San Francisco, California, remains the slowest among 63 major U.S. cities in recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, according to mobile phone data.
The new data from the University of Toronto’s School of Cities repeats a finding from early 2023, when San Francisco was last among 62 cities.
The recovery index is “computed by counting the number of unique mobile phones in a city’s downtown area in the specified time period, and then dividing it by the number of unique visitors during the equivalent time period in 2019. For example, the March 2023 – May 2023 time period is compared to the March 2019 – May 2019 time period,” the study explains.
“A recovery metric greater than 100% means that for the selected inputs, the mobile device activity increased relative to the comparison period. A value less than 100% means the opposite, that the city’s downtown has not recovered to pre-COVID activity levels.”
San Francisco scored a paltry 32%. Salt Lake City, Utah, by contrast, scored 139%, meaning that its downtown has actually expanded since before the pandemic.
Two interior California cities’ downtown areas — Fresno and Bakersfield — had also expanded in terms of mobile phone traffic. But Los Angeles stood at just 63% of pre-pandemic downtown mobile traffic.
New York City measured 67%, and Chicago measured 52%.
Pandemic restrictions, combined with a shift to work-from-home in the tech sector, plus rising crime and homelessness, are all factors contributing to San Francisco’s malaise.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.