Episode 99: The Reinvention of Downtown San Francisco Part 3

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The San Francisco Standard downtown San Francisco coverage

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“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.

Sarah Wright

Sarah is a housing and transportation reporter at The San Francisco Standard. She has worked as a local journalist in Washington, D.C., and in Half Moon Bay, where she served as the Half Moon Bay Review's first deputy editor, covering the COVID-19 pandemic response and the biggest wildfire in a century in San Mateo County. Originally from Lake Tahoe, Sarah is an avid outdoorswoman and now lives in the Inner Richmond. Sarah can be reached at sarah@sfstandard.com. More on Sarah’s reporting

Kevin Truong

Kevin Truong is a reporter with The San Francisco Standard with a focus on small business policy and the economic recovery. Prior to joining the publication, he was a reporter and editor at the San Francisco Business Times where he covered commercial real estate, biotech and the innovation economy. His journalism has won recognition from the California News Publishers Association and the San Francisco Press Club. A proud graduate of UCLA, Kevin cut his teeth at the Daily Bruin student newspaper and news organizations like the Christian Science Monitor, NBC Los Angeles and Marketplace, before making his way north to The City by the Bay. More on Kevin’s reporting

The San Francisco Standard

The San Francisco Standard is a news organization serving everyone with a stake in the future of San Francisco. We aim to build the city’s most trusted, authoritative and contemporary source of news and information, meeting you where you are to help you “Know Your City.”

We are an independent, for-profit company, with initial funding provided by Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital. We believe great local journalism is crucial to helping cities work better. Our newsroom operates with full autonomy and our Editor in Chief retains authority over all editorial decision-making. We’re committed to the highest ethical standards, as described in the Ethics and Standards Policy that you can read below.

We believe in open, direct communications, both in our journalism and in our relationships with our readers and viewers. We welcome feedback of all types. We will surely make mistakes, and we promise to address errors promptly. We’re a small but fast-growing team–mostly reporters, editors and videographers– working out of an office in the Mission District. Please subscribe to our daily newsletter, and you can also find us here and on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms. You can subscribe to The San Francisco Standard here

Videos

For More Insights into converting Office Space into Housing please watch this very informative webinar from SPUR and APA Northern California which features developers who discuss the realities of converting office space into housing

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“Right now we’re, sort of wanting to, I would call right size our downtown. So make sure that we have, the amount of housing, the amount of commercial space, the amount of retail that makes sense, for whatever the post pandemic future will look like”

— Kevin Truong,Business & Policy Reporter,The San Francisco Standard

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