As the Bay Area’s three major urban centers — San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco — struggle to rebound from the lingering effects of a pandemic that emptied their downtowns, the one place most often overlooked for its vibrancy is, in fact, the one that has managed to bounce back the quickest.
That would be San Jose.
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Not that San Jose ever likes to be compared to San Francisco — San Joseans still bristle when old timers refer to San Francisco as “the city.” But this time, the recovery in downtown San Jose and its main Santa Clara Street corridor have blown away the famed “city by the bay.”
“You never thought Santa Clara Street would be a lot livelier than the streets of downtown San Francisco, but it is, oh, much more so,” said Mark Ritchie of Ritchie Commercial real estate, which has offices in San Jose and San Francisco and spends time in each.
Downtown San Jose has restored some 90% of its foot traffic compared to the prepandemic days of 2019 — with a spike in December to nearly 100%, according to cell phone tracking data compiled by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, a think tank that studies the region. Downtown Oakland, despite its monumental problems, is back to 74% of its prepandemic street activity. San Francisco’s downtown, meanwhile, has fared the worst by the same metric. It’s downtown foot traffic regained just 59% through March.
Granted, San Jose’s downtown is much smaller than San Francisco’s and Oakland’s. With office space in San Jose of about 10 million square feet compared to San Francisco’s 80 million and Oakland’s 35 million, it didn’t have as far to climb.
All three cities are still enduring epic office vacancies: San Francisco at 36%, San Jose at nearly 31% and Oakland at 23%, Bay Area Council data shows. And all are facing enormous budget shortfalls that constrain their ability to solve some of their most entrenched problems.
Even so, “we’re optimistic about all three cities,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
With two new mayors in office, Daniel Lurie in San Francisco and Barbara Lee in Oakland, and San Jose’s Matt Mahan serving his first full term, he said, “there’s new energy.”
Each mayor has a strategy, including converting empty offices to apartments in San Francisco, improving public safety in Oakland, and bringing more sports and entertainment to San Jose.
And each city has its own story.
San Jose
San Jose has been doing something right.
Despite the lack of office workers during the day, San Jose has come alive again after 5 p.m., with dining and entertainment offerings on nights and weekends. The construction of residential high rises downtown over the past decade is also paying off in street activity now.
Hope Reeves, a food runner at The Pressroom, a new restaurant in downtown San Jose, carries food on June 26, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
The headquarters for Adobe and Zoom are downtown, and NVIDIA’s March convention here brought in more than 25,000 people, one of the largest conventions the city has hosted since the pandemic. The city is trying to lure more business downtown with offers of zero business tax and free parking for two years for signing new leases, and offering cash incentives for artificial intelligence startups to locate here.
They are all building blocks for an invigorated downtown. But so far, nothing comes close to the momentum from 2019, when San Jose was poised for a liftoff that never happened. Google’s grand plans to build a “Downtown West” mega campus that city leaders hoped would flood downtown streets with activity were put on hold indefinitely — another setback for a downtown that has yet to realize its promise. Like Oakland and San Francisco, San Jose still struggles with homelessness and a lack of affordable housing.
But Mahan is leaning into the goal of reinventing the downtown as a major sports and entertainment hub. He’s floating the idea of a new downtown stadium for the San Jose Earthquakes, and is close to finalizing a lease extension with the San Jose Sharks, keeping them here until 2050. To encourage the 1.5 million Sharks fans and other SAP patrons each year to dine downtown before and after events, the city plans to enliven walking paths with art and a teal stripe connecting the restaurants and bars in San Pedro Square as well as Little Italy to SAP Center. To keep downtown streets clean and welcoming, the City Council passed an ordinance banning people from sleeping on downtown sidewalks from 8 a.m. to midnight.
Next year, when the Super Bowl and the FIFA World Cup come to the region, bringing thousands of football and soccer fans to the city, Mahan said, “we’re going to do concerts, watch parties, Night Market, drone shows, and get significantly more people coming downtown and having unique experiences and maybe rediscovering their downtown.”
That’s all good news for David Mulvehill, a partner in five downtown restaurants and bars who just opened The Pressroom and Bar Mercury in March. The downtown has come a long way from two decades ago, he said, when he started as a bartender at O’Flaherty’s Irish Pub in San Pedro Square and asked proprietor Ray O’Flaherty why downtown San Jose, a city with 1 million people, was so dead on a Friday night.
“It’s like a bar with no beer,” O’Flaherty told him, in an Irish brogue like Mulvehill’s own.
Looking out at his new restaurant, lively with a mix of patrons nearly every night of the week, Mulvehill doesn’t view downtown that way anymore — even without a new Google campus.
David Mulvehill, a partner in four downtown restaurants and bars who just opened The Pressroom and Bar Mercury in March on June 26, 2025, in Bar Mercury in downtown San Jose. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
“People are coming in for a drink or happy hour or brunch,” he said, “This is what all cities look like, you know? Now, it’s like a real downtown.”
Oakland
Over the past year, overall crime has dipped in Oakland. But the crime rate remains so staggeringly high — with a spike in downtown homicides in May — that it continues to scare off workers, visitors and potential employers. Through the end of 2024, Oakland’s crime rate was more than double San Francisco’s and three times San Jose’s. Over the past five tears, Oakland has lost three major league sports franchises and the city’s image wasn’t helped when former Mayor Sheng Thao was indicted on bribery charges involving a local recycling company.
Oakland’s crime, the perception of crime and memories of it have led to an astonishing phenomenon in downtown Oakland’s Chinatown. On nearly every block, storefronts are boarded up — most since the window-smashing days of the 2020 George Floyd protests — yet they remain open for business. Shopkeepers have simply cut out holes for the front doors to let in customers. At night, they slide metal security gates.
Store owners say they have noticed the drop in crime from the days in 2023 when the neighborhood experienced upwards of three holdups or break-ins a day. But they have refused to remove the boards — most layered with five years worth of graffiti — even when the Chamber of Commerce offered them $500 to take them down.
At King of Grocery on 8th Street, owner Sue Wang has become so inured to the boards covering her storefront windows that she nailed up a roll of plastic bags for customers to grab and fill with produce she pulls onto the sidewalk each morning.
“I’m happy to take them down if I feel more comfortable that nothing could happen to my business,” Wang said. “I’m not ready.”
Mayor Barbara Lee, the former congresswoman newly elected in May to replace the ousted former mayor, has been meeting with the CEOs of the city’s 10 biggest employers, which include Kaiser Permanente, Clorox and Delta Dental, to discuss partnerships to improve the city’s economy and increase public safety. Those companies helped fund a Bay Area Council study on Oakland’s woe’s and how to solve them. The answer? Invest in public safety.
Newly elected Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee mingles with attendees after being sworn in at City Hall in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, May 19, 2025. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
In an email, Lee said she’s planning to bring “urgency, honesty, and collaboration” to the city.
“We’re not going to fix downtown overnight, but I’m focused on getting the basics right — safety, clean streets, clear permitting, and better city presence,” she said. “That’s how we support small businesses and rebuild trust.”
The city is facing a $245 million budget shortfall, so resources to fulfill her vision are tight.
“If you look at its financial situation, you’d say there’s a ‘doom and gloom’ scenario here,” said Bellisario, who co-authored the Bay Area Council report on Oakland. “But you have a lot of people very much invested in the future success, which gives us hope that when we find those solutions, there’s someone to invest in them.”
Home of Chicken and Waffles owner Derreck Johnson looks on from his new location in the Jack London district of Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Derreck Johnson is one of them. Owner of Home of Chicken and Waffles in Jack London Square, he is planning to buy the building that houses his restaurant. The drop in crime and the new mayor are giving him hope.
“We need the region, the Bay Area, to have trust in our city again,” Johnson said.
San Francisco
Before Mayor Lurie was elected in November, frame shop owner Tamara Freedman said San Francisco “felt like it was going to explode.”
For several years, her business’s neighborhood south of Market Street had been featured on the national news as ground zero for tent encampments and overdosing vagrants. She was so aggravated after stumbling over drugged out people getting into her front door each morning, she supported the 2022 recall of then-district attorney Chesa Boudin, telling this news organization at the time, “I guess I’m not as liberal as I thought.”
That sentiment, and her vote, also helped usher in the business-minded Lurie last fall, who promised to clean up the streets, improve public safety and bring vitality back to downtown. A major initiative creates a downtown financing district to make it easier and cheaper to convert vacant office buildings downtown to housing — bringing more foot traffic to an area that even in boom times empties out at night.
“Before, it was just about office space, and now it’s got to be about culture,” Lurie said during a recent news conference touting a family housing project. “It’s got to be about restaurants. It’s got to be about bringing tourists back and conventions back and and by all indicators, we are seeing improvement year over year, from last year to this year. We have a long way to go, but it’s why we’re focused on clean and safe streets being open to business.”
After four years of entrenched problems — workers staying home, homelessness and crime scaring off shoppers and leading to the closures of Nordstrom on Market Street and the announced sale of Macy’s Union Square — it’s a tall order.
Sujata Srivastava, chief policy officer for the think tank SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, that advises the region’s governments, said the key to revitalizing post-pandemic downtowns is to diversify.
“You need to have a different mix of uses and not be so dependent on the office,” she said. For several years, San Francisco’s “Vacant to Vibrant” program has added pop-up retail stores on the ground floors of vacant buildings.
San Francisco’s worst days may be behind it, said Bellisario of the Bay Area Council. The city appears to have hit rock bottom at the end of 2024 with commercial real estate prices hitting a new low. But with the burgeoning AI industry leasing up property in San Francisco (as well as north San Jose), “the story there has moved from doom loop to what is the next boom?” Bellisario said.
Freedman’s street was cleaned up in the waning months of former Mayor London Breed’s term with the help of a nonprofit. But she believes the new mayor has “created a healthier, more positive feeling about San Francisco” that is making a difference.
“Everybody feels better in general,” Freedman said. “It’s quieter now, like the tension has died down.”