![]() According to research from the University of Toronto, cell-phone activity in downtown SF is 32 percent of pre-pandemic levels. The doom-loopy vision laid out for downtown SF was not pretty: Workers don’t return, offices remain empty, restaurants shutter, transit agencies go bankrupt, tax bases plummet, public services disappear. San Francisco Could Be in the Biggest ‘Doom Loop’ of All.” The phrase “doom loop” was recently repopularized by Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at NYU, in a paper he wrote last year with two Columbia B-school professors called “ Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse,” about the consequences for American downtowns of workers remaining remote. Now, late one morning this dark spring, next to the Salesforce Tower, the Salesforce Transit Center - designed by César Pelli’s firm and opened in August 2018 to serve as the city’s main bus hub -was empty, as in truly vacant, save for a security guard in black Dickies and a yellow-and-black jacket walking in circles on the poppy-tiled floor.Ī week earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article: “ Cities Are Struggling. Meta has laid off 21,000 employees and ditched 435,000 feet of office space in San Francisco. Since that time, Salesforce has laid off 9,000 employees and ditched nearly a million feet of office space. “Can you see it? It’s just about to land on top of the medical center … There’s only one helicopter landing pad in the entire city, and it’s on the top of the Children’s Hospital for kids who have to get to the NICU, which is the neonatal-intensive-care unit … So that’s what just happened.”īut that was a lifetime ago, before the pandemic, when we were still debating if you could have good billionaires. “You can see that helicopter is about to land with a child going to the NICU?” he said, pointing south toward the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. That Friday afternoon, like every Friday afternoon in those days, Salesforce employees and their families promenaded on the top, or ohana, floor of the building - ohana means “extended family” in Hawaiian appropriating Hawaiian culture was still considered corporate okay - drinking the free espresso drinks, marveling at the tremendous view.īenioff’s PR team brought him water and Diet Coke and made sure the big man’s chair was not in the sun. ![]() Are you getting the vibe, too? There’s, like, a vibe.” “It’s cool up here, right?” said Benioff. The city looked sun-kissed and thriving from this view: the elegant Golden Gate Bridge, Twin Peaks, the surreal green of the Marin Headlands. The site of a 200-bed Navigation Center for the homeless (which Benioff had defended in the face of other rich - but less rich - San Franciscans who tried to fight it off). The UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and the Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland (to which Benioff had donated $250 million). You could see every part of the city and out across the bay. ![]() He stood on the top floor of the Salesforce Tower, the tallest building in San Francisco, named after his company, then the largest employer in San Francisco. In the spring of 2019, Marc Benioff surveyed his kingdom and it looked good. ![]()
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