It's looking like all of San Francisco's past sins are about to come back and haunt them.
Like much of California, The City has first and foremost been all about real estate speculation. And secondly, the region's economy was about the Tech sector. Specifically, speculation in high-tech.
This has worked since the late 1970's, but like all good things they are coming to an end.

Experts say post-pandemic woes stemming from office workers staying home instead of commuting into the city could send San Francisco into a “doom loop” that would gut its tax base, decimate fare-reliant regional transit systems like BART and trap it in an economic death spiral.

Who could have predicted such a fate?
Anyone who paid attention to what happened in New York after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

New York made an enormous investment in order to stave off the disaster of a financial district that lacked people (for now).

The tragedy of 9/11 inadvertently revealed the glaring vulnerabilities and inadequacies of office-dependent, 9-to-5 business districts — and created a new model for making American downtowns more stable economic engines for local governments and fostering better, more compelling urban life.
Unfortunately, San Francisco didn’t get the memo.

Don't get me wrong - this is going to effect lots of other cities. It's just that San Francisco is the worst off. Despite New York's investment, they are still in bad shape. Los Angeles is even worse off. Miami and several major Texas cities should also be aware.

Interconnected forces trap the city in economic free fall: Workers remain primarily remote; office space sits empty; businesses shutter; mass transit is sharply reduced or even bankrupt, making it even harder for low- and middle-wage workers who enable restaurants and small businesses to operate, causing major budget shortfalls from declining tax revenue that imperil numerous city services, trigger mass layoffs of city workers and shred the social safety net, all of which causes more people to leave.

While The City seems to be at the center of the doom loop, California is general also has serious issues.

Thousands of Californians have been laid off in the last few months, the cost of living is increasingly astronomical, and Gov. Gavin Newsom revealed in January that the state faced a $22.5 billion deficit in the 2023-24 fiscal year — a plummet from the $100 billion surplus a year ago.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, plus the collapse in cryptocurrencies and the infrastructure around it has led the crash.

In California alone, employment in the information sector, a category that includes technology and entertainment workers, declined by more than 16,000 from November to February, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which predates a recent wave of job cuts in March.

Here's some numbers to give you an idea of how bad things could get.
350 California is a 25-story office building, that is 75% empty.
It just sold for $60 million, after previously selling for over $200 million pre-pandemic.
Two of the largest hotels in San Francisco just defaulted on their debts.
The largest downtown mall, by far, defaulted on their debts just yesterday.

Back in February 2021, we reported that Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), the largest property REIT in Europe, had announced that it would dump all its 27 Westfield malls in the US, of which 16 were in California, including the Westfield San Francisco Center.
..When Nordstrom announced that it would close the two stores in San Francisco, Westfield blamed in part “unsafe conditions” and “lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity.”

In reality, ecommerce and retail executives’ inability to figure out how to compete with ecommerce have been the real enemy that has been killing mall after mall. Neither Nordstrom nor Westfield blamed their own executives and ecommerce for the failures across the US. They blamed San Francisco, which stimulates the braindead media circus that covers up their own failures.

I was just in that mall yesterday. It was full of people, mostly tourists. The idea of lack of law enforcement is laughable. There was probably 20 officers near the front entrance.
Of course, the real immediate problem here is rising interest rates. And this goes well beyond just downtown malls and office buildings.

The largest apartment landlord in San Francisco, Veritas Investments, is facing the loss of more than a third of its multifamily portfolio in the city as its lenders seek to offload $1B in loans that are in default.

Eastdil Secured is marketing the unpaid mortgage loans, which are backed by 95 apartment buildings in San Francisco encompassing 2,452 units and 45 ground-floor commercial storefronts, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Am I thinking about getting out of San Francisco? Yeh!
In fact, after my health scare earlier this year, plus the totally inadequate response from my health care provider, I'm looking strongly at retiring overseas, and giving this dumpster-fire of a nation my backside.