Hello, Stephanomics. Here the podcast that brings you the global economy. This week, we have a Tale of Three Cities, which is also a tale about winning and losing in a world economy in flux, and why sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference. Take San Francisco. It looks for all the world like a loser from post COVID work habits, A big chunk of its workforce hasn't returned to the city center and financially and socially its entire straits.
But the San Francisco area is also at the center of the global AI boom from for large parts of the US tech fraternity, really the only part of the world you'd want to live. So it's complicated. California Bureau chief Karen Breslo and Bloomberg opinion columnists Justin Fox are going to help me make sense of it all in
a few minutes. We also have a great piece from Seen Asia economy reporter and Michelle jam Risco in Singapore, a city that has benefited enormously from the economic and political shifts of the past few years, but where long term residents now struggle to afford a drink. But we're going to start with a cautionary tale from Dubai, which on paper at least looks like one of the big winners from the invasion of Ukraine last year and all
the geopolitical events that have unfolded since then. But if you're living in Dubai, there's definitely been some downsides to this influx of people and wealth that's followed that invasion. I'm going to have a quick chat with Manus Cranny, distinguished longtime anchor for Bloomberg who's been based in Dubai for a while. Manus, thanks for joining us. I guess I should start by just asking you to paint a
bit of a picture. I have been there a couple of times in the last year, and I can certainly see people complaining about there being no Rolex shot watches left in the stores because of the Russians arriving. But you know what's it been like to be there.
High class Problemsphanie, And there are many.
I mean, I can tell you there was a palpable change in this city how we live, what we spent to live, how we get around in the past year,
year and a half. And this acceleration began before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in terms of rent prices, congestion tough to get an uber price gouging by uber Why, Stephanie, Because post COVID you saw this huge influx of not just you know, Russian emigrats, but wealthy Europeans beginning to look at the value differential per square foot here in Dubai relative to the Cortezu, relative to Paris, relative to Berlin,
and relative to London. And it began to offer them a glimpse of six months of the year where you could live in beautiful weather from October through to the end of March, and you could get yourself a million dollar pad, which you just couldn't buy in any of those cities on the beach overlooking the Marina. And suddenly people began to look at this city in a very different way. And then the Russians came, and my gosh, it just exploded.
And of course the main thing people talk about is rent. And you should tell us you had your own experience with a rent increase which you helped to go viral.
Yeah, I got a rent review through They asked me for fifty two percent increase year on year, to which I went what you know, fifty two percent. So I got on LinkedIn Welcome.
To my home.
So to understand inflation is to understand the rent increase that I've just been sent. My landlord wants to raise my rent by fifty six percent.
Yeah, fifty six.
And I talked about this is what happens when cities get greedy and landlords get greed.
You want to understand the definition of greed, then that is the very personification of it.
And all I can say is.
You know, the implosion of an economy and a city.
Is driven by the lunacy that is greed. I'm really rather vexed.
One could say, now through I wouldn't say any great negotiation skills, but I would say through you know, blunt hammer approach. I ended up offering thirty two percent of a rent increase, and they accepted that they wanted to keep me as a long term tenant. We tooed and throwed over a couple of prices, but I chose to pay the extra because this stock and inventory of equivalent properties available in the area where I want to live was very, very limited. And I should add I, Stephanie,
you know where the office is here. We're in the heart of the DIFC, the heart of Dubai Financial District, and I live very close. I'm very privileged to live four minutes away in an uber and a fifteen minute walk.
Yes, I walk home from work.
It's when it's not but it's good five degrees heat. But yeah, you have to keep that, keep that quiet because everyone else living in big cities will hate you for that four minute commute. But I have heard some horror stories about rent. I mean, is this was this typical of the experience of other people, friends of yours, colleagues in Dubai.
I got away lightly, if you can call a thirty two percent hike getting away lightly. Lots of friends have been through different scenarios. One, you're giving a notice to quit because the landlord says we're going to come back in and live in the property.
They don't. They simply get you to vacate.
They are then able to raise the rent by an even bigger proportion. The second thing that they do is think of Dubai as a concentric circle, Stephanie. Inside the middle, there's the DIFC where there is no rent regulation and
what soever. And then you go outside of that and you have a whole other area of Dubai, which is ruled by a regulatory boldery called rerop so me the tenant can go to the regulatory body challenge the rent rise and to a certain extent it will be enforced because do Bai still want people to come from London, from Madrid, from all around Europe and the United States
of America, so they're conscious of this housing costs. And I got quite a few calls and responses to the video that I put on LinkedIn in terms of, you know, just an.
Overall response from a variety of levels of organizations in the city.
We're going to talk more broadly in this show about the way that cities have handled economic success and the problems it can sow for the future if you don't handle it well. I mean, housing comes very high on the list if you start to make it difficult for people to not right at the upper end of the income scale, to live comfortable in that city. When we think of Dubai, we think of construction and you know, building, apartment buildings and other things going up very quickly. Is
it something that they're responding to effectively? Do you think this? Are they handling this success well?
I think they are even shot by the level of success that they have had. And in terms of the risk, the risk is this is that you price on the very sort of typical expatriate family that might come to live here, or you know, the kind of construct to parents and a couple of kids.
I'm just looking at some stats.
The average rent for a villa, a family home jump by twenty six percent last year. That's eighty thousand dollars. Okay, that's called in Cbori. The average apartment rent went up by twenty eight percent. They are conscious they need to deliver more supply, and that supply is coming like they have a bit of a desert that they can build into. So they are extending the growth of Dubai in a
variety of directions, both along the coastline. And there's some big prime projects coming on board there that were perhaps you know, dumped in the post financial crisis, and they are building lots of smaller family units, smaller apartments which are affordable. It just means you need to move further out. You won't get a four minute commute. You move further right, you can get a consider you can get a less rent.
I don't know.
About considerably less rent, but you can get a much more competitive rent in a lot of various Let's say family constructs apartment constructs around the periphery of the city, and that is the growth of a city, isn't it. The question is the infrastructure is that there to support that? And that's perhaps the bit that's lagging.
And I'm sure your colleagues of Bloomberg will be delighted for you having given chapter and verse to senior management at Bloomberg on why they need a bigger pay rise at the end of this year. I'm going to let you go in a minute manage, but I know you're about to relocate to New York. Do you think it's going to be any better there?
Seventy? I guess it is.
I've done a lot of steps in New York last week, fourteen to fifteen thousand steps a day, So, first of all, to give you some perspective, and very fortunate, I live in about fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred square feet.
Somebody said to me, which part of this is not going to happened?
Yeah? Which part of this trade? Have I given great thought to? Forty percent tax?
To pay fifty percent more rent to live in fifty percent smaller apartment. It's not quite as drastic as that, but I can tell you, having walked around a lot of property in New York last week, I'm going to be living in a heck of a smaller apartment, and I reckon, I'm going to be up another fifteen percent to live in fifty percent smaller apartment.
Well, you did have it relatively easy for a few years, as you've admitted, But thank you very much, Betters. And you've you've introduced actually something which we're going to be talking about now, which is, you know, maybe a city that's a bit further down this road and actually is not making it easy for middle class, ordinary families to live.
Because people aren't just rich, they're crazy rich. And you really should have told me that you're like the principal Inamodesia.
That's ridiculous.
That's more of a Harry.
When the international blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians was released in twenty eighteen, Singapore's Prime Minister Lisia and Lune laughed at the impression the movie brought on the city state.
Crazy Rich Asians have nothing to do with us. We don't live like that, and I think it'd be disastrous that Singapore has got the idea that that is the way we ought to live.
Well, that kind of jinxed it five years in one global pandemic later, a huge influx of wealth, a lot of it from China, has made Singapore a playground for the rich and crazy expensive for everyone else. Singapore's core inflation is April held firm at five.
Thought has been ranked the most expensive city to live.
In over and over and over again.
Every day is expensive cars, housing, I think four is also rising in con.
Berries and I was it there so much as property costs in Singpole like one million.
Five bedroom house four hundred and eight million dollars.
You can see the stresses, especially in rents.
Yes, I mean the rental market was still continuing its crazy upward spiral from the beginning of the year.
Juliette Standard of City prop Property, who's been a Singapore real estate agent for twenty three years, It's seen a.
Lot of experts coming in from Hong Kong and a lot of mainland Chinese coming in from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and a lot of locals still were having to rent.
What did ch.
As Chinese President Xijingping PUSH's common prosperity at home. The most prosperous Chinese are looking to protect their cash. They're pouring it into assets beyond their borders, and that accelerated with the end of China's COVID zero policies and resumption of travel. A lot of that money has ended up
here in Singapore. The number of family investment offices nearly tripled over the past two years, and just recently the city climbed ranks into the top five most expensive cities in the world and the most expensive for luxury living by some estimates. Unlike other major cities, rents didn't drop in the COVID era, They've only gotten worse. One measure shows condo rents surge more than thirty percent in the first quarter compared to the same period a year earlier.
That's the fastest pace in fifteen years. Expiring leases has become a source of stress, as it's not uncommon for landlords to demand double or more upon renewal. Under the pressure, real estate agents are seeing an outflow, especially of middle class foreigners who simply can't afford Singapore anymore.
So there's been a lot of remigration out of Singapore back to other parts of Asia. Specifically, a lot of Hong Kong expats who came in last year, quite a few kind of number are going back to Hong Kong because they're kind of comparing the prices with Hong Kong prices and you know, there's actually not much difference now. And then there's a lot of people who are leaving Singapore and going to places like Bali or jb or Vietnam,
Thailand because it's so much cheaper. So you know, there's a lot of people who are rethinking their plans and having to leave Singapore.
Now.
It's not just the housing market getting squeezed. The food and beverage industry aka Singapore's pride and joy is also seeing a hallowing out in the middle market. Michelin Star chef Michael Wilson told me that he added a steak entree to his menu for eighty eight SEEING dollars or about sixty six US dollars, just to test the range of prices customers were willing to pay. That's more than twice the cost of any other entree he had on offer. In the first weekend on the menu, they ran out
of steaks. Besides the influx of new cash. The government's labor policies aren't helping either. In twenty twenty one, Singapore tightened hiring quotas, limiting foreigners to thirty five percent or less of staff and services jobs. This year, they raised the minimum salaries for local employees and food and beverage rolls. Michael Callahan is the owner of Barbary Coast Bar. He told me this is all making for a very complicated calculus.
As we're seeing actually where we saw the inability to afford new staff, now we're seeing the inability to retain our current staff.
A lot of restaurant owners said, the quotas for hiring locals, we're making it unwise to hire foreign workers at all, because when one local staffer quits, the resulting ratio could make them ineligible to stay open. Callahan warns that too many in the industry will break under the pressure and raise menu prices that will force restaurants to cater to an even wealthier, more niche clientele.
When you get to the point that you're charging twenty eight twenty nine thirty dollars a cocktail, there isn't a lot of people that can justify going out two three nights a week, much less four or five nights a week when the single serving of a cocktail is twenty eight dollars plus plus. So now you have a very very small pie and they're very very much I don't want to say too similar, but they kind of are. So what's happening now.
Is that we're catering towarding well, we are personally, but a lot of the industry's catering towards this smaller group that have a particular taste, and that's actually reducing how creative we're getting.
And that's why said, yeah, I see that, because.
It's Callahan helped me understand the changes to Singapore's dining out culture. But since this is an economics podcast, I also turned to sing one song he's watched the shift play out over the past three decades. He's an economist at cimb Private Banking who follows trends in the industry as a gauge of how Singapore's broader economy is doing.
I suppose I come here weekly mainly just because I pretend I'm up not in Singapore.
At the glass and cased Flower Dome, part of the popular gardens by the Bay, complex. I sat with Song. The place was buzzing with tourists on a recent weekday a.
Fifty years ago, when it's really about finding jobs and housing for the people after the production of that Singapore and so FMB fairly basic at that point in time.
Just eating and.
Feeding as a necessity to today greater disposable income especially important then it allows obviously the whole range of options.
The whole range of options is getting leaner in the middle at the bottom of Singapore's famed hawker centers where you can get a full hot meal for just a few dollars, and those are still popular up and down the income ladder. Since twenty twenty, they've been protected with UNESCO World Heritage Status, top of special attention they received from the government such as Digital Transformation assistance in the
past few years. On the high end, like Callahan pointed out, more wealthy customers are keeping up those top priced outlets, but in the middle there's a real crunch. But Song says Singapore will never be a cheaper place for doing business, and the high demand also comes from Singapore's neutrality in politics.
Given the increased tension between China and US or Western government in general, where Singapore becomes even more of attraction for businesses as many of them Reshaw and Unshaw whatever businesses are on the U Singapore.
As their hub.
Altogether, the rising costs are raising some political and socioeconomic stress that's ahead of general elections that are due by November twenty twenty five. Officials have reassured that resumed construction
will bring relief to rent soon. They've also instituted stamp duty increases, including a move in April that doubled the levee for foreigners buying residential property to sixty percent, and on Wednesday, Central Bank Chief Rovimannon played down the impact that cash flows into Singapore are having on inflation.
Wealth in flows in Singapore into Singapore have literal effect on the exchange rate, domestic inflation, property prices or conferences.
The step of inflation since late twenty one was mainly due to shop increases in global energy and food prices and beach proof.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore says that the inflation fight isn't over, but they do see energy and food prices slowing further and wage growth easing. Real estate agent Juliet says she's seen rents fall off a cliff in the past few weeks, so maybe a market cool down is just around the corner. But the damage has been done and the stereotype that crazy rich Asians projected on Singapore seems to be solidified. It'll take a long time for people to change their minds. Here's Juliette again.
So the perception of Singapore is that it's no longer a place where you can come and live relatively inexpensively. You can't save money here anymore. That's what a lot of expats see in Singapore.
Michelle Jamrisco for Bloomberg News.
So not so long ago, it was San Francisco that was the great boomtown. The city benefited more than any other from the rise of Silicon Valley. Books were written about how other places in the US might learn from its example. Now, though, it's become a byword for urban decline and dysfunction, with homelessness, a fentanyl epidemic making downtown and no go area for a big chunk of the population, and the commercial real estate market imploding. Big retail businesses
are heading for the door. In fact, in recent weeks we've seen Whole Foods Nordstrom and the Westfield shopping mall all deciding to quit the city. So how did San Francisco get to this unhappy state? And are there parallels
or lessons for cities elsewhere in the US. Well, I've got two excellent people here with me to speak about that, Karen Breslau, our California Bureau chief who's based in San Francisco, and Justin Fox, who's been on the program before, a Bloomberg opinion columnist who writes about lots of interesting things, including US cities and the challenges that they're dealing with. Justin, Karen, thank you very much for talking to me. Karen, there are a lot of horror stories about San Francisco doing
the rounds at the moment. Just give us a sense how bad is it day to day.
It really depends where you are and who you talk to. So if you are in the downtown financial district, which is where I am right now in our Bloomberg bureau here in San Francisco.
It is dire.
If you are a downtown landlord, if you are a downtown retailer, if you are a mayor staring into you know, empty city coffers, it is you know, from a fiscal standpoint, obviously terrible to have these giant skyscrapers with a thirty percent vacancy rate, you know, for the last several years due to COVID, and now with the tech downturn and work from home, you know, becoming the norm. You know, you are seeing definitely this, you know, the proverbial doom
loop in this downtown area. If you go outside of the downtown into neighborhoods, I think you see a more vibrant, alive San Francisco. And the city is also undergoing an AI boom, right, so a lot of a lot of AI startups are here. But these you know, these are young, early stage companies. They don't fill skyscrapers, you know, their their work live lots and people's you know, the modern
day version of the of the Hewlett Packard garage. So it really is it is blocked by block, but the city from a fiscal standpoint and also from morale, it is it is unusually dire.
I mentioned that San Francisco obviously was the center of the previous tech booms of this century, and I think that's what people find surprising, because, as you suggested, there's success still there. There's still all those startups. How does that coexist with the kind of horror stories that we hear about downtown. Why is the city not benefiting from that continued success of parts of its economy.
When you think about San Francisco, you really have to hold more than one thought in your head at the same time. This is a city, you know, that's been through booms and bus since the gold Rush. It is a boom and bust town, and so you know the most you know recent obviously we have the tech crash, you know, on the heels of of the COVID shutdowns, and before that we had the dot com boom, the dot com bust. So the city has seen this before.
The difference is I think really that the hybrid or work from home models have flattened out what would be a normal recovery, uh and made so much of the commercial real estate, this incredibly valuable commercial real estate in downtown San Francisco that powers you know, the tax base of the city, and the and the and the retail base that has all gone. San Francisco is a very small city. It's surrounded by affluent suburbs where people you know,
come into work. The population of San Francisco is hovers around eight hundred thousand. It's not a big major city in terms of population, but the you know, the commuters who come in and fill those offices and spend their money are simply not here in the numbers they were before the pandemic.
And when people take the sort of long view, there's kind of a range of culprits that people point to for how the city got to this position, which, as you say, it's not all bad, but certainly downtown feels pretty bad. There's a one whole set of arguments that's around the tech boom itself, all the money that came in, the enormous increase in real estate values that made so
much of San Francisco unaffordable. There's another set of critiques that's around sort of dysfunctional politics, and obviously that's what Republicans are doing attack ads about. You know, this is an example of leftist politics gone amuck. And then, as you've mentioned, you know, there's COVID and the fact that more people have just stayed at home since the very long period of shutdowns from the pandemic. When you think about it in your mind, I'm sure it's all of
those things. But is there was there a sort of an original problem that in the way that that that all that influx of enormous amount of money from related to Silicon Valley got got handled.
I think you've really laid out the cast of culprits very well. I would say the blame the tech Bros. Storyline was certainly here. What you know, during the boom days, right, you had people throwing tomatoes at these big white buses that would carry unlabeled of course, unmarked buses that would that would ferry workers from San Francisco to Google and Meta and Apple and Genent Tech and you know, all the big employers, and they were blamed for, you know,
ruining the vibe in San Francisco. Then, of course dysfunctional politics. Why does this heavily democratic city in a heavily democratic state not have sufficient thousand there are? You know, I think I think there is legitimate blame for I would say an air of permissiveness around drug use which has completely gotten out of hand. I think that is legitimate criticism.
And then overlying all of this, of course, is the pandemic, which really exacerbated trends that were clearly in place before and accelerated those trends and revealed, you know, a society that is so deeply unequal it cannot recover from COVID from the pandemic as other cities have.
But I want to get on to the other cities in a minute. But just I guess one last question for now. Does it feel like there is a way out? I mean, as you identify, is not just one negative storyline, but certainly downtown that's the dominant story that's currently playing. Does it feel like the existing administration and the mayors has a route out of this? If only how to get hold of some money for a.
Start, right, there's definitely a way out of this. San Francisco, you know, was flattened. I mean, this is what the mayor London Breed talks about. She said, Okay, so this is a city that was literally in smoke and ashes in nineteen oh six.
It was over.
It would never it would never come back after the great earthquake. And she says, a change in people's work habits, a change in people's retail habits is not the end of San Francisco. And there is definitely intellectual ferment. There's venture capital, a tremendous talent pool, major universities. All of that stays. But I think San Francisco is going to have to undergo a tremendous reining. There's not going to be this downtown core of thirty percent empty skyscrapers and
empty shopping malls. These buildings look like fossils of the way American cities were even you know, just a few years ago before the pandemic. So I think, you know, the tax space is going to have to shift away from tech, it's going to have to shift away from real estate and financial services, it's going to have to shift away from retail, and these these are all the things that powered San Francisco as recently as the before times.
So will this.
Happen on our current political cycle. I think it's highly unlikely. I mean, we have an election you're coming up next year.
Justin I mean, what Karen's describing obviously is sort of everything that we think of as being a city is going to have to be rethought. But you know, how much is San Francisco an outlier in a US context, and how much is it potentially a sort of harbinger of problems that other cities will be starting to have.
I mean, it's a pretty big outlier. And really, I think Karen expressed this already. It's the working from home that has sort of caused all these things to come to a head. San Francisco had been struggling with all these problems for a while, and then suddenly Bay Area based companies were the most gung ho about getting people to stop coming into the office at the beginning of COVID.
Let it keep happening forever. The one other city in the US that's sort of big city that's comparable in the percentage of people that are still staying home is Washington, d C. But it feels different. I guess like tourism has come back to Washington in a big way. So at least the streets are full of people, even though the offices are I guess all empty, especially the government offices.
So yeah.
And then the other issue is that the Bay Area public transit system, at least the Bay Arey Rapid Transit, the biggest part of it, is very much just funded by and to a much greater extent than most other public transit systems in the US. So that's undergoing all
of these problems. Obviously, every major commercial district is struggling to some greater or less extent with the fact that people are coming into the office less often and maybe they don't need all those buildings, and that's going to be a long and difficult and expensive process to figure out what to do about it. But I have not seen any place else in the US, except maybe Portland, Oregon, which is sort of a similar economy and has kind of some issues of its own. They're even worse than
San Francisco. But in general, it's unique.
But it's interesting. I mean, it does. It feels a little bit like we're talking more now about kind of managing the long term consequences of success and of having a certain amount of wealth come into a city or a city sort of region in a way that maybe twenty thirty years ago we were talking about managing decline
in some of these old industrial cities. When you look at somewhere like Miami or other places that are actually is starting to attract people from other parts of the country, certainly quite a lot of coming from Chicago for example, and sort of heading south. Are there things they should be looking out for, things to avoid or to try, and how should they respond to that influx of money and then not have some of the same dynamics that we've seen played out in San Francisco.
Well, the simplest answer is you build lots and lots of housing. The difficulty is if you're in a coastal city that's already kind of pretty much full, it's hard to do. I think it's hard to do anywhere in the world. It seems especially hard in the US, although I guess I get the sense that the south of
England is not super easy either. And so, I mean, like Austin, Texas has had this big inflow of people in wealth and has been adding new housing at a pace just way beyond any other large metropolitan area in the US, and so it's gonna have a lot of growing pains. And I don't know how all those people are going to get to work, but maybe they'll just work from home. But it's clear that it's these coastal
cities in the US have had this extreme problem. In California's it's been by far the most extreme in responding to new demand for housing. That the Bay Area was creating all these jobs for the last couple decades and building very few new houses and apartments. I'm one of those people who it's all about the housing. I think clearly it's other things too, And right now a lot
of the focus is on other issues. And you know, right now the Bay Area the last couple of years, people have been leaving, So you'd think that adding a whole bunch of new housing isn't the most pressing issue. But I don't know. I feel like that's that's at
the core of it. And I mean in New York City it's a huge problem, which in New York City has had more of a rebound, more of a return of people, and housing prices here just in the city proper are insane, and whereas there's been at least some correction in San Francisco.
In Europe, is very fashionable to talk about the fifteen minute city. I mean, is that going to be part of the sort of reinvention of downtown in some of these places?
Well, I mean in San Francisco, the issue is that and this is true in New York although New York sort of has a couple of downtowns, but the best transit connections are all sort of go through that downtown, the financial district and nearby areas and so it's absolutely true that the neighborhoods out in San Francisco are pretty vibrant and you can live a fifteen minute lifestyle. But if you want to get to the other side of town,
very often it ends up going through the middle. And so if that, something's got to happen with that core, and I just don't know what it is at this point, I just wanted.
To chime in on the reimagining down the middle. I interviewed London Breed at our technology summit last week and she just threw out, She just spitball. She said, why are we all worked up about the empty mall? The Westfield Mall, which was taken, as you know, the death knell. And she asked the audience how many of you have shopped there in the last two you know, even in the last five years. Very few hands went up. She said,
where do you get your stuff? You go online, you buy it, So why are we flipping out about an empty shopping mall. I'm paraphrasing her very very crudely, but she said, why do why do we need a shopping mall? Why why don't we have a soccer stage? So she kind of spitballed this idea, which got picked up here in lots of memes, and you know, then, of course, being San franciscoverybody started piling on about what a terrible idea that would be in hell could you? But you
know I did that. Well, there there was a little she took a little, a little uh you know, flight of imagination right there in real time, with absolutely no forethought. But it maybe it does take that kind of radical reimagination. I mean, the Giants play downtown, you know, why not? Why not major League soccer?
So all football as we might.
I'm sorry, thank you. Yes, the spherical object to es.
Well, that would be that would be very controversy. That would set us up for an enormous debate. In my household, we live in the shadow of an enormous Westfield, but we also where at least one of my children spends a lot of their lives. But there are also some keen football fans who quite wouldn't mind having a new stagment a very bad local team. So yeah, that'll set
the conversation around the dinner table. So finally, we have to always because we now live also in the shadow of the presidential and general election in twenty twenty four. I mean I should ask both of you, but certainly, Karen, what are the political Clearly the Republicans think that they can make score some points, pointing to San Francisco as an example of an indi California as an example of a democratic rule runner.
Muck.
Are there broader political implications from what's going on?
Yes, I think you can. You can throw San Francisco on the ballot pretty much anywhere you're running right and say is this what you want? We're already seeing this. We saw Ron de Santists come out. There does seem to be a little pattern of stopping to record, you know, a horror scene somewhere in San Francisco and shake their heads and say, oh my, is this what you want? So San Francisco is on the ballot everywhere, you know, shorthand for for democratic. Uh, dystopia if you're a Republican.
And yeah, even if you're a Democrat, San Francisco right now, Uh, this bastion of you know, of tolerance and acceptance and creativity and social progress is very hard to point to the social values that Democratic voters might might agree with. If you look at some of the streetscapes, So it's it's very tricky, but I think in a weird way, you're going to see a lot more Republican candidates here to record their ads and collect their money.
Uh.
But that and maybe four or five percent of the of the electorate will vote for them.
Well, it sounds like the mess to increase the fees for filming on the street anyway.
Political ads, Yeah, they want to pass the tin cup right there.
And just in final question to you, can you imagine any politicians, I mean, given that there's some serious economic consequences, is anyone going to be brave enough to tell people to go back to the office.
I mean, obviously lots of people in New York have done that and in the financial sector pretty successfully. But politicians, well, I mean the mayor Adams here does that all the time, although he's final. It's funny because in New York City, and this was under Deblasio, his predecessor, they actually, uh required all city employees to come in five days a week, and they're finally relaxing that. Yeah, that's a pop I mean, the Republicans had this bill that they keep bringing up
to I forget. It's got some great acronym, but it's in Washington to force federal employees to go back to work. So yes, I think there's a slight partisan valance to the whole going back to the office thing, because it's it's something that white collar professionals are the ones who can work from harm and they almost all the democratic these days.
Karen Breslaud, Justin Fox, thank you very.
Much, so closure, Stephanie, thanks for having us.
That's it for this episode of Stephonomics. Next week we'll have more. In the meantime, you can get a lot more economic insight and news from the Bloomberg Terminal website or app. This episode was produced by Mangnus Hendrickson, Yang Yang and Summer Sadi, with help from Abria Ruffin. Special thanks to Manus Cranny, Michelle jam Risco, Kevin Varley, David Ramley, Karen Breslau, and Justin Fox. But Mollie Smith is the executive producer of Stephanomics and the head of Bloomberg podcast is Sage.
Both