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Comment by sidvit | Hacker News Reader

How's this compare in other cities? Just annecdotally speaking, I feel like I know a lot more people who used to live and work in San Francisco who don't anymore post pandemic, as opposed to friends of mine who left and came back to Austin/New York/Seattle

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Linked from the article, the Urban Displacement Project's recovery ranking dashboards [1] place San Francisco dead last amongst 60 major North American cities.

[1] https://www.downtownrecovery.com/dashboards/recovery_ranking...

Whoa, not only last, but last by a long shot. Most of the cities toward the bottom in that list are in the lower 50s and upper 40s. Then you have the bottom 3—Portland at 41%, Cleveland at 36% and San Francisco at 31%.

That's quite a drop off.

That's mostly looking at downtown though?

SF is small and its downtown has an oversized impact on its financials. There couple of relatively large areas with older residential buildings that pay fairly low property tax and have mostly small businesses. Business related revenue from relatively small area is what allows San Francisco its breathing space in the budget.

Really interesting that Salt Lake is at the top, and that's the only city I know of that (at least reportedly) had an innovative solution to tackling homelessness. I just tried to search for their solution, but was overwhelmed by links from the past few months talking about how homelessness is swelling in that city. Perhaps every city is just dying of homelessness right now. Makes me wonder if those numbers for downtown recovery are manipulated or accurate. How to tell?

I read some updates about the housing first program you’re talking about a while back. If I recall correctly it fell apart after a year or two and was quietly abandoned. The reasons why aren’t very clearly explained, but the coverage I recall insinuated that the government failed to fund it or build new affordable housing

I just spent a week in Minneapolis and the downtown core is as clean, new, well maintained and well ordered as I have ever seen it.

It was also dead.

Weekday morning skyway traffic looked like a weekend or a holiday. New office campuses … tumbleweeds. My hotel was almost empty.

That’s an enormous amount of (relatively recent) investment that is now of questionable value.

NYC looks the same as before but with outdoor dining and legal weed.

Manhattan was packed on the weekend, it seems more crowded than pre-covid. Fridays in the office districts not so busy but still people. It has the benefit that people there actually like living in cities.

My impression is that London is fairly thriving… after a period of people leaving for calmer/cheaper places during the pandemic, anecdotally I’ve heard of a lot of people returning for whatever reason (missed the buzz of it, had to go back in to the office a few days a week and the commute sucks, small town/country life not all its cracked up to be, etc).

Apparently demand vs supply for rental properties is quite crazy, with places going off the market within hours and people getting into bidding wars (not normal for rentals in the UK in my experience).

Most people I know are back in the office at least a few days in week, though a lot of tech companies (certainly smaller ones) are letting people work fully remote.

I work remotely so can’t say what the number of people on public transport going to work is like, but pubs and restaurants seem to be doing well again, which is great to see.

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