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.
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.