On the surface, San Francisco still looks like a vibrant city, with visitors still riding the cable cars, taking San Francisco tours, and enjoying the sightseeing attractions for which the city is famous, but the crowds are no longer crowds, but rather pods here and there. While the economic recession came to San Francisco later than a lot of other cities, it has finally arrived in full. The city was buoyed until very late in 2008 by international visitors, for pleasure and business, but the worldwide recession has now curtailed those travels as well. The city is now feeling the dramatic impact of the recession in the local economy through not only tourism, but also business travel, construction, financial services, and the technology sector.
The trade shows and conventions are booked years in advance so while almost all of such events will come to fruition, the numbers of attendees having attended or planning to attend indicates a reduction trend. Large companies feel the need to make dramatic spending cuts wherever possible so that they don’t appear to be spending wastefully, and small companies can elect to opt out entirely. The technology sector which managed well for some time into the downturn has also seen sales drop and layoffs initiated. Venture capital funding has slowed to a trickle.
San Francisco’s real estate was expensive enough that only the affluent were buying homes in the city and to a great extent, the real estate implosion which affected much of the rest of the nation, San Francisco managed to avoid. But once the nation’s mortgage market wreaked its havoc through the banking and financial sectors, there was no way for San Francisco to avoid a downturn entirely.
But while San Francisco has now been dragged down along with the nation as a whole, the city is rather affluent and the citizens are well educated, ranking amongst the top US cities for percentages of college graduates and as a result, the prospects for its resiliency are good. The city’s economic infrastructure possesses sound fundamentals – more than most other US cities – and with such, the local officials are reasonably optimistic that San Francisco can return to economic prosperity as quickly as the conditions will allow.
San Francisco has survived earlier downturns, from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the dot-com crash of 2001, when the Internet bubble collapsed and many companies disappeared. A century ago, the city was almost leveled by a great earthquake and fire. It bounced back fairly quickly, and people here say San Francisco today remains resilient.
