who keep the site running, moderators who keep it from being overrun with hate, executives in charge of making rules and enforcing them.

The result, long-term Twitter watchers say, has been the end of the platform’s role as an imperfect but useful place to find out what’s going on in the world. What X will become, and whether Musk can achieve his ambition of turning it into an “everything app” that everyone uses, remains as unclear as it was a year ago.

“Musk hasn’t managed to make a single meaningful improvement to the platform and is no closer to his vision of an ‘everything app,’ than he was a year ago,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg. “Instead, X has driven away users, advertisers, and now it has lost its primary value proposition in the social media world: Being a central hub for news.”

As one of the platform’s most popular and prolific users even before he bought the company, Musk had a unique experience on Twitter that is markedly different from how regular users experience it. But many of the changes he’s introduced to X has been based on his own impressions of the site — in fact, he even polled his millions of followers for advice on how to run it (they said he should step down).

“Musk’s treatment of the platform as a technology company that he could remake and his vision rather than a social network fueled by people and ad dollars has been the single largest cause of the demise of Twitter,” Enberg said.

The blue checkmarks that once signified that the person or institution behind an account was who they said they are — a celebrity, athlete, journalist from global or local publication, a nonprofit agency — now merely shows that someone pays $8 a month for a subscription service that boosts their posts above un-checked users. It’s these paying accounts that have been found to spread misinformation on the platform that is often amplified by its algorithms.

On Thursday, for instance, a new report from the left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters found that numerous blue-checked X accounts with tens of thousands of followers claimed that the mass shooting in Maine was a “false flag,” planned by the government. Researchers also found such accounts spreading misinformation and propaganda about the Israel-Hamas war — so much so that the European Commission made a formal, legally binding request for information to X over its handling of hate speech, misinformation and violent terrorist content related to the war.

Ian Bremmer, a prominent foreign policy expert, posted on X this month that the level of disinformation on the Israel-Hamas war “being algorithmically promoted” on the platform “is unlike anything I’ve ever been exposed to in my career as a political scientist.”

It’s not just the platform’s identity that’s on shaky grounds. Twitter was already struggling financially when Musk purchased it for $44 billion in a deal that closed Oct. 27, 2022, and the situation appears more precarious today. Musk took the company private, so its books are no longer public — but in July, the Tesla CEO said the company had lost about half of its advertising revenue and continues to face a large debt load.

“We’re still negative cash flow,” he posted on the site on July 14, due to a about a “50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

“Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” he said.

In May, Musk hired Linda Yaccarino, a former NBC executive with deep ties to the advertising industry in an attempt to lure back top brands, but the effort has been slow to pay off. While some advertisers have returned to X, they are not spending as much as they did in the past — despite a rebound in the online advertising market that boosted the most recent quarterly profits for Facebook parent company, Meta, and Google parent company, Alphabet.

Insider Intelligence estimates that X will bring in $1.89 billion in advertising revenue this year, down 54% from 2022. The last time its ad revenue was near this level was in 2015, when it came in at $1.99 billion. In 2022, it was $4.12 billion.

Outside research also shows that people are using X less.

According to research firm Similarweb, global web traffic to Twitter.com was down 14%, year-over-year, and traffic to the ads.twitter.com portal for advertisers was down 16.5%. Performance on mobile was no better, down 17.8% year-over-year based on combined monthly active users for Apple’s iOS and Android.

“Even though the cultural relevance of Twitter was already starting to decline,” before Musk took it over, “it’s as if the platform no longer exists. And it’s been a death by a thousand cuts,” Enberg said.

“What’s really fascinating is that almost all of the wounds have been self-inflicted. Usually when a social platform, starts to lose its relevance there are at least some external factors at play, but that’s not the case here.”

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SAN FRANCISCO — Tanya Tilghman moved to the Bay Area as a teenager to live with her mother. She later married, had two sons, and made a home in San Francisco’s historic Italian neighborhood of North Beach, above the tourist and financial centers.

Even when her marriage fell apart, she never considered leaving. This was her city, her people. Liberal like her, with a mix of income levels and an overall sense of community. She wasn’t worried about her growing boys taking to the streets, where she herself always felt safe.

But those streets have changed, she says. She believes actions by city hall and even groups helping the homeless have exacerbated some of the problems and the community she once felt a part of has disappeared, she says. And her son got caught up in a scene that’s hard to ignore in the city: the drug scene.

Tilghman said Roman Vardanega first tried illegal drugs early in high school when he took a prescription drug at a friend’s house.

He quickly became addicted, his mother said, and then switched to cocaine, heroin, and later fentanyl, all of which were available in the city’s seedy Tenderloin area.

Tilghman admits she was uninformed, even naïve, about the proliferation of hard drugs. But it wasn’t something she encountered every day. Then “I think it’s a lot worse now than it was when I was growing up here,” she said. “When I was a teenager we always came to the Tenderloin because we thought it was just fun and quirky and I never felt insecure as a teenager. But I also don’t remember people coming up to me and asking if I wanted to buy drugs.

One of her first clues that her son was deeply involved was when she accompanied him on a tour of City Hall while he was at school. It was a few blocks from the Tenderloin, and some of the homeless people on the street knew him by name, like he’d been out there hanging out with them a lot — and that’s exactly what he did by collecting his drugs.

She tried to help. Vardanega spent 11th grade in rehab but persuaded his mother to let him return. She welcomed him home, but so did the streets.

By this time, their neighborhood had changed, and drugs seemed freely available even when they rode the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system home.

“The first thing I got asked when I walked out of the BART station was if I wanted to buy drugs,” Tilghman said. The ease of getting and using drugs made the city a dangerous and sometimes deadly playground for people like her son.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Vardanega began living on the streets full-time. The city was shut down, residents left or stayed indoors, and at the height of the pandemic, more people died from drug overdoses than from Covid-19.

“Everyone in town started putting up tents,” Tilghman said. “The outdoor drug market got a lot worse. And so it became easier for him to buy drugs and use them outdoors.”

And what Tilghman found puzzling was that the city just seemed to be looking the other way.

“The city’s policies absolutely harmed my son, it harmed us, and it caused him, I would say, to fall into his addiction a lot more,” she said.

“If you get caught for drugs, you most likely won’t go to jail, the cops would just let you go,” she said. “That made things worse, especially for my son because he’s very young and he’s still in that party mood.”

Tilghman’s state of mind was focused on one goal: finding her son. She knew he was addicted. She knew she loved him so much it hurt. And she knew that she wouldn’t stop looking until she found him, even if it put her in danger.

She walked the streets looking at things that most people tried to avoid and looked straight into the eyes of the people who lived on the streets. Sometimes she got blank looks back. Sometimes a sympathetic ear or a hopeful hint as to where her son might be.

She didn’t find him, but so many people were like him. “What makes me sad is seeing my son’s face on everyone’s faces … out on the street,” Tilghman said.

When Covid broke out, many residents started disappearing and the tent cities exploded on the sidewalks along with the drugs, the addictions and the signs of mental illness.

Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city to set up a “liaison center” at the Tenderloin, touted as a place for addicts to seek services that can help them.

When it opened in January 2022, Tilghman hoped it might be a place her son would find himself in, and one day she went to have a look. When she got there, she heard blaring music and tried to peek inside.

“I saw people doing drugs. I could not believe it. I think this is a place where people should get help. And they actually do drugs?” Tilghman said.

A little later she pretended to be an addict and went to the center to take a closer look.

“I told them I wanted to quit drugs and that I needed help,” she said. “And they laughed at me. And the guy at the door said, ‘We can help you use drugs. But if you need help with drug recovery, you have to come back tomorrow,'” Tilghman said.

The center had an area intended to treat overdoses, but it became known as a place for taking drugs and not for other services.

“The most disturbing thing… was that the damage reduction area was more like a party scene,” Tilghman said. “If my son went there for services because he’s a drug addict, if he saw a party scene where people were dancing and singing and taking drugs and most likely selling drugs there, there just wouldn’t be an option for him to access it.” Because he was so distracted and excited that he went and used it.”

In her opinion, the city’s laissez-faire philosophy had simply gone too far.

“If you walk into a store and steal less than $1,000 worth of merchandise and get away with it, that’s going way too far,” she said. “It’s going too far when you could smoke crack in front of a cop and the cop just looks at you and doesn’t even arrest you.”

The struggle to save her son was wearing her down. Not once, but three times, Tilghman says she was so depressed and so hopeless that she attempted suicide.

The situation is beginning to change, both for Tilghman personally and perhaps for her town.

The Tenderloin Linkage Center, later renamed the Tenderloin Center, closed last December. Tilghman has found new support and a mission working with Mothers Against Drug Addiction and Deaths. A new district attorney took office after the previous one was removed by constituents who perceived him as soft-spoken about crime. Tilghman’s son Vardanega got into trouble with the law, served a prison sentence and was sent to a court-ordered rehab program.

For Tilghman, incarceration is a good thing for him — it keeps him alive, off the streets, and gives him a chance in a treatment program.

For them, San Francisco is still beautiful – with the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio and Fisherman’s Wharf, the Italian enclave of North Beach. But it’s gotten even scarier, and she thinks part of the blame lies with the politicians whose job it is to clean up the streets.

“I’m liberal,” Tilghman said. “My politics have stayed the same and things have gone crazy around me.”

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Many of these changes were prompted by referendums, which are an integral part of city elections and often controlled by the board. Since 2000, 321 initiatives have appeared on the city’s ballot papers. This process has produced eight different corporate taxes over the past decade that have doomed many small businesses as well as large corporations whose headquarters are now in less hostile environments. This has resulted in a sharp drop in projected tax revenues, which, as usual, will result in cuts in city services for those most in need.

Then there’s the fact that San Francisco is a one-party city. The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee Nominating Committee has an impressive track record of supporting candidates seeking their first electoral victory as members of local transportation and education committees. These slots bring candidates onto the conveyor belt to higher office. Inbreeding is not healthy – especially for politicians.

Even Superman with a lightsaber wouldn’t be able to rule San Francisco.

The state of San Francisco—mirrored by conditions in other cities across the country—has much to do with how machinic politics, with its many flaws, has given way to power fragmentation at City Hall. This makes it much more difficult to engage in traditional struggles between a well-defined machine and an equally vibrant reform movement. Gouging out city newspapers, in our case The San Francisco Chronicle, also contributes to bad governance. And San Francisco, like a growing number of blue cities, suffers from a lack of middle-class voters who could provide a stabilizing influence.

Fortunately, there is an increasing movement for changes in the mechanics of the San Francisco City Government. Frustrated with the state of the city, in 2020 I helped found and fund TogetherSF, which is now an active organizer of community events and has begun playing a role in election contests through its sister organization, TogetherSF Action. Several parent initiatives are also calling for improvements. Last November, for the first time in 20 years, an elected acting manager was not re-elected. The district attorney and three members of the city’s school board were also removed last year.

I’m optimistic about San Francisco’s long-term prospects, in part because of some changes I’ve seen since I arrived in 1983. Once the warehouses and railroad yards in the area now known as Mission Bay, the area is now home to one of the world’s leading medical centers, mixed-use housing, home of the Golden State Warriors and Visa’s new world headquarters. Fueled by civic pride and a combination of private and government funds, this example shows what is possible — even as many other proposed changes that would have a positive impact on the city have been nullified and delayed.

There are many reasons to believe that Democratic San Francisco can once again become a frontrunner for the nation – this time by turning around a city held hostage by the political class. There is growing recognition that voters have repeatedly been duped. And the call for change is growing. It will not be easy. It will take time, persistence, magnanimity and the contributions of many. But eventually, Tucker Carlson will be forced to eat his words, and San Francisco will work out better for everyone.

Michael Moritz is a partner at Sequoia Capital. He also funded Crankstart, a San Francisco-based foundation, and San Francisco Standard, an online news organization.

The Times strives to publish a variety of letters to the editor. We’d love to hear what you think of this or any of our items. Here are some tips. And here is our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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The grim economic signs of life in San Francisco over the past six months strongly suggest residents will be abandoned amid record job losses, remote work anchoring, and a coronavirus pandemic that shows no sign of an end.

It is still unclear how many people are left, but moving trucks and middle posts tell the story of ongoing migration. The weakness of the rental market and the practically constant online spending while on-site accommodation shows that residents not only stay at home but also leave, experts say. The city’s ability to attract new residents or lure old ones to return will be critical to avoiding a huge hole in a local budget that has swelled to nearly $ 14 billion.

In an increasingly virtual economy, where everyday goods are delivered not out of convenience but out of pandemic necessity, all you have to do is count the Amazon boxes.

Todd Trumbull / The Chronicle

Between April and June, the nine counties in the Bay Area saw a sharp drop in brick and mortar sales taxes as home stay orders went into effect, from a 17% decrease in Santa Clara County to a decrease of 53% in San Francisco. compared to the previous year. But eight of the counties – anywhere but San Francisco – saw huge leaps in online sales taxes, up to 36% for Contra Costa County.

In San Francisco, the tax on online sales only increased 1%. That number was by far the worst not only in the region, but among California’s 20 largest counties. Los Angeles County saw online sales taxes increase 31%, San Diego County increased 38%, and Sacramento County increased 32%.

“That’s a sign to me that people aren’t here,” said Ted Egan, chief economist for San Francisco.

The empty streets are a reminder of the aftermath of the dotcom bankruptcy in the early 2000s, said Noni Richen, president of Small Property Owners of San Francisco.

Its members have ex-tenants who left town because they saw no reason to stay after losing their jobs or moving classes online.

“The utilization is declining,” said Richen. “They’re moving home to mom and dad or cheaper somewhere else.”

Real estate data firm Zumper reported a 20% decline in average one-bedroom rents per year in San Francisco this month, the largest decline among major cities. The inventory of homes and condos for sale hit a 15-year high amid a flurry of new listings, although prices for single-family homes are still rising, according to realtor Compass.

An empty Market Street during the second week of Shelter-in-Place in March. Economic indicators over the past six months suggest residents are leaving San Francisco amid record jobs and the rise of remote work.

Gabrielle Lurie / The Chronicle

One difference to the dotcom days is that tech titans like Google and Facebook, who have large offices in both San Francisco and Silicon Valley, haven’t cut jobs. Richen said she was encouraged that companies haven’t scaled back, despite allowing workers to stay away until next summer.

“I think San Francisco will recover,” said Richen. “I think they will recover.”

Between February and August, the workforce in the greater San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco area declined 4.5%, higher than the 4.1% decline for the state and 2.3% nationally. It agrees with evidence that urban areas are harder hit than the rest of the country and could indicate people are moving away from San Francisco, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Chris Thornberg, founding partner of research firm Beacon Economics, said talk of San Francisco’s downfall and decline was exaggerated.

“Once the virus is under control, the economy will recover like it’s nobody’s business,” he said, predicting a recovery in San Francisco by next spring. “I don’t think you need a vaccine.”

He said excessive restrictions on reopening businesses were unnecessary and ineffective. “I don’t think there is any way to eradicate this disease by shutting down the economy,” he said.

But San Francisco officials remain cautious. There is still no schedule for when non-essential office workers can return. Tech companies – now dominating the ranks of San Francisco’s largest private employers – are increasingly turning to remote work, for extended periods of time, or in some cases, indefinitely.

“That begs a big question: when are they coming back? Are you coming back? “Said Egan.

Online sales tax collections in the Bay Area and other major California counties showed a sharp rise during the pandemic – except in San Francisco, where they were practically flat.

Source: San Francisco Office of the Controller

See morecollapse

Roland Li is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: roland.li @ .com Twitter: @rolandlisf

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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – As San Francisco tries to recover from the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, crime and homelessness are now top concerns of local residents, many considering moving, according to a new poll.

The poll was published by the SF Chamber of Commerce and is based on feedback from more than 500 San Francisco residents who are registered to vote.

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It turns out that more than 40 percent plan to move out of the city in the next few years.

Lindsay Stevens just moved out on the weekend.

“There’s nothing worse than seeing such a beautiful place in such a mess and I really thought I was going to be sad when the moving companies loaded the last container on Saturday and I’ve never been so relieved,” said Stevens.

After living in San Francisco for more than 12 years, Stevens recently sold her apartment and moved to the Palm Springs area.

“I honestly believe that we have seen a massive decline in the quality of life over the past three years and that has only been improved by COVID,” she said. “Homelessness is a serious problem, people don’t feel safe walking their dogs … the number of break-ins seems to be increasing all the time.”

Their feelings are reflected in the results of the chamber’s survey.

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80% of residents say that crime has worsened in recent years, 70% think that the quality of life has decreased and 88% say that homelessness has worsened.

76% also believe that increasing the number of police officers in high-crime neighborhoods should be a high priority.

“I think safety is a big concern. Even two years ago when I originally returned to the city, I never considered certain neighborhoods to be necessarily unsafe, ”said Minku Lee from San Francisco.

The 24-year-old resident himself became a victim last Friday. He said he was out with his friends at happy hour on 3rd Street near Oracle Park when he was racially and physically assaulted by a homeless person.

“He also said an insult, knocked me over forcibly, the slash tripped me, really scared of the incident,” said Lee.

An overwhelming 82% of respondents said they would like to see more social workers on the street to help people with mental illness and drug problems.

Almost 75% supported more makeshift housing for the homeless.

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Earlier this month, Mayor London Breed announced a $ 1 billion investment to fix the problem over the next 2 years. This also includes funding for housing and psychiatric services.

The post San Francisco Residents Think about Relocating As Crime Worsens, High quality Of Life In A Decline – CBS San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – As San Francisco tries to recover from the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, crime and homelessness are now top concerns of local residents, many considering moving, according to a new poll.

The poll was published by the SF Chamber of Commerce and is based on feedback from more than 500 San Francisco residents who are registered to vote.

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It turns out that more than 40 percent plan to move out of the city in the next few years.

Lindsay Stevens just moved out on the weekend.

“There’s nothing worse than seeing such a beautiful place in such a mess and I really thought I was going to be sad when the moving companies loaded the last container on Saturday and I’ve never been so relieved,” said Stevens.

After living in San Francisco for more than 12 years, Stevens recently sold her apartment and moved to the Palm Springs area.

“I honestly believe that we have seen a massive decline in the quality of life over the past three years and that has only been improved by COVID,” she said. “Homelessness is a serious problem, people don’t feel safe walking their dogs … the number of break-ins seems to be increasing all the time.”

Their feelings are reflected in the results of the chamber’s survey.

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80% of residents say that crime has worsened in recent years, 70% think that the quality of life has decreased and 88% say that homelessness has worsened.

76% also believe that increasing the number of police officers in high-crime neighborhoods should be a high priority.

“I think safety is a big concern. Even two years ago when I originally returned to the city, I never considered certain neighborhoods to be necessarily unsafe, ”said Minku Lee from San Francisco.

The 24-year-old resident himself became a victim last Friday. He said he was out with his friends at happy hour on 3rd Street near Oracle Park when he was racially and physically assaulted by a homeless person.

“He also said an insult, knocked me over forcibly, the slash tripped me, really scared of the incident,” said Lee.

An overwhelming 82% of respondents said they would like to see more social workers on the street to help people with mental illness and drug problems.

Almost 75% supported more makeshift housing for the homeless.

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Earlier this month, Mayor London Breed announced a $ 1 billion investment to fix the problem over the next 2 years. This also includes funding for housing and psychiatric services.

The post San Francisco Residents Contemplate Relocating As Crime Worsens, High quality Of Life In A Decline – CBS San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.