The bleak trudge to post-pandemic recovery introduced us to phrases like “brain rot” and “doom-scrolling” to help put a name to our collective malaise. But while these phrases describe each person’s journey back to the optimism and drive of 2019, we struggled to put a name to the bleakness of our once-bustling office spaces.
The phrase “doom loop” starts appearing in media around the end of 2023, but the concept is a familiar one. In every decade, from Gold Rush ghost towns to the “urban blight” panics of the 1980s, doom loops start when the highest-earning employees of an urban core flee the area. When COVID sent Bay Area office workers back to their homes in Dublin and Tracy, they stopped spending at nearby restaurants, stores, and entertainment. Even essential businesses that were permitted to stay open couldn’t get enough foot traffic to sustain themselves. Empty spaces easily fall into disrepair and create the boarded-up, graffiti’d-over façade that encourages visitors to drive past rather than linger and spend.
And so, the cycle goes: empty buildings lead to fewer customers, lead to fewer businesses, lead to deserted landscapes, lead to fewer customers, lead to fewer businesses…until a once-thriving city center is now a set piece for the next season of The Last of Us.
It’s tempting to write off San Francisco’s downtown as a relic of a butts-in-seats culture long gone. Why not cut our losses and lean into the development of Oakland and Alameda? These big, bulky office buildings don’t pencil into adaptive reuse for housing easily, and to raze them and start fresh is a pricey and protracted process.
To that we say the doom loop is making you too dizzy to see the future.
To build downtown urban spaces with the vitality and value we see in up-and-coming areas like Mountain View, we will have to commit significant time and capital expense. But the upward spiral that results not only reverses the damage of the doom loop, it scales upward into huge returns long into the future for developers and businesses willing to invest.
Across California and the United States, urban cores are finally picking up on the “15-minute city” that many European cities have enjoyed from pre-car life to today. Integrated housing, workspaces, entertainment, schools, and gathering opportunities all within a 15-minute walk create city centers that are sustainable long into the future.
Integrating business space into housing and work communities provides more options for people to work while incurring fewer costs for companies previously chained to a large central office. Instead of forcing suburban to urban commutes via return-to-office mandates, the 15-minute city provides quality housing within walking or short transit distance to work. Workers also get the option of walking to a local business to work — increasing employee satisfaction, stimulating the local economy, and costing their employer nothing. Refocusing workspace needs on providing the resources for work that truly cannot be done remotely — advanced technology labs, team connection-building, hosting events — allows for a more efficient use of real estate and creates opportunities to create truly unique spaces that reflect a firm’s values instead of endless seas of individual desks.
This is where the author reveals their bias. We’re CoBUILD Construction Services, a general contractor and consultant that specializes in spaces just like those we describe above. Would we benefit from the Bay Area going all-in on the 15-minute city concept? Absolutely, especially because we’d rather live in the city we describe above than one retreating into a doom loop. Our mission is to create environments for people to succeed. Right now, the car-centric urban core with a sky obscured by empty high-rises is only successful in draining developers’ pockets and wasting those gorgeous Bay views.
If you’re tired of watching investments languish and doom loops, well, loop, consider bringing a consultant contractor with expertise in adaptive reuse and creative value engineering into your space to see how it can reverse course into an upward spiral. There’s two things San Francisco will never lose: its rich history and its huge potential.
