San Francisco has lost tens of thousands of jobs since December, the City Controller’s Office reported April 1.
The city lost 21,000 jobs between December and February, which the controller’s office said was mostly the result of businesses no longer needing temporary positions for the holiday season.
According to the controller, remaining job losses were mainly in the tech industry, where layoffs are ongoing. Other sectors impacted, in addition to retail and tech, was the hospitality industry.
As a result, the city’s unemployment rate rose to 3.8 percent in February, the office reported.
The losses, the controller said, were “greater than expected,” particularly in tech and other office industries.
Since the start of the pandemic, many industries—especially tech—transitioned to remote work, leaving numerous buildings in the city unoccupied. Although the city has been encouraging people to return to the office, the occupancy rate is recovering at a much slower rate than expected.
Some suggest such could be attributed to the city’s rapidly increasing crime rate.
“There has been a mass exodus of residents and businesses out of the city during the last couple of years, due to high crime, rampant homelessness, no-bail laws, and minimal criminal prosecutions,” Joseph J. Ori, executive managing director of Paramount Capital Corporation—a real estate investment and advisory firm based in the Bay Area—told The Epoch Times earlier in an interview.
“Many of the store and business closures are the result of employees not wanting to live in or travel to the city to work because of the crime safety issues,” Mr. Ori said.
As the holiday season ended, the city’s tourism also saw a significant decline in February, with monthly hotel revenue falling to 65 percent of the normal level, according to the controller’s office. While New York and Seattle, included in the controller’s report also saw decreases in hotel revenue, neither was as significant as San Francisco’s.
However, Los Angeles and San Diego both experienced an increase in hotel revenue in January and February, the report said.
The city has also reported a rise in metro ridership to 64 percent of the 2019 level and an increase in Bay Area Rapid Transit downtown ridership to nearly 35 percent of pre-pandemic levels, the controller’s report said.
