The Reinvention of Downtown San Francisco Part 3

Voices of the Community

“I think the, first one that stood out to me is unlike some other cities, the San Francisco city government, is not pushing for these downtown office to housing conversions”- Sarah Wright

This is part three of our three episodes exploring how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting San Francisco's downtown neighborhood and economy along with the efforts to address the issues in the reinvention of downtown San Francisco. As downtown San Francisco continues to struggle to come back from the Covid-19 pandemic one of the ideas that is being discussed is to convert office buildings into housing to address San Francisco’s decades long affordable housing crisis.

We wanted to dig deeper into this idea of converting offices into housing and explore all of the issues of making this happen in San Francisco along with examples of other cities who have actually converted offices to housing. Our guests also tell us about the State of California’s pressure on San Francisco’s government to build more housing since according to California’s Department of Housing and Community Development, San Francisco is the slowest jurisdiction in the state to move housing projects to construction.

In this episode we feature the voices of two local reporters Sarah Wright and Kevin Truong from the San Francisco Standard who have done in-depth reporting on the office to housing conversion along with issues facing our housing, and business sectors.

To read Sarah Wright’s reporting on housing and transportation please go to sf standard dot com / author / sarah-wright/

And to read Kevin Truong’s reporting on both business and recovery policy please go to sf standard dot com / author / kevin-truong/

To hear part one of our three stories on downtown San Francisco which featured the voices of Christ Wright from Advance SF and Jeff Bellisario from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute please listen to episode 95 . And to hear part two of the series which features the voices of Noah Arroyo from the San Francisco Chronicle and Anna Tong from The San Francisco Standard please listen to episode 98

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