Angus Mordant/Bloomberg/Getty Images

A Wells Fargo bank branch in New York, US, on Wednesday, March 29, 2023.

Wells Fargo & Co has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a lawsuit accusing it of defrauding shareholders about its progress in recovering from a series of scandals over its treatment of customers.

A preliminary settlement of the proposed class action was filed late Monday night with the federal court in Manhattan, and requires a judge’s approval. The dollar amount was suggested by a mediator, court papers show.

Wells Fargo

(WFC) has operated since 2018 under consent orders from the Federal Reserve and two other financial regulators requiring that it improve governance and oversight.

The fourth-largest US bank is also subject to an asset cap by the Fed, which can impede its ability to compete with larger rivals JPMorgan Chase & Co

(JPM), Bank of America Corp

(BAC) and Citigroup Inc

(C).

Shareholders accused Wells Fargo of overstating how well it was complying with those orders, and that the bank’s market value fell by more than $54 billion over two years ending in March 2020 as the shortcomings became known.

Wells Fargo did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside business hours.

The San Francisco-based bank denied wrongdoing, and settled to eliminate the burden and expense of litigation, court papers show. Lawyers for the plaintiffs may seek up to 19% of the settlement fund for legal fees.

Wells Fargo has since 2016 paid or set aside several billion dollars to resolve regulatory probes and litigation concerning its business practices.

These included that it opened about 3.5 million accounts without customer permission, and charged hundreds of thousands of borrowers for auto insurance they did not need.

Chief Executive Charlie Scharf has said repairing the reputation of the 171-year-old bank founded by Henry Wells and William Fargo has taken longer than he expected when he took over in 2019.

“When I arrived, we did not have the culture, effective processes, or appropriate management oversight in place to remediate weaknesses on a timely basis,” he said in his March 3 letter to shareholders. “Today, we approach these issues differently.”

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Addiction isolates. Recovery connects, and connecting spiritually is vital.

Once a person recovering from alcohol or other drug addiction has established the way of life suggested by the tenth step for maintaining the benefits of recovery (see A.A.’s Step 10: A Way of Life), there is still more progress possible. The 11th step offers advice from the earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous on how they deepened sobriety by nurturing their spiritual lives.

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As with previous postings in this series on the 12 Steps, I need to stress that I am not speaking on behalf of A.A. There are many ways to understand the meaning and implications of each step[i]. What follows is only one perspective on step eleven filtered through my experience as an addiction psychiatrist. My goal is to offer thoughts on the psychological depth contained in A.A.’s 12-step approach to recovery from addiction (see A Meaningful Definition of Addiction Recovery).

Step 11 reads as follows:

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

People who have not seriously searched for personal meaning in the ten steps preceding step 11 may stumble over this direct appeal to spirituality, expressed as an increasingly conscious connection to God. But alcoholics/addicts who have achieved sobriety through practicing the 12 steps have already grappled with whatever childhood and family baggage may have clung to the word “God,” which they comfortably interpret according to their own individual understanding. For some, God is an ethereal deity, while for others, “He” is an inner wisdom, their conscience, the A.A. community, nature, or simply an undefined Higher Power that lies beyond the self.

The heart of step 11 lies in suggesting a practice of prayer and meditation as part of a sober life. Put simply, prayer is “talking to” or addressing one’s thoughts toward whatever form of higher power has somehow aided their recovery. Meditation, on the other hand, is listening to that higher power. Prayer is an act of humility—a recognition that you are not God and perpetually in need of help to remain sober. Prayer is important because once humility is lost, alcoholics/addicts are prone to revert to the same narcissistic assumption of omnipotence that formed the backbone of their efforts to control addictive disease without having to resort to abstinence.

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Meditation quiets the mind and pays active attention to whatever enters one’s consciousness. Many forms of meditation exist. Some focus attention on the breath, others on an object or sound. In either case, the editor in your mind is turned down, if not entirely off. There is an open space in your mind—a space that our monkey mind usually fills with random or obsessive thinking. This openness was first encountered in the sixth step to leave room for new behaviors to appear (see A.A.’s Steps 6 & 7: Making Room for Change, Then Inviting It). Meditation enhances this openness to allow whisperings from one’s conscience, wisdom from the unconscious, or communication from a higher power to seep into our awareness. Like stars in a darkened sky, subliminal thoughts, feelings, and understandings can be perceived more easily during meditation.

The primary goal of step 11 is to achieve a greater connection to your higher power by entering into a dialogue: talking and listening. Striving for a personal relationship with a God/higher power of your own understanding expands your sense of identification with mysteries at the core of all being. This expansion of your identity, in which your being is felt as a legitimate manifestation of the universe, is the essence of spiritual experience. Recovery contains many paradoxes, such as regaining control of one’s life by admitting powerlessness over alcohol and other drugs. The mystery at the core of our spiritual life is where such paradoxes are comfortably held.

The final portion of step 11 is critical. Prayer and meditation are not practiced to beseech God to satisfy our wishes. It is not akin to sitting on Santa’s knee with our Christmas list. Alcoholics/addicts are engaged in one paramount pursuit: freedom from chemical slavery. The goal of prayer and meditation is to gain knowledge of what is necessary to remain sober, with the assumption that sobriety and good health would be a caring God’s will for us. When working to learn God’s will for us and asking for “the power to carry that out,” you are no longer sitting in the director’s chair. Instead, you are willing to surrender to whatever realities are required of you to remain sober. Obedience to these realities is the only pathway to receive A.A.’s promise of a “happy, joyous, and free” life.

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The next posting in this series will explore how Step 12 calls on people in recovery to serve as a beacon to those who still suffer from addiction and to extend the principles of recovery throughout all aspects of their lives—a final push toward integrity and authenticity.

References

[i] Readers interested in a deeper dive into AA and the Twelve Steps can find it in AA’s How It Works and the more academic work by Ernest Kurtz, Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, Hazelden, 1991.

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PARADISE, Calif. (AP) — On the day Paradise burned, Gwen Nordgren stopped her car just long enough to rescue a young woman escaping by foot.

By that time on Nov. 8, 2018, the sky was black even though the sun had been up for hours. Both sides of the street were on fire as Nordgren grabbed the woman’s hand.

“Have you lived a good life?” she asked. The woman said she had.

“So have I,” said Nordgren, the president of the Paradise Lutheran Church council. “We’re going to say the Our Father and we’re going to drive like hell.”

Nordgren has told that story countless times in the five years since the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history nearly erased a quiet community in the Sierra Nevada foothills. There are thousands more stories like it, each one providing a frame for one of the worst wildfires in U.S. history.

Five years later, some — like Nordgren — are sharing their stories freely and managing their post-traumatic stress enough to return to Paradise to help make something new. Others, like Shari Bernacette, are still haunted by their memories — including witnessing the flames consume a fleeing couple, one pushing the other in a wheelchair.

“We still can’t sleep well. We toss and turn all night,” said Bernacette, who moved with her husband to Yuma, Arizona, to escape the risk of future wildfires. The couple lives in a used RV purchased with their insurance money. “We are in the desert surrounded by cactus and rocks. There is nothing that can light up. We will never live amongst the trees again.”

For people who returned to Paradise, life is about adjusting. It’s the same place, but doesn’t feel the same. Paradise was once so thick with trees it was hard to tell the town was perched on a ridge. Now, the shadows are gone as sunlight bathes the town on clear days, offering impressive views of the canyons.

Today’s population of just under 10,000 is less than half the 26,000 who lived there before the blaze.

The Camp Fire destroyed about 11,000 homes, which amounted to about 90% of the town’s structures. So far 2,500 homes have been rebuilt. About 700 are under construction at any one time, many on original lots. But just six of the town’s 36 mobile home parks that served mostly low-income and older residents have reopened.

Donna Hooton and her husband lived in one of the mobile home parks destroyed by the fire. The Hootons live off of Social Security and said they can’t afford to move to Paradise. They now live an hour away, in a small, decades-old mobile home.

“We wish we could go home but home is not there anymore,” Hooton said.

Paradise Mayor Greg Bolin says that by 2025 all of the town’s overhead power lines will be buried underground. By 2026, he says all public roads will be repaved.

“I can see what it’s going to look like. I know how nice it is going to be when it’s done,” said Bolin, who also owns Trilogy Construction Inc., one of the town’s main construction companies.

For the most part, Bolin said it is “amazing, in five years, how well people are doing.” But then a whiff of smoke will linger in the air, and it instantly brings residents back to that terrible day. It happened just last month, when Derrick Harlan — a 34-year-old Paradise resident whose business reduces fire hazards — got a permit to burn some debris piles in Paradise.

When neighbors saw smoke from the debris fire though, they called the police. The next day, the fire department showed up.

“That’s where the trauma and the PTSD comes in,” Harlan said.

Wildfires have always been a part of life in California, but they are getting more severe as climate change has caused hotter, drier summers. Seven of the state’s top 10 most destructive fires happened in the past decade. Before the Camp Fire killed 85 people, the state’s deadliest was a 1933 blaze that killed 29. More recently, a 2017 fire shocked the state as it ripped through suburban neighborhoods in California wine country, killing 22.

But the Camp Fire, the official name of the Paradise fire, marked a turning point.

Now, utility companies routinely shut off power for millions of people during wind storms in an effort to prevent fires from starting. Major property insurance companies have raised homeowners’ rates to exponential highs or dropped coverage for many in wildfire-prone areas. Other providers have simply stopped writing new policies altogether. PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter, filed for bankruptcy and announced plans to bury 10,000 miles of power lines. The town has installed warning sirens and is working to create more evacuation routes.

But just when it seemed safe to think that what happened in Paradise was a once-in-a-lifetime fire, it happened again — this time thousands of miles away in Maui, Hawaii. It meant April Kelly, who grew up in Paradise and lived in Maui for 16 years, lost both of her hometowns.

“I can’t believe I’m going through this a second time,” she said.

Finding ways to cope with that grief has become a shared part of life in Paradise. The local theater saved Judy Clemens, giving her a space to channel her passion for live performance after the blaze. The Theatre on the Ridge opened to host its first show on Valentine’s Day in 2019.

“If the theater had gone, too, I really would have been lost,” Clemens said.

For Samuel Walker, making peace with the fire meant making peace with God. The pastor of the First Baptist Church of Paradise was wracked with guilt over the death of Bob Quinn, a church member who Walker likened to a second father. On the day of the fire, Walker drove by the street where Quinn lived and for a moment, thought about checking on him. Instead, he rescued his parents, who would not have been able to escape the fire on their own.

Walker learned of Quinn’s death three days after the fire, while he was in Fresno with his family. Thieves had just broken into Walker’s car and stolen the only things his wife and daughter had saved from their house — including photos, an iPad and a knitting machine.

He was angry about his situation, everything that had happened and all of the people who had died or been hurt. For a pastor, being mad at God is a bigger problem than most.

“How am I going to minister to a congregation with all of these people with all of their issues, if I’m still trying to get through mine?” Walker asked.

He finally found peace after a trip to the hospital, of all places. Walker injured his arm after a fall while taking out the trash. In the hospital, he immediately thought of a Bible verse from the New Testament that says: “The Lord disciplines everyone he loves.”

“It was almost kind of a healing point … to say, ‘OK Lord, I’m going to let this go. I’m going to stop being angry and get back to what you have me here to do,’” Walker said.

Businesses are returning to Paradise, with recent openings of a Big Lots and Ross Dress for Less sending ripples of excitement through town. Town leaders plan to begin installing a sewer system next summer for the business district, which would allow more restaurants to operate.

That will help Nicki Jones’ restaurant, a deli and wine bar called Nic’s. Jones first came to Paradise 25 years ago. She called it a “fluke,” a place to retire with her husband. The town quickly became much more than that. She opened two businesses: a candle shop and a women’s clothing store. Both burned in the fire, along with her home.

After the fire, there was no time for rest or reflection. She had a community to rebuild. With a background in accounting she knew what to do. She started by calling her insurance companies. Within 30 days of the fire, she was able to buy a building. Within a year, she opened a restaurant called Nic’s, what she said is the first new business to open in Paradise after the fire.

“Everybody reacts to whatever tragedy there is — and we all have them — but my way has always been to jump in. How can I fix it?” she said. “I wanted a place where everybody could come and feel comfortable and feel normal.”

The best time to go to Nic’s is for “Wine room Wednesdays,” when lots of locals stop by for a drink and a hug. That sometimes includes Adam Thompson, who is not from Paradise. After the pandemic, Thompson and his family were looking for a quiet community in the foothills to raise their family. In 2021, they moved to Magalia, just outside of Paradise.

If the town is to grow, it needs new people. But newcomers face a daunting question: How do you assimilate into a community defined by a shared tragedy?

Thompson said his family was quickly accepted. His kids are enrolled in a local school. They play Little League baseball and perform in the local theater.

“There’s a humility and a resilience here that I don’t think would be in a town like this had they not gone through the fire,” he said. “I’ve never once felt excluded up here. I’ve never felt judged. I’ve only felt love and welcome from literally every single person I’ve met.”

April Kelly, who hails from Paradise and Maui, is now the general manager at Nic’s. She is on the board of directors for a parent support group called Mom’s on the Ridge. Samuel Walker is still the pastor of Paradise Baptist Church, now living with his family in nearby Magalia.

Before the fire, Paradise was viewed as a retirement community with mostly older residents. But that’s changing. The Paradise Little League has had so much interest it’s warned parents that kids may be turned away next year.

The town’s rebirth has amazed Don Criswell, a Paradise native who moved back to the area in 1998. Wildfires burned his property in 2008 and again in 2018. Both times he stayed to fight the fires himself.

The Paradise of his memory has been erased. Personal landmarks — the house he grew up in, his elementary school — are gone. Most of his childhood friends and neighbors have since moved away.

But he hasn’t gone anywhere. Instead, he has planted trees and a garden. He donates vegetables to a free community lunch put on by his church. He even plays the piano for people who come to eat.

“I’m so sorry that (the fire) happened. There’s nothing I can do about that,” he said. “I can try to make it a good, fun and beautiful place to live again. I think we’re doing that.”

___

Rodriguez reported from San Francisco.

Follow @ktar923

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Dan Walters

A few days ago, the toll for driving on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge took another jump. It will now cost motorists at least $6.75 to cross the entrance to San Francisco Bay — if they are using carpool lanes — and as much as $9.75 if they are invoiced for their crossing.

It appears the tolls are destined to climb even higher.

The iconic bridge is owned by the multi-county Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, whose directors have directed a series of toll increases over five years. They were done to cover rising maintenance costs and — this is the most important factor — offset a decline in traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic began three-plus years ago.

It’s an aspect of a larger phenomenon that has upended the San Francisco Bay Area’s economy. Many workers, particularly those in technology and financial services, shifted to working remotely when the pandemic struck and the work-from-home tendency has persisted after the health threat eased.

Downtown San Francisco suffered what some call a “doom loop” of reduced in-place employment, wholesale declines in office space usage and closure of retail businesses.

Fewer commuters also translated into lower bridge toll income and very sharp drops in transit use and revenues, particularly on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

BART and other transit systems pleaded with Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators for a package of state aid to offset declining farebox revenue and got a $5.1 billion, four-year commitment in the new state budget.

“Public transportation is easy to take for granted, but allowing it to collapse would have been devastating for our state’s future,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said. “This budget extends a critical lifeline that will help transit agencies maintain service while making critical improvements to cleanliness and safety.”

However, Wiener added, “the future of public transportation in the Bay Area is still under threat due to pandemic-related operational deficits that, without help, will lead to severe service cuts.”

Learn more about legislators mentioned in this story

Wiener and other Bay Area legislators are proposing a $1.50 per vehicle hike on motorists who use the region’s seven state-owned bridges to provide transit systems with more operating revenue. The nonstate Golden Gate Bridge would not be affected by the proposal but, as noted earlier, is already raising its prices.

The $1.50 toll increase has been amended into a Wiener bill, Senate Bill 532, that has already passed the Senate and is pending in the Assembly, which could lead to fast track (no pun intended) approval.

Auto tolls on the seven bridges are generally $7 now, so Wiener’s bill would boost them to $8.50, roughly in line with the new Golden Gate Bridge tolls.

“Bay Area transit ridership continues to climb, but it’s not happening quickly enough to make up for the loss of federal emergency assistance,” Wiener said. “SB 532 provides critical lifeline funding for our transit systems — ensuring they have the resources they need to provide safe, reliable service for our residents.”

How, one might wonder, would raising the already stiff tolls on Bay Area bridges impact a region that is struggling to recover economically from the pandemic?

Classic economics would say that increasing their commuting costs would make San Francisco’s workers even less likely to return to their cubicles and therefore hinder downtown recovery.

However, perhaps it would merely persuade them to take BART or other transit services, thus reducing auto traffic on the bridges, which in turn would decrease revenues from the new tolls.

Dan Walters has been a journalist for more than 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He began his professional career in 1960, at age 16, at the Humboldt Times. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics. He can be reached at dan@calmatters.org.

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English

Two-and-a-half years after the start of the Covid pandemic, San Francisco’s downtown is still a shell of what it once was, and the economic outlook, for the short term at least, is ominous.

But just a few miles south, business is back. In South San Francisco, a self-styled “industrial city” that shares little of the glamor of its northern neighbor, restaurants and coffee shops along main thoroughfare Grand Avenue are abuzz with customers. Construction cranes dot the landscape, and east of Highway 101, the city’s corporate campuses and industrial hubs hum with activity. A few storefronts downtown are shuttered, and small business owners say they’ve been through the wringer, but the city’s economy has proven far more resilient than that of SF.

A big part of the secret sauce for South City is its standing as the “birthplace of biotech.” Unlike the software business, which today accounts for about 30% of San Francisco’s office market, biotech relies heavily on in-person work, making it a far more durable local industry in the Covid era. Genentech, South City’s largest employer by far, was considered an “essential business” with 3,000 to 4,000 people still in-office during the pandemic, and today it averages around 9,000 people on-site each week.

But there are other factors, too. Companies cite the relative ease of navigating the city’s bureaucracy and a welcoming approach to new development which, together with assets like proximity to major transit hubs, has helped the city build on its strength as a center for biotech and manufacturing. Tech firms such as payment leader Stripe, which decamped from San Francisco in 2019, now also find it a welcoming home.

Pedestrians walk up Grand Avenue in South San Francisco on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. The town’s downtown area was buzzing with street traffic and groups grabbing lunch at local restaurants. | Benjamin Fanjoy/The Standard

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week celebrating a new lab built by Amgen, the global pharma giant, South San Francisco Mayor Mark Nagales touted some 9 million square feet of new research and development space that’s in the pipeline. South San Francisco has issued over 2,000 commercial building permits and around 3,000 residential permits since the start of 2019, totaling $3 billion worth of construction, according to the city.

“You are right where you belong,” Nagales told a boisterous crowd of Amgen employees on Thursday, including CEO Bob Bradway, who flew in for the event from Switzerland.

Comparing San Francisco and its southern neighbor is not entirely fair: With a budget of just $122 million, it’s a veritable small town next to San Francisco, whose annual spending nears $14 billion. Even compared with other cities on the Peninsula, its downtown is quaint, with a historic City Hall and library and ample dining but only a modest retail scene.

Still, its pandemic-era resilience and can-do approach may hold some lessons for its bigger and more famous neighbors.

“South San Francisco—they didn’t close their doors,” said Rosanne Foust, president and CEO of the San Mateo County Economic Development Association. “They stepped up.”

Leave it to Biotech

South San Francisco, like many other cities on the Peninsula, got its modern start as a transportation and manufacturing hub. The industrial parks on the eastern side of the city were occupied first by meat-packing and steel companies in the 1920s, followed by shipbuilding in the ’30s. In the 1950s, freight and distribution of various types began to thrive as its marshlands were converted into even more industrial land to support the San Francisco International Airport.

The game-changer came in 1976 when Genentech chose South City as its home because of its proximity to both SF’s industry and the Peninsula’s academia. The company proved to be a seminal force in the creation of the biotechnology industry, pioneering both scientific and business advancements in the field, and it stuck to its original home even after being acquired by Swiss pharma giant Roche in 2009.

Today, there are more than 200 biotech companies located in South San Francisco, accounting for about 30% of the city’s jobs, according to data from the city’s general plan. Genentech and fellow biotech giants Abbvie and InterVenn Biosciences have all expanded in South City or renewed their leases recently. Earlier this year, 23andMe and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine both announced plans to move their headquarters to South SF from Sunnyvale and Oakland, respectively. The latest rumor is that Eli Lilly and Co. is hunting for 300,000 square feet of additional space in the city.

South San Francisco had the “strongest submarket” among Peninsula cities for research and development space in the most recent quarter, according to data from real estate broker CBRE.

And it’s not just biotech. True to its famous hillside signage, “The Industrial City” has around 28% of its jobs in production, distribution and repair. Despite regional stagnation, South City’s industrial market logged four of the top five notable sales and leases in the area for the most recent quarter.

One major new development on the horizon is Southline, a 28.5-acre campus whose plans were unanimously approved by the South San Francisco City Council earlier this year. Marcus Gilmour, principal at Lane Partners, the developer on the project, said demolition and site work began this year and the group is in the process of getting foundation permits for the 2.8 million square feet of planned office and research and development space.

Gilmour said the process to get Southline through the city’s pipeline was “robust” but efficient.

“One of the things that stood out to me […] their team was very responsive,” Gilmour said. “The priority is protecting the city and understanding the impact but also wanting to see the project go forward if it was really the right fit, so it was really more of a partnership than what I’ve typically seen in the Bay Area.”

For the most part, South San Francisco has been accelerating its housing building on par with the rest of San Mateo County, especially for higher-density development, according to data from Jon Haveman, principal at Marin Economic Consulting.

New apartments and construction fill the view from a street in South San Francisco on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. | Benjamin Fanjoy/The Standard

Nell Selander, director of South San Francisco’s Economic and Community Development Department, said the city’s development pipeline didn’t slow down as much as other places during the pandemic because the city made a concerted effort to keep its planning and building offices up and running.

South San Francisco’s average of 342 days from submitting plans to getting the key approval known as entitlement is well below the 450 days it takes San Francisco, according to data from the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development.

“If you need or want to expand in South San Francisco, you’re going to get a pretty clear and straightforward process,” Selander said.

Like many other cities, South San Francisco does charge a number of impact fees for new development, totaling $134 million since the start of 2019. During the 2020-21 fiscal year alone, the city collected $21.5 million in impact fees across eight programs for things like childcare, arts, parks and libraries.

Included in that is a fee requiring commercial developers of office, research, development and medical space to pay $15 per square foot toward an affordable housing fund. The city expects to collect $85 million over the next four to five years just for housing in South City, according to reporting from The San Francisco Business Times, which includes $30 million over the next 15 years from Genentech as the company updates its campus.

While those same impact fees often scare away developers in San Francisco’s costly building market, Foust said they haven’t had the same effect in South City. While San Francisco does not charge an affordable housing fee for commercial development, it does have many other types of impact fees. SF’s affordability requirements for housing developments are modestly more stringent than in South City.

The midday sky reflects from a recently opened Amgen building in South San Francisco on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. | Benjamin Fanjoy/The Standard

Saptarsi Haldar, Amgen’s vice president of cardiometabolic research and the site head for the new South City location, said Amgen and other biotech companies continue to choose South San Francisco for a few reasons: It’s already a hub full of talent with world-class education institutions nearby; it’s surrounded by freeways, transit stops and an international airport; and unlike traditional tech, biotech and life sciences doesn’t up and leave so easily because of the complex and long-range nature of the work.

So see

The global biopharmaceutical company has been in South San Francisco since 2004 and signed a lease for a new facility in Oyster Point in 2019.

“Because companies have invested so heavily in the city, it makes sense for them to double down rather than to start over somewhere else,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

Help From Above

The relative stability of the big biotech companies doesn’t mean the pandemic was easy for small businesses in South City.

Montserrat Mata, who co-owns Antigua Coffee Shop with her husband, said the downtown really only started coming back to life a couple of months ago. That coincided with companies like Genentech starting to bring back nonessential workers for more regular in-office work and the revival of its “Genentech Goes to Town” program, which gives every employee $25 to spend at local shops.

Like many other owners, Mata had plummeted to transform her business overnight, pivoting to delivery and outdoor dining as demand. Mata says her coffee’s reputation among locals is what kept Antigua alive, alongside relief funding and money for outdoor seating, like a grant from the city’s Chamber of Commerce that was funded by Genentech.

“We were struggling a lot,” Mata said.

Alongside the chamber, nonprofit Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center stepped out of its normal role helping to launch small businesses and got to work on relief, said Amanda Anthony, program manager for its north San Mateo County branch. And in 2021, the City Council dedicated $2 million of its federal relief funding to open an Economic Advancement Center, a physical space downtown for small business services and job training. The center also got support from the county, the San Mateo County Economic Development Association and money from Genentech and Lane Partners with programs run by Renaissance, the local YMCA and the nonprofit JobTrain.

Angel De Jesus works from the front desk at the Economic Advancement Center in South San Francisco on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. | Benjamin Fanjoy/The Standard

One county program in particular, Great Plates Delivered, connected struggling restaurants with homebound seniors who needed fresh food delivered. Participation in that program allowed food truck owner Feda Oweis, who often catered to biotech offices and events, to stay afloat during the early days of Covid.

Now, Oweis has moved his truck, called Beyond the Border, into a storefront on South Linden Avenue and is looking to buy a second truck to keep up with demand. As office work returned, so did his catering business.

Oweis crafted his menu at the new location to fit the customer base, offering quick lunch bites for workers in the surrounding factories and warehouses. He’s looking forward to when Southline, which is just down the road, gets built. He’s even partnering with the city to pass out fliers and appetizers to customers next week, saying, “It’s always busy year-round.”

As for the city’s culture, Mata said it might take a bit more time and effort to really bring back the feeling of the pre-pandemic days when Grand Avenue stayed open and bustling well into the night. But if it’s up to her, it won’t be long.

“We have a lot of plans,” Mata said. “In the end, this is a place open for the community.”

English

The post Whereas SF’s Covid Restoration Falters, South San Francisco Is Booming appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

English

Two-and-a-half years after the start of the Covid pandemic, San Francisco’s downtown is still a shell of what it once was, and the economic outlook, for the short term at least, is ominous.

But just a few miles south, business is back. In South San Francisco, a self-styled “industrial city” that shares little of the glamor of its northern neighbor, restaurants and coffee shops along main thoroughfare Grand Avenue are abuzz with customers. Construction cranes dot the landscape, and east of Highway 101, the city’s corporate campuses and industrial hubs hum with activity. A few storefronts downtown are shuttered, and small business owners say they’ve been through the wringer, but the city’s economy has proven far more resilient than that of SF.

A big part of the secret sauce for South City is its standing as the “birthplace of biotech.” Unlike the software business, which today accounts for about 30% of San Francisco’s office market, biotech relies heavily on in-person work, making it a far more durable local industry in the Covid era. Genentech, South City’s largest employer by far, was considered an “essential business” with 3,000 to 4,000 people still in-office during the pandemic and today averages around 9,000 people onsite each week.

But there are other factors, too. Companies cite the relative ease of navigating the city’s bureaucracy and a welcoming approach to new development which, together with assets like proximity to major transit hubs, has helped the city build on its strength as a center for biotech and manufacturing. Tech firms such as payment leader Stripe, which decamped from San Francisco in 2019, now also find it a welcoming home.

Pedestrians walk up Grand Avenue in South San Francisco Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. The town’s downtown area was buzzing with groups grabbing lunch at local restaurants and street traffic Thursday afternoon. | Benjamin Fanjoy/ The Standard

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week celebrating a new lab built by Amgen, the global pharma giant, South San Francisco Mayor Mark Nagales touted some 9 million square feet of new research and development space that’s in the pipeline. South San Francisco has issued over 2,000 commercial building permits and around 3,000 residential permits since the start of 2019, totaling $3 billion worth of construction, according to the city.

“You are right where you belong,” Nagales told a boisterous crowd of Amgen employees on Thursday, including CEO Bob Broadway, who flew in for the event from Switzerland.

Comparing San Francisco and its southern neighbor is not entirely fair: With a budget of just $122 million, it’s a veritable small town next to San Francisco, whose annual spending nears $14 billion. Even compared with other cities on the Peninsula, its downtown is quaint, with a historic City Hall and library and ample dining but only a modest retail scene.

Still, its pandemic-era resilience and can-do approach may hold some lessons for its bigger and more famous neighbors.

“South San Francisco—they didn’t close their doors,” said Rosanne Foust, president and CEO of the San Mateo County Economic Development Association. “They stepped up.”

Leave it to Biotech

South San Francisco, like many other cities on the Peninsula, got its modern start as a transportation and manufacturing hub. The industrial parks on the eastern side of the city were occupied first by meat-packing and steel companies in the 1920s, followed by shipbuilding in the ’30s. In the 1950s freight and distribution of various types began to thrive as its marshlands were converted into even more industrial land to support the San Francisco International Airport.

The game-changer came in 1976 when Genentech chose South City as its home because of its proximity to both SF’s industry and the Peninsula’s academia. The company proved to be a seminal force in the creation of the biotechnology industry, pioneering both scientific and business advancements in the field, and it stuck to its original home even after being acquired by Swiss pharma giant Roche in 2009.

Today, there are more than 200 biotech companies located in South San Francisco, accounting for about 30% of the city’s jobs, according to data from the city’s general plan. Genentech and fellow biotech giants Abbvie and InterVenn Biosciences have all expanded in South City or renewed their leases recently. Earlier this year, 23andMe and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine both announced plans to move their headquarters to South SF from Sunnyvale and Oakland, respectively. The latest rumor is that Eli Lilly and Co. is hunting for 300,000 square feet of additional space in the city.

South San Francisco had the “strongest submarket” among Peninsula cities for research and development space in the most recent quarter, according to data from real estate broker CBRE.

And it’s not just biotech. True to its famous hillside signage, “The Industrial City” has around 28% of its jobs in production, distribution and repair. Despite regional stagnation, South City’s industrial market logged four of the top five notable sales and leases in the area for the most recent quarter.

One major new development on the horizon is Southline, a 28.5-acre campus whose plans were unanimously approved by the City Council earlier this year. Marcus Gilmour, principal at Lane Partners, the developer on the project, said demolition and site work began this year and the group is in the process of getting foundation permits for the 2.8 million square feet of planned office and research and development space.

Gilmour said the process to get Southline through the city’s pipeline was “robust” but efficient.

“One of the things that stood out to me … was their team was very responsive,” Gilmour said. “The priority is protecting the city and understanding the impact but also wanting to see the project go forward if it was really the right fit, so it was really more of a partnership than what I’ve typically seen in the Bay Area.”

For the most part, South San Francisco has been accelerating its housing building on par with the rest of San Mateo County, especially for higher-density development, according to data from Jon Haveman, principal at Marin Economic Consulting.

New apartments and construction fill the view from a street in South San Francisco Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. | Benjamin Fanjoy/The Standard

Nell Selander, director of South San Francisco’s Economic and Community Development Department, said the city’s development pipeline didn’t slow down as much as other places during the pandemic because the city made a concerted effort to keep its planning and building offices up and running.

South San Francisco’s average of 342 days from submitting plans to getting the key approval known as entitlement is well below the 450 days it takes San Francisco, according to data from the state’s Office of Housing and Community Development.

“If you need or want to expand in South San Francisco, you’re going to get a pretty clear and straightforward process,” Selander said.

Like many other cities, South San Francisco does charge a number of impact fees for new development, totaling $134 million since the start of 2019. During the 2020-21 fiscal year alone, the city collected $21.5 million in impact fees across eight programs for things like childcare, arts, parks and libraries.

Included in that is a fee requiring commercial developers of office, research, development and medical space to pay $15 per square foot toward an affordable housing fund. The city expects to collect $85 million over the next four to five years just for housing in South City, according to reporting from The San Francisco Business Times, which includes $30 million over the next 15 years from Genentech as the company updates its campus.

While those same impact fees often scare away developers in San Francisco’s costly building market, Foust said they haven’t had the same effect in South City. While San Francisco does not charge an affordable housing fee for commercial development, it does have many other types of impact fees. SF’s affordability requirements for housing developments are modestly more stringent than in South City.

The mid-day sky reflects from a recently opened Amgen building in South San Francisco Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. | Benjamin Fanjoy/The Standard

Saptarsi Haldar, Amgen’s vice president of cardiometabolic research and the site head for the new South City location, said Amgen and other biotech companies continue to choose South San Francisco for a few reasons: It’s already a hub full of talent with world-class education institutions nearby; it’s surrounded by freeways, transit stops and an international airport; and unlike traditional tech, biotech and life sciences doesn’t up and leave so easily because of the complex and long-range nature of the work.

So see

The global biopharmaceutical company has been in South San Francisco since 2004 and signed a lease for a new facility in Oyster Point in 2019.

“Because companies have invested so heavily in the city, it makes sense for them to double down rather than to start over somewhere else,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

Help From Above

The relative stability of the big biotech companies doesn’t mean the pandemic was easy for small businesses in South City.

Montserrat Mata, who co-owns Antigua Coffee Shop with her husband, said the downtown really only started coming back to life a couple of months ago. That coincided with companies like Genentech starting to bring back non-essential workers for more regular in-office work and the revival of its “Genentech Goes to Town” program, which gives every employee $25 to spend at local shops.

Like many other owners, Mata had plummeted to transform her business overnight, pivoting to delivery and outdoor dining as demand. Mata says her coffee’s reputation among locals is what kept Antigua alive, alongside relief funding and money for outdoor seating, like a grant from the city’s Chamber of Commerce that was funded by Genentech.

“We were struggling a lot,” Mata said.

Alongside the chamber, nonprofit Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center stepped out of its normal role helping to launch small businesses and got to work on relief, said Amanda Anthony, program manager for its north San Mateo County branch. And in 2021, the City Council dedicated $2 million of its federal relief funding to open an Economic Advancement Center, a physical space downtown for small business services and job training. The center also got support from the county, the San Mateo County Economic Development Association and money from Genentech and Lane Partners with programs run by Renaissance, the local YMCA and nonprofit JobTrain.

Angel De Jesus works from the front desk at the Economic Advancement Center in South San Francisco Calif., on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022. | Benjamin Fanjoy/The Standard

One county program in particular, Great Plates Delivered, connected struggling restaurants with homebound seniors who needed fresh food delivered. Participation in that program allowed food truck owner Feda Oweis, who often catered to biotech offices and events, to stay afloat during the early days of Covid.

Now, Oweis has moved his truck, called Beyond the Border, into a storefront on South Linden Avenue and is looking to buy a second truck to keep up with demand. As office work returned, so did his catering business.

Oweis crafted his menu at the new location to fit the customer base, offering quick lunch bites for workers in the surrounding factories and warehouses. He’s looking forward to when Southline, which is just down the road, gets built. He’s even partnering with the city to pass out fliers and appetizers to customers next week, saying, “It’s always busy year-round.”

As for the city’s culture, Mata said it might take a bit more time and effort to really bring back the feeling of the pre-pandemic days when Grand Avenue stayed open and bustling well into the night. But if it’s up to her, it won’t be long.

“We have a lot of plans,” Mata said. “In the end, this is a place open for the community.”

English

The post Whereas SF’s Covid Restoration Falters, South San Francisco Is Booming appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.