On March 16, 2020, Mayor London Breed issued a shelter-in-place order. The same day, San Francisco schools began what was, at first, a three-week shutdown.
In her State of the City speech today at Mission Rock, the mayor painted a lively picture of reopening, with a little side-eye for the narrative — local and national — that SF is in dire straits. Nodding to new development behind her strategically-placed podium, Breed said, “This doesn’t happen in a city that’s dying, this happens in a city that grows and is thriving.”
The situation is more complicated. (She did start her speech with this: “Our recovery will not be easy, it will not be quick.”) First, the pandemic isn’t over. But much has changed, and the overwhelming reason is modern medicine.
COVID has killed 6 million people worldwide, and 815 in San Francisco. Imagine the toll without vaccines. We would not be talking today about making indoor dinner reservations, or about kids in school without masks, or about bringing workers back downtown.
It’s also a stark reminder that much of the world, in fact, does not have access to vaccines or, as do many in SF, access to green space and work-from-home jobs and wealth. So even with hope that in 2022 we will return to a busier, richer civic life, this is still a solemn occasion. Let’s take a moment to take stock of San Francisco.
Schools
It’s a big pandemic milestone among many: SF students can take their masks off in school starting next week. We’ll see how many kids, uneasy with lifted restrictions, will stay home. In SF public schools, that would add another problem to a long list. The pandemic accelerated an enrollment decline and perpetuated existing educational inequality, with 50,000 kids spending a year or more in virtual school.
The school board handled the pandemic so poorly that voters recalled three of the seven members. (It might have been the whole board if the other four had met the recall requirements.) With new members about to join, the board is grappling with a huge deficit, looming layoffs at schools and in the central office, and the search for a new superintendent.
Enrollment and fiscal woes didn’t start with COVID, but as with many other aspects of life the past two years, San Franciscans have signaled a desire for something different as we emerge.
Or should we say — if we emerge. More variants will circulate. January’s omicron surge was a gut-wrenching test, but administrators learned and adapted. Kids and teachers missed a lot of time, but campuses did not shut down, unlike in some Bay Area towns. Let’s say the district came through with a passing grade.
Now let’s see if the folks in charge, with school board elections in November and energized parents watching closely, can do at least the same for the rest of 2022 and beyond.
Housing
Here’s one takeaway from COVID-era housing: It sure ain’t cheaper. Rents bottomed out in late 2020, with thousands of people fleeing SF, but have been ticking back up. The median home price is around $1.5 million, with demand called “insatiable.” For all the hysteria over our decline into a lawless hellhole, the City by the Bay is still hot.
So let’s talk about housing. Local officials in SF and elsewhere have done their best to thwart more of it. The biggest change has been at the state level, where Sacramento legislators led by SF’s state Sen. Scott Wiener have chipped away, peaking (so far) with a package of pro-density bills last fall.
Among them, SB 9 is shaking up towns across the state. The law means property owners can split single-family lots into two, then build a duplex on each. Where there’s only one home, four are now allowed. Could this year be a breakthrough? Some people don’t think so:
In response to SB 9, three SF supervisors are floating their own fourplex proposals for the single-family swaths of the city. The Planning Department has endorsed one, with modifications, and dismissed the other two, saying they could “potentially stymie densification.”
Perhaps the three plans will be blended into one, but we’re just at the start of the sausage making. It does seem unlikely that our supes will relax “local control” rules that give even a single person veto over a neighboring project.
If SF doesn’t show real effort to meet state housing goals, penalties could ensue from the new attorney general. And without more housing — market rate, affordable for working-class and middle-income residents, and deeply subsidized for the formerly homeless — the brief dip in prices, now in our rearview mirror, will seem ever more like a COVID-induced fever dream.
Homelessness
One big fear in early 2020 was COVID spreading among the thousands of SF’s unhoused people. (A 2019 count put their population at 8,035, but it was likely higher than that.) After an outbreak in the city’s biggest overnight shelter, supervisors demanded the lease of 8,000 empty hotel rooms to move people out of harm’s way. Breed refused; the city ended up leasing about 2,500 rooms and supplementing them with tent villages in neighborhoods overwhelmed with sidewalk encampments.
COVID never devastated the homeless population. It did, however, put the city’s strategies on pause — and add considerable confusion. For example, people on the street who were on a waitlist for permanent housing got kicked to the back of the line, in favor of those who took hotel rooms. But many in hotel rooms refused to move, and a growing number of housing units have sat empty.
Group shelters are back, but officials know that cycling thousands of people in and out of temporary lodgings isn’t helping. The city has redoubled its pre-COVID commitment to more permanent homes, buying older properties and building new ones, all backed by state and federal funding. SF voters have been generous too, approving bonds and new taxes. If COVID and its disruptions indeed wane, we’ll get a clearer sense if the money we’re spending is making a difference.
Streets and Transit
The early days of the pandemic were claustrophobic. To provide more room, the city banned through traffic from more than two dozen residential streets and two main arteries — the Great Highway and Golden Gate Park’s JFK Drive. As some neighbors began to chafe, the first reversal came last summer. The mayor reopened the Great Highway to cars on weekdays. A more heated debate has dogged the JFK Drive closure.
Neighborhood streets have provoked less conflict, including four roads made permanently slow in August. Even these, however, have not been without controversy, and one group’s fight to reinstate traffic on Lake Street is a potential bellwether for other neighborhoods. (Always worth repeating: Cars aren’t banned from slow streets. Everyone, including residents and delivery vans, can drive on them, but not as through streets.)
As The Frisc has reported, proponents of a return to full car traffic have resorted to specious claims and clumsy subterfuge, while many stakeholders, including an advocate for seniors and the disabled, are working to make a car-free JFK accessible to everyone. (The Board of Supervisors may vote on a new plan as soon as next month.)
A decade from now, it will be clear that COVID altered our streets permanently. What about public transit? Only federal intervention kept our systems from collapsing. We have no idea if regular commutes will return in full, but in SF, Muni is restoring many suspended routes to pre-pandemic service. The Omicron surge delayed those plans, however. There’s no telling if a more severe variant will wreak havoc.
There’s a big fiscal question too: Is this the time to wean Muni from the farebox — rider revenue — and find other sources of stable funding?
Cities change, and their transit systems must adapt with them. But San Francisco has a daunting task to recover and reconfigure its transit maps and funding quickly — and climate change won’t pause to give us a break.
The economy
The outlook is mixed at best. At least we can take comfort in our ability to even talk about a post-COVID economic strategy, which must include downtown.
Last week, Breed and various top employers — from Bank of America, the Gap, and Salesforce to Uber and UCSF — pledged workers would return this month to offices. SF will spend more than $12 million on “welcome ambassadors” near offices and transit hubs to keep things clean, and promote live events downtown. Scenes like this won’t hurt, either:
But will people really return en masse? Many workers have signaled a preference for flexibility, and many employers will have to give highly sought-after workers — which describes a lot of the tech world these days — what they want. SF’s workforce is heavy on tech, of course, and perhaps a longer-term shift to more remote work will be our window to diversify. But that’s cold comfort to hotels, restaurants, event spaces, and retailers who need the office crowd as customers right now. We’re certainly not turning scads of empty towers into housing anytime soon.
Tech isn’t the only game in town. Tourism is — or was — a top industry SF, and what that really means is conventions. Will thousands of podiatrists, biopharma deal makers, or meterologists ever descend upon our city and drop major coin again? Family vacations can’t really compensate for massive losses of business travel, as a modest 2021 rebound shows.
How much has the pandemic altered SF? It‘s got us nostalgic for the days of Larry Ellison keynote speeches. OK, maybe not.
Shared Spaces
Restaurants and bars got crushed by the city’s shutdown. “We weren’t at home taking Zoom calls and making salary and getting our health insurance paid,” Golden Gate Restaurant Association director Laurie Thomas reminds us.
Mayor London Breed announced the emergency Shared Spaces program in May 2020 for outdoor dining parklets. In May 2021, 80 percent of surveyed businesses said parklets were keeping them alive.
Now, with more than 1,700 in place, the program is permanent. But turning an emergency response into something long-term isn’t easy, and some restaurants worry about compliance with the new rules. Fines for violations might not kick in until April 1, 2023, however, giving restaurant and bar owners more breathing room.
As we reported earlier this week, parklet operators must factor in these costs and risks. Thomas and others are advocating for higher subsidies to help ease the decision to keep parklets, something the city’s Shared Spaces chief cautiously endorsed. But Thomas is also confident that the pandemic itself created a new demand that won’t go away: “We’ve trained people to eat outside. People love eating outside.”
Alex Lash, Anthony Lazarus, and Max Harrison-Caldwell contributed to this report.
