Excerpt:

>Google mobility data suggest that San Francisco has had one of the slowest returns to in-person work since the pandemic when compared to over 50 major metropolitan areas — and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change in 2023.

>Google’s reports, which they stopped publishing in October 2022, are based on data from anonymous Google users who have their “Location History” setting turned on in their account, so may not be representative of all users.

>Google uses its location tracking and map directions data to quantify the places people are visiting. Those places are lumped into categories like “workplaces,” which includes places like offices and production facilities, and “retail and recreation” places.

>Trips to workplaces in San Francisco were still nearly 40% lower in October 2022 than in January 2020, according to data from Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports.

>In mid-April 2020, time spent in the workplace plummeted to 70% of what it was at the beginning of the year for San Francisco. Despite some growth, time spent in the workplace among these Google users in San Francisco was still 37% lower than pre-pandemic times as of October 2022.

>Meanwhile, other cities like New York and Los Angeles are 31% and 28% below pre-pandemic, respectively.

> 

>San Francisco’s chief economist Ted Egan said “there’s probably a certain amount of ‘only in San Francisco’ phenomenon that’s keeping people away from the workplace.”

>Still, these hollowed-out office spaces could have a large impact on the city’s financial outlook considering that the city’s downtown is a large source of revenue for the city. In 2021, office work contributed to three-quarters of the city’s GDP, according to Egan.

>“Almost nowhere in San Francisco is sales tax recovery to where it was before the pandemic after you adjust for inflation and it’s particularly bad in downtown,” Egan said. “We’re missing office workers, we’re missing residents and we’re missing hotel guests who were usually customers to those businesses.”

Adriana Rezal, 11 Jan. 2023, the San Francisco Chronicle (Hearst)