MegJun 17, 2023

God it's depressing that people believe this is the true nature of downtowns:

"Without commuting office workers, the office buildings go empty, they become worth a fraction of their cost, and retail cannot survive."

From https://innovationnation.blog/p/its-companies-fault-we-dont-want

Cities predate commutes. The hollowed out core that triples in population, swelled to bursting with bored and unhappy suburbanites during work hours, is a modern abomination made possible by cars and structural racism.

What's killing downtowns is that we spent so long on this awful vision of work and spent half a century strangling inner city infrastructure to subsidize incredibly expensive suburban lifestyles.

Want to make downtowns viable again? Convert dead office space to apartments and schools and colleges and other spaces people can work *and* live in.

Good luck with your rezoning applications though.

It's Companies' Fault we don't want to Return to the Office

It wasn't appealing to begin with

Innovation Nation
Show threadStan Wonn 🏳️‍🌈 🌹Jun 18, 2023
@megmac @BruceMirken San Francisco (where I lived for 21 years) is going to be going through a lot of painful adjustments to the new reality of work life. I don’t think that the City’s leadership has *any* vision for how to deal with this other than begging employers to make their employees return to the office — and it’s not gonna happen. The Financial District is never going to be as it was before.
Show threadBruce MirkenJun 18, 2023
@StanWonn @megmac No doubt. It needs a new vision, not "Let's go back to 2019."
Show threadMegJun 18, 2023

@BruceMirken @StanWonn The difference between SF and a lot of other north american cities might be that, due to NIMBYs there's still a *lot* of residential in central SF, afaik, so even with bad city management there's room for things to shift on the ground.

In a lot of other cities grassroots civic organizing is basically completely dead, and downtowns are already hollowed out of anything but temporary workers.

Show threadBruce Mirken
@megmac @StanWonn SFs Financial District is pretty much all offices. I lived in SF for 28 years.
Jun 18, 2023 at 6:50amWeb
Show threadMegJun 18, 2023

@BruceMirken @StanWonn sure, I know. But the financial district never seemed, to me at least, to be the center of vibrancy in the city to begin with.

In so many other cities once you leave the downtown area it's a stark difference in density, vibrancy, and very few have any real secondary "mainstreets."

Show threadStan Wonn 🏳️‍🌈 🌹Jun 18, 2023
@megmac @BruceMirken I worked in the Financial District for about 11 years overall. It was a Monday-Friday area for sure, and for the most part a ghost town on weekends and holidays. To Bruce’s point, it would have been much better for there to have been more residential development in the area but that is not what we ended up with. That will have to change.