Vancouver also has an enormous amount of visible street homelessness, numbering in the thousands, driven by a housing crisis and lack of mental health supports. The city is also severely experiencing the consequences of toxic drugs flooding the illegal street drug market, as 6+ people are killed by toxic drug overdoses Province wide every day.
The vacancy rate downtown? A mere 14% and only 10% in the Metro Region. Low during an era when other cities such as Calgary and SF are experiencing double that rate.
So I don't think it's homelessness etc that is causing any of these problems. After all, both SF and Vancouver had a severe homelessness and drug problems well before the pandemic.
It is likely that SF's especially tech oriented economy may be a factor, as tech is particularly WFH friendly and may be keeping WFH going on longer than other places.
Vancouver's excellent public transit system may have helped in return to office efforts. When I hear people talk about how great WFH his, they often talk about how miserable their old commutes were. Fix the commute and maybe RTO is more appealing.
But fixing the commute problems is not really something SF can do alone. I do not believe at all that a city alone can move the needle on public transportation, unless we're talking about affordable projects like bike lanes. Vancouver's rapid transit system is only possible due to significant funding from both the Province and the Federal government. The Feds just bailed out Vancouver to prevent service cuts.
Vancouver’s office sector has a higher fraction of occupants who cannot work from home, such as digital animation and effects companies and video game developers, who have special on-site tech and extreme confidentiality requirements that preclude WFH. San Francisco’s typical firm is more likely to be WFH-friendly.
I’d say another factor in Vancouver’s favor here is the concentration of people who live downtown amongst the office towers. San Francisco’s downtown is relatively empty by comparison. So when the office workers left, it hollowed out entirely.
These are just some anecdotes. But I would tend to agree with your comment that it’s unlikely just the drugs and crime keeping offices empty in SF.
Yep I agree. The other advantage Vancouver always had is that there's a pretty significant amount of residential Downtown and near Downtown, and so Downtown didn't fully empty out as badly as many American cities, and there are a massive amount of workers that can walk and bike to work.
I don't have familiarity with the needs of digital effects workers, but I'm unsure that there were any technical barriers for the games folks. There were games studios that shipped games during WFH with all PCs and dev kits on site due to IP issues. The solution was Parsec, a pretty much magical piece of software that is essentially ultra low latency remote desktop.
I remain shocked that so few companies outside of the games industry use this, and the software seems not well known, but maybe everyone else just ships people laptops.
Close colleagues of mine run a video game development company (I worked for a time in that industry). They were doing contract development for one of the huge publishers and were prohibited from doing WFH. During the pandemic, they toughed it out at the office.
The vacancy rate downtown? A mere 14% and only 10% in the Metro Region. Low during an era when other cities such as Calgary and SF are experiencing double that rate.
https://www.biv.com/news/real-estate/metro-vancouver-office-...
So I don't think it's homelessness etc that is causing any of these problems. After all, both SF and Vancouver had a severe homelessness and drug problems well before the pandemic.
It is likely that SF's especially tech oriented economy may be a factor, as tech is particularly WFH friendly and may be keeping WFH going on longer than other places.
Vancouver's excellent public transit system may have helped in return to office efforts. When I hear people talk about how great WFH his, they often talk about how miserable their old commutes were. Fix the commute and maybe RTO is more appealing.
But fixing the commute problems is not really something SF can do alone. I do not believe at all that a city alone can move the needle on public transportation, unless we're talking about affordable projects like bike lanes. Vancouver's rapid transit system is only possible due to significant funding from both the Province and the Federal government. The Feds just bailed out Vancouver to prevent service cuts.
TransLink set to receive $825M from federal gov’t funding over five years https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2024/07/03/translink-canada-go...