Matt Winkler joins us, the founder of Bloomberg News way back in the day. He's got a calm that I've been waiting for him to write because I'm a huge fan of San Francisco, as I've said many times, and I'm sad that it's on some tough times and i haven't been there recently. But just kind of what you read and see and all that kind of stuff, Matt's got some analysis says, maybe it's not that bad. Matt, What did you find when you went out to San Francisco.
What are the numbers tell you about one of my great, great favorite cities, San Francisco.
So I have to thank my wonderful colleague, Sheen Pey for this, because we talked about San Francisco and what we decided to do and he did specifically is compare the ten largest companies publicly traded companies in the ten largest cities of America. And of course San Francisco is not one of the ten largest cities. It's number seventeen with a population of you know, maybe eight hundred and
fifty thousand. The ten companies that are publicly traded that are one to ten in San Francisco literally outperformed by employee growth and sales growth over five years, all the way through twenty twenty five, the top ten cities of America. So if things are bad in San Francisco, the business of San Francisco, the business people of San Francisco are thriving. And you can't, you know, have two narratives like that at the same time. Something has to give.
What are these companies hiring the people their.
Employee growth within the city limits in the city life. Yeah, yeah, totally outperformed Chicago, New York, Dallas, Houston, every city except, by the way, number two close, Number two is Los Angeles.
Okay, yeah, Well that's your moment, that's your bullish California callity and make it right.
And that's another column.
Yeah exactly.
But San Francisco is in fact a twenty first century economy as measured by the companies that it keeps. And I say keeps, I mean whether it's Visa, which is a financial company for Airbnb, or Salesforce to name three. Airbnb and Salesforce right now are outperforming their global peers in market capitalization, sales growth, employee growth.
What I know you spoke to the mayor of London. I'm sorry, the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed. I mean, he's been there since she's been there since twenty eighteen. So the good, the bad, and kind of where we're going.
Now, what does her outlook, Well, it's what you would expect it to be. She's bullish, I mean, and listen, London Breed is really exceptional in the sense that this is somebody who grew up literally in the worst part of San Francisco and was raised by her grandmother and is, you know, a success story in her own right. And when she talks about San Francisco, she's very confident because
guess who she talks to. She talks to the CEOs, and not a one of those ten companies that we're talking about have any intention of picking up and leaving. And the fact that they're out performing their peers in bigger cities coast to coast, north to south, east to west in the United States of America tells you something about San Francisco, which is probably why you like it so much.
I do, and commercial real estate talk to us about the vacancy there versus other cities, because it's it.
You've got vacancy rates that are maybe not as high as San Francisco, but close enough in lots of places, whether it's in Texas, whether it's in New York, whether it's in Illinois. You know, literally all across America, you've got coming out of COVID nineteen vacancy rates. Bloomberg News reported not too long ago that that trend actually has gone favorable in the sense that the worst is over
and there's a rebound underway. So you would expect by that way that to happen because more people were going to come back to work. Even at Bloomberg.
Yep, we're returned to office the owner.
The owner has already told us that, you know, it's going to be a four day week at least in the office.
And our San Francisco office is awesome, by the way, it's built on one of those piers out into the San Francisco Bay.
So again kudos Toorrow.
Well, you know, to that end. So I actually was there for a reporting trip I think twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. I had gone as a child, and then I would turn in early twenty twenty one, April twenty twenty one, I believe, and it was pretty sorry twenty twenty two. April twenty twenty two, it's pretty grim. You know, saw crime, saw overdose, you know, the whole nine yards. How you've spoken with London Breed. How does what's the path forward
from here? And does this really stand the potential? I mean, you see all these companies hiring and whatnot, But you know, what do the executives say about how they're you know, making people want to live in Francis.
Well, the executives are very confident about their businesses because they talk about them from quarter to quarter to analysts and their shareholders. But I think what's more meaningful? And London Breed did reference this is not too long ago. Last month, in fact, the what used to be called
the Grateful Dead had a concert in San Francisco. It was sold out, or was sold out one hundred and twenty thousand people over three days into downtown San Francisco, and everybody had a great time and it poured more than thirty million dollars into the San Francisco economy.
That's not a dystopia, right, Well, I mean, but do you see the change coming? I think there's specifically some rules about theft and burglaries resulting in misdemeanors rather than felonies, and this sort of encourages you.
Yeah, that's a California law law, and there are some moves to change the law. There's a California law that actually makes it too often you could say, a misdemeanor for breaking and entering or for burglary and theft, whereas in other cities it's easily a felony. Now that happens to be, if you like, an idiosyncrasy of California, and it's particularly a cue in San Francisco, but that can be changed. Actually, the crime rate in San Francisco violent
crime rate is way below most major cities. It's near the bottom actually among major cities. So that's a better indicator of really quality of life in San Francisco.
I think one of the challenges for the San Francisco and the Bay Area in general historically was the cost of housing, the cost of living. Is that where we in that regard now? Has there been an adjustment or is that just California.
Everybody, especially London Breed will be the ones to say they've hired more people over the years than they had housing for and that it needs to be that inequality needs to be rectified, and it's actually being led at the state level by the governor himself to create housing, particularly public housing, in lots of places that his historically have resisted it for local reasons, and the state is likely to circumvent those local restrictions once and for all
so that you can have a big increase in housing.
Well, lately, one of the stories I saw MATTT just corporate conferences. San Francisco has historically been a great conference down because it's such a great town. Even that's taken a knock over that.
Well, there's going to be an Asia Pacific Summit in San Francis. That's right, it's going to be a pretty big deal, and all the CEOs in San Francisco are going to be part of that Asia Pacific summit because those companies are very much part of the global and dare I say Asia Pacific economy.
Yeah, there's a stickiness to this and then maybe negativity around San Francis. I just got to feel like, you see this data coming back, you see some of this data, How long does it take to sink in?
Yeah, exactly. Well, all I know is there's a ton of engineers there and you always need engineers. Thanks so much for joining.
STT.
Winkler is the editor in chief emeritus and the founder of Bloomberg News. Greg Collums Shinpei his man there with all the data, and they bring it