As we outlined earlier this week, the amount of vacant office space in San Francisco has just hit a new pandemic high of 19.9 million square feet.
For context, the 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce/Transbay tower at First and Mission, which is the tallest building in San Francisco, contains 1.35 million square feet of office space spread across 59 floors. And employing the framework we introduced back in 2020, there is now 14.7 Salesforce Towers or 869 Salesforce Tower floors worth of empty office space spread across San Francisco, which is roughly enough space to accommodate between 114,000 employees, based on an average, pre-Covid density or 153,000 (a la twitter) worker bees.
And once again, while tempting to see or promote an opportunity to convert all the vacant office space into housing in a response to San Francisco’s housing woes, the conversion of existing office space to residential use currently makes no economic sense for the vast majority of downtown San Francisco buildings, due to the relative value of each use and the cost of conversion.
