At noon today, on a Friday, I drove around the city to see what the shutdown means. I think that many of the other cars I saw were people doing what I was doing; looking around.
The city was just like the same city on a Saturday morning in summer time at 8am, with five exceptions.
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People out exercising, but fewer than an ordinary Saturday morning.
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Fewer parked cars in downtown and business neighborhoods than any day of the week or on holidays.
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A few dozen businesses boarded up; that is not a regular occasion in the city.
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About half or less as many 'homeless', what I call 'street people', as would be normal for 2020 in San Francisco. We have about 7,000 regularly, at most today there were 3,000 city wide. But they have still created messes where they are and nobody is cleaning it up. Businesses would usually clean up the messes.
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The most significant change in this shutdown period is the total absence of tourists. Total absence regardless of the time of day. The photo of Chinatown at noon shows no one. No one. There would be hundreds of visible tourists any day any week of the year. The same was true for Union Square and Fisherman's Wharf. No one.
These last two points are significant based on earlier blogs that I have written.
The current scene is a perfect vindication for an earlier blog.
I wrote a blog, for city planners, on why cities have so many empty retail store fronts. Thousands of empty retail store fronts in San Francisco in the past two decades during a period of vast population growth and massive wealth expansion.
The two professional planners I showed the blog to, found it irrelevant to their worlds. The nature of business is something they don't know about.
Tourism is vital to San Francisco and is directly connected to the City's functioning.
What the current situation in San Francisco shows is that tourism, which is today non- existent, is a vast San Francisco enterprise. We got 25.2 million tourists in 2016 spending $16 billion a year.
Based on this blog from 2006, there were 12 million tourists per year at $7.76 billion in spending. The number of tourists is right, since the airport count is accurate. The number of tourists grew from 2006 to 2016. That is astounding; 12 million per year to 25.2 in ten years. More than double.
That means, today, 500,000 people in the Bay Area are supported by the growth in tourism to San Francisco in the past decade. As with the earlier blog estimate a further doubling of tourism in the next four years would mean another 500,000 new jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area. Doubling within four years would occur if the visible street people were gone.
That doubling of tourism; that would occur without the street people, means, EACH visible San Francisco street person destroys jobs that would support 166 potential new people in the Bay Area. Worth roughly $2.6 million dollars per year for the potential new workers and their families arriving in the Bay Area.
Good lord, visible street people, are very expensive for a tourist oriented city like San Francisco.