More ominous for the city is that its downtown business district — the bedrock of its economy and tax base — revolves around a technology industry uniquely equipped and enthusiastic about letting workers stay home indefinitely. In the space of a few months, Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, went from running a company rooted in the city to vacating Yelp’s longtime headquarters and allowing its roughly 4,400 employees to work from anywhere in their country of residence.
“I feel like I’ve seen the future,” he said.
Decisions like that, played out across thousands of remote and hybrid work arrangements, have forced office building owners and the businesses that rely on them to figure out what’s next. This has made the San Francisco area something of a test case in the multibillion-dollar question of what the nation’s central business districts will look like when an increased amount of business is done at home.
“Imagine a forest where an entire species suddenly disappears,” said Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies urban real estate. “It disrupts the whole ecosystem and produces a lot of chaos. The same thing is happening in downtowns.”
by Conor Dougherty and Emma Goldberg, Seattle Times/NY Times | Read more:
Images: Aaron Wojack; The New York Times
[ed. Define major. I imagine a lot of other cities might have a good shot at this competition. See also: the MIXT story: "...was it possible to marry good, healthy food and good, healthy business practices to create a new category of fast-casual dining?" Aka... salads. Ack.]
