The flood started with a trickle four years ago, when a handful of firms you might never have heard of — QuestionPro, ASGN, XO, and Finical — all announced in January of 2024 they’d depart San Francisco for Florida, Texas, and Virginia.
Then came the lockdowns, work-from-home, #DefundThePolice, and the city attorney general’s office refusing to prosecute so-called “lifestyle” crimes like public drug use and shoplifting.
Soon, everybody from electric carmaking giant Tesla to the corner Walgreens was closing up shop in San Francisco without so much as a thank you note. The once-upscale Market Street retail district looks more and more like the background to a post-apocalypse videogame.
I’ve covered the Financial District’s body blows time and again, including the mostly empty One Front Street building — one of the largest office buildings in the city — where I worked three decades ago.
The latest to leave is Google, vacating the 300,000-square-foot offices it has occupied at One Market Plaza since 2018. The San Francisco Chronicle describes the complex as one of those “trophy” office spaces, thanks to its “sweeping views of San Francisco Bay.” Say what you will about the increasingly empty (but still pooped-covered!) city, but the Bay remains one of the most glorious sights in the country.
Ryan Lamont, a spokesperson for Google, said the company will be moving out of One Market’s Spear Tower, but will continue to occupy the smaller Landmark building. He declined to comment on how long Google plans to remain in the latter.
Translation: Google will not remain long in the latter. The company is consolidating its San Francisco offices into much less glamorous digs at 345 Spear St in the SoMa neighborhood.
Lamont also said, “We remain committed to our long-term presence in San Francisco,” but the trendline doesn’t look good. Developers Paramount and Blackstone just renegotiated their loan on the complex earlier this year, including a whopping $125 million payment on their maturing debt. “A market participant” told the Chronicle “that working out such a deal would have likely been more challenging had Google announced its exit at that time.”
Alphabet’s decision to close its One Market Plaza offices comes quickly on the heels of Visa’s decision to depart the same complex for the new Mission Rock development, also in SoMa.
These exits can’t just be about the costs since San Francisco has the country’s highest vacancy rate for office space. It isn’t even the crime, not really. It’s the growing loss of everything that makes people want to live and work downtown in a big city. It’s the point in the Doom Loop where it might be too late to turn back.
I’ve written here for a few years now that if the Bay Area ever manages to kill its golden goose, it won’t be because established giants like Alphabet, Apple, or Facebook pull up stakes, close their massive headquarters, and depart for fairer places. It will be because the innovative disruptors — the companies that will someday leave Alphabet, Apple, and Facebook on the ash heap of history — won’t be founded in the Bay Area.
The Next Big Thing instead will come out of Austin, Denver, or Tampa.
But Alphabet closing its One Market Plaza Google offices has me rethinking that premise. Is Mission Rock all that more desirable than the Financial District? Is Mountain View or Menlo Park or Cupertino that much better than San Francisco? They’re all in California, and California’s business climate is one of the most hostile in the union.
San Francisco might prove to be the Bay Area’s coal mine canary. And as the Bay Area’s fortunes swell and ebb, so do California’s.
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