LA, San Francisco lead California business reopening pace

“It seems as if people are coming back,” she said. “They’re excited to be having lunch with colleagues again.”

Fear of catching the virus prompted a huge drop in mass transit ridership. But Jason Alderman said he felt like a kid on his first day of school when he took a commuter train into San Francisco when his company reopened its headquarters in late March.

“Instead of feeling like a hollowed-out ghost town that people had quickly abandoned, it felt like there were green shoots of life,” he said. “I felt a twinge of the energy that used to be there.”

When the lockdown order came, an estimated 137,500 workers for San Francisco companies that include Google, Facebook and Uber, seemingly vanished overnight.

Moving vans carted off households for roomier suburban homes and younger people simply packed up their cars and left since they could work from anywhere. Residential rents plummeted, but now are climbing.

The office vacancy rate in San Francisco is 18% compared with 10% a year earlier, said John Chang, senior vice president at Marcus & Millichap, a commercial real estate financing and advisory company. In Los Angeles, vacancies are at 17.5%, up from 13.5% a year earlier.

More telling, perhaps, is that only 14% of key cards are being used to enter offices in San Francisco, compared with 24% in LA. At the other end of the spectrum is Dallas, where data showed 41% of cards being used, reflecting the different approaches to the virus in the two states.