Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, said in a recent interview published this week that San Francisco and the Bay Area are in trouble.
Offering a dire outlook of the city, he said the downtown area is “never going back to the way it was” before COVID-19 when workers commuted to San Francisco’s offices on a daily basis.
“We need to rebalance downtown,” said Mr. Benioff, whose company is the largest employer in San Francisco and an anchor tenant. He said the mayor’s office needs to come up with a program to turn dormant office space into housing and hire additional police officers to deal with a surge in crime.
On Tuesday, Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, proposed putting city workers into empty downtown buildings in a bid to revive the city’s downtown area. Ms. Breed said in a letter that some city agencies can “lead on recovery by investing in high-quality office space for workers” and noted that a shift to hybrid work “resulted in an overall reduced demand for office space and correspondingly lower rents for high-quality buildings.”
“While this poses a challenge to the City’s finances and its overall economic recovery, it also presents a critical opportunity for the City government to be strategic about its own use of office space,” Ms. Breed wrote. “The City alone cannot fix all of the problems impacting downtown San Francisco; however, we can lead the path toward recovery.”
In recent years, San Francisco’s crime has been on the uptick, too, and was perhaps punctuated by the shocking murder of Cash App co-creator Bob Lee, who was stabbed in a wealthy area of the city. The incident drew a reaction from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco.
Mr. Musk earlier this year said the murder of Mr. Lee was emblematic of San Francisco’s “violent crime” problem, which has been “horrific” in recent years. “So many stores shuttered in downtown SF. Feels post-apocalyptic,” he also wrote around the same time in response to another user’s comment about the declining state of the city.
