The first months of 2021 were dismal at San Francisco’s storied House of Prime Rib. One year into the pandemic, with indoor dining still forbidden by the city, the restaurant’s more than 90 workers who once carved prime rib and tossed salads table side were nowhere to be seen. With no outdoor dining space, longtime owner Joe Betz had laid them off.

“We were told we had to close for a couple of months, and that turned into a long time,” he said.

House of Prime Rib was hardly alone, newly released data from the US Census Bureau confirms. Between 2019 and 2021 — the depths of the pandemic shutdown — San Francisco lost more than half its jobs in the food service industry, according to data from the bureau’s annual American Community Survey. In 2019, the city had a reported 31,501 food service workers; in 2021, there were just 14,201 — a 55% plunge. It was by far the biggest drop in any sector, according to the survey.

For Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association and owner of San Francisco restaurants Rose’s Cafe and Terzo, the new census numbers come as no surprise.

Comparing 2021, a year in which restaurants were still bound by restrictions on indoor dining capacity and vaccine requirements, to a year like 2019, which was booming, makes the workforce decline appear much more strong, she said.

“2019 was a pretty high bar and that was a really good year,” said Thomas, who cited record convention attendance numbers and hotel bookings. “Restaurants were super busy.”

Then, restaurants closed in March 2020. While they could reopen their dining rooms that fall, the change was short-lived due to rising coronavirus cases. In March of the following year, indoor dining returned at 25% capacity. Starting March 26 of that year, capacity increased to 50%, though bars remained closed. San Francisco loosened restrictions on April 15, allowing bars to come back.

An employee sanitizes a table after diners leave at House of Prime Rib in San Francisco in October 2020, about a month before San Francisco shut down indoor dining again.

Kelsey McClellan/Special to The Chronicle

House of Prime Rib, for example, remained closed during 2020’s restrictions apart from a brief reappearance in October before the city shut down indoor dining again. In March 2021, the restaurant reopened and Betz hired back about half of his employees, although a few people remained on the payroll through the closures. He continued to re-hire workers slowly as restrictions loosened.

Thomas is confident that numbers for 2022 will tell a different story about San Francisco’s restaurant employment.

“It’s going to look a lot better,” she said.

That new story might well be under way.

From August 2021 to August 2022, preliminary data from the California Employment Development Department for the San Francisco-San Mateo metro region showed a 14.7% increase in employment in the “food services and drinking places” sector. Data shows 72,300 workers in the sector in August 2021 and a preliminary 82,900 in August 2022.

Frank Chui, owner of Hang Ah Tea Room, packs an order for pickup in February 2021, before San Francisco reopened indoor dining.

Constanza Hevia H./Special to The Chronicle

Frank Chui, owner of Chinatown dim sum spot Hang Ah Tea Room, let his whole front of house staff go during the most restricted parts of the pandemic. Like House of Prime Rib, Hang Ah also started to hire back in March 2021.

That was a challenge. Many restaurant workers had left the field as jobs dried up. And, specifically for Hang Ah Tea Room, hiring from within Chinatown was difficult in 2021.

“The fear during the pandemic was more prevalent in the Asian community than in the non-Asian community,” Chui said

For many workers living in multigenerational housing, “the risk of contracting a virus and bringing it home outweighs the money they would be making. So many chose not to work and cut costs,” Chui said. This year, he’s seeing more applicants.

Yet, most restaurant operators speak of too few workers rather than too few jobs these days. Staffing shortages have stubbornly kept many from fully reopening.

Not at House of Prime Rib, though. Today, says Betz, staffing levels are higher than they were before the pandemic, with nearly 100 workers stirring martinis and wheeling carts of beef across the dining room.

“It might be my ego talking, but I think this is maybe the happiest crew we have had in a long time,” he said. “It also helps that we pay fairly well.”

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When Taco Bell removed the “Grilled Stuft Nacho” from its nationwide menu in 2015, Chris Sandberg was crushed.

The specialty item – a triangle-shaped tortilla filled with beef, crunchy red strips, sour cream and cheesy jalapeño sauce – was “the best thing I ever had at Taco Bell,” Sandberg said.

The day he discovered the dish, he liked it so much, “I had it every day for a week,” Sandberg said. “The following week, it was discontinued.”

After it was taken from the menu, he moved on and tried other items, but none measured up for him. It stayed fresh in his mind. And on Jan. 4, 2021, he decided to start a daily exercise challenge on TikTok, in the hope of getting Taco Bell’s attention.

Sandberg shared a video of himself, breathless in his bathroom mirror, saying, “Day one of exercising every day until Taco Bell brings back the Grilled Stuft Nacho.”

The seven-second clip went viral with hundreds of thousands of views. Sandberg doubled down on his unusual – and somewhat illogical – effort to apply pressure to the restaurant chain through physical activity. He posted another mid-workout video the following day, and every single day thereafter. In the roughly 470 days since he started chronicling his daily exercise routine on TikTok, Sandberg has shed more than 85 pounds.

“I’ve put in an unbelievable amount of physical work,” said Sandberg, who lives in San Francisco, is self-employed, and produces social media videos and short films. He emphasized that he does not work for Taco Bell and never has.

The goal of his workout antic is twofold: While his primary objective is to bring back his beloved Grilled Stuft Nacho, when he began his Taco Bell challenge more than one year ago, Sandberg – who weighed close to 300 pounds before the pandemic – what also seeking to lose weight. He decided to merge the two missions.

“I do understand the irony in exercising every day for a fast-food item,” he said. “It started as a joke that has clearly gone way too far, but I can’t stop now.”

Although Sandberg initially executed the idea in jest, he quickly realized “it resonates for people,” as losing weight can be a stressful struggle for many. He wanted to find a way to make his experience lighthearted.

Sandberg grew eager to get in shape after “I read that people who were overweight were more vulnerable to COVID, so that had been at the back of my head for a while,” he said, adding that he was 275 pounds when he started the exercise challenge, after losing 15 pounds over the preceding few months.

Sandberg thought that publicly sharing his weight-loss journey on social media might help hold him accountable while also potentially motivating others. He wanted something to set himself apart, a cause that might be comical enough to compel Internet strangers to cheer him on.

“I didn’t want the journey to be about a number on a scale,” Sandberg said. “I wanted it to be fun. I wanted the goal to be something that had nothing to do with my weight.”

Enter the Grilled Tier Nacho.

“Everyone loves Taco Bell,” Sandberg said in a bold culinary statement. “That’s just what came to me.”

Plus, he believed his efforts might actually work.

“Doja Cat wanted them to bring back the Mexican Pizza, and look what happened,” Sandberg said. “The Grilled Stuft Nacho is better than the Mexican Pizza, and the world needs to know that.”

According to the Taco Bell Fandom Wiki, the Grilled Stuft Nacho first appeared on the menu in 2013 but was discontinued in March 2014. It made a brief reappearance in 2015 before it was pulled for good. Some people were peeved, though probably no one as much as Sandberg.

“There is a common belief that everything at Taco Bell tastes the same, but the Grilled Stuft Nacho is the exception,” Sandberg said, explaining his appreciation for a specific sauce.

“I want to make this clear,” he said. “The cheesy jalapeño sauce is different than their creamy jalapeño sauce. Without the cheesy jalapeño sauce, it is just not the same.”

Sandberg found an online community that shared his taste in fast food. Someone started an online petition four years ago pleading with the chain to bring back the specialty item. The petition collected 792 signatures – including Sandberg’s. The appeal was not enough to revive the dish, so Sandberg decided to take matters into his own hands.

First, he began with at-home workouts, then incorporated weightlifting, high-intensity interval training and long-distance running into his regular fitness routine.

“There are days that you want to give up,” Sandberg said. “On the days that you do want to work out, that’s when you push yourself physically, but on the days that you don’t want to work out, that’s when you have to push yourself mentally.”

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Sometimes, in my daily wanderings through downtown San Francisco, I look to the sky and ponder all the empty office buildings and wonder: What’s going to happen to this city?

For decades, San Francisco and neighboring Silicon Valley have assumed they would remain the world’s top spot for technology and innovation, riding a revenue train that would never ever stop.

Well, our choo choo has slowed down quite a bit. And there’s no guarantee of return ridership. A recent study by the research firm Real Estate Witch ranks San Francisco as the 16th best city in the country to launch a startup, far behind places like Las Vegas (No. 1), Salt Lake City (No. 2) and Miami (No 4). The metrics considered in the study included favorable tax laws, access to an educated workforce and employment growth. San Francisco didn’t stack up. The cost of doing business in the Bay Area has been prohibitive, to put it gently.

That has worried local tech leaders. I recently spoke to Jennifer Stojkovic, executive director of sf.citi, a San Francisco tech trade organization founded by venture capital legend Ron Conway 10 years ago, in partnership with then Mayor Ed Lee. Conway, a centrist Democrat who has been active on the local and national political stage, built the group into a powerhouse, influencing policy while representing giants such as Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Twitter, Uber and Facebook. The group’s mission is “to empower the San Francisco tech community to have a voice in tech policy decisions and collaborate with government leaders on solving local issues.”

And that’s exactly what Stojkovic plans to do. With Conway retiring from the board chair position, she and two other prominent women in tech — Board Chair Rebecca Prozan (director of government affairs and public policy for Google’s West Coast region) and Vice Chair Kate O’Sullivan (general manager of digital diplomacy within Microsoft’s corporate, external and legal affairs department) — will lead sf.citi forward into an uncertain future. And frankly, they sound worried.

From left: Rebecca Prozan, Kate O’Sullivan and Jennifer Stojkovic are poised to lead sf.citi, a tech trade organization founded by venture capitalist Ron Conway, following Conway’s retirement from the board chair position. (Examiner photo stitch)

“San Francisco has not had the same level of recovery as cities like New York and Austin and Seattle and places like that,” Stojkovic told The Examiner. “One of the things that is very concerning, in our opinion, is that while we have a myriad of quality of life issues that we need to address to make sure that we are reopening our offices safely and reopening our downtown, that’s really a short – term solution. The long-term (question) for economic recovery is, ‘How do we remain the best place for folks to locate their business and to make sure that their talent is located in San Francisco?’”

Unfortunately, Stojkovic doesn’t hear anyone talking about this at City Hall.

“That, in my opinion, is the $14 billion question that we are not talking about at a city leadership level. We have been very, very fortunate to be a city that has been leading as the main capital of innovation in this country and in this world for several decades now. And we are now at a precipice where there’s potential for us to not have that same pull. … We need to make sure that we are, from a regulatory and tax perspective, continuing to be competitive. We’re the most expensive place to do business in the country.”

ugh Just when you thought you were full up on bad news, add this to the list. On my doomscrolling top 10, San Francisco’s tech center status ranks far behind Ukraine, inflation, fentanyl and homelessness. But it’s definitely on the list. We are a city based on technology and tourism, with a crucial convention economy that ties it all together. None of those engines are working at full capacity right now, so we need to pay attention when our tech leaders sound the alarm.

So what does Big Tech want San Francisco to do? You can read through sf.citi’s policy priorities, which map out some key areas one would expect from a business group. Favorable tax structure. Reasonable regulation. Eliminating bureaucracy. There’s also heavy emphasis on the pressing issues facing us all, including our lack of housing, aging transportation infrastructure, rampant homelessness and rising public safety concerns.

I would add one more to sf.citi’s list. Work with our largest tech employers to bring workers back to the office. And at the same time, embrace ideas forwarded in this column, and elsewhere, to repurpose space that will not be reclaimed by business. Empty offices? Make them into housing.

“I think the talk about repurposing the space downtown is one that a lot of folks are having right now. And I think that’s a realistic step and something we should be talking about,” said Stojkovic. “I also think that we have to do a good job of incentivizing people to want to be in San Francisco. At the end of the day, we keep coming back to the same thing. It’s very expensive to live in The City. So if we want folks to be coming downtown, and using the space more, we need folks to locate in San Francisco, which has not been on the forefront of housing development. California is not at the forefront of housing development.”

“(As for) transportation, a lot of our members are having concerns (about) their employees literally getting in and out of the city and getting to their offices. So we are advocating for better solutions from Muni and BART. That is important. Other perspectives? The state of the streets. Everybody says that. SF Travel is saying it, hospitals are saying it, every single association says the state of our streets has to change.”

For the record, sf.citi stands aligned with Mayor London Breed’s current plan to clean things up.

“We support the mayor’s initiatives, everything that she needs for public safety,” said Stojkovic. “But they’re not all tenable at the board level. We think that we need to be realistic about this. “

Conway and his organization have had some wins over the years, helping to make San Francisco startup-friendly while also advocating for improvements in local governance. For instance, this past year’s annual report shows they were heavily focused on mapping The City’s tech exodus and helping City Hall grapple with remote work, remote school and a remote population downtown.

Going forward, the organization’s new leadership wants to focus on keeping San Francisco relevant in the startup scene and helping to reenvision the city’s traditional downtown work spaces. From where I sit, this is core to our future success.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. The region was the Silicon Valley of the Industrial Age, booming beyond belief in the 1910s and 1920s. The post-war era was a time of prosperity as well. Just like San Francisco, the civic leaders believed the boom times would last indefinitely. But as the companies and factories started moving out, seeking cheaper labor elsewhere, a slow decline began that bottomed out during my childhood.

To Cleveland’s credit, the city has reinvented itself behind strong ties to biomedicine and life sciences, due in large part to institutions like the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University. But that took decades, and it’s still very much a work in progress. The key is to make sure you don’t hit bottom and have to build back from scratch.

trust me I’ve seen a downtown die. It’s not a pretty sight.

Editor’s note: The Arena, a column from The Examiner’s Al Saracevic, explores San Francisco’s playing field, from politics and technology to sports and culture. Send your tips, quips and quotes to asaracevic@sfexaminer.com.

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SAN FRANCISCO—On Wednesday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed made a fiery speech in response to recent increases in thefts and drug sales and use in the city, particularly in the Tenderloin, a notoriously gritty stretch residents say has had similar issues for decades.

“It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end,” Breed said, arguably sounding more like a police union boss than a Democratic politician in a progressive stronghold. “It comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement. More aggressive with the changes in our policies. And less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

The tough talk represented a stark reversal for Breed, who, shortly after the murder of George Floyd last year, stripped $120 million from the San Francisco Police Department to fund initiatives aimed at improving the lives of Black residents. In the days since, her statements have drawn praise from some residents and business owners in the Tenderloin who say they sympathize with justice reform but that longstanding problems have gotten out of control as crime numbers shoot up nationwide.

But they have also drawn ire from detractors who argue Breed risks abandoning a focus on the root causes of crime in a sort of retrenchment that has played out in progressive strongholds across the country since last year’s summer of rage over police violence. Even then, the about face in the liberal bastion of San Francisco is particularly astonishing.

“What’s underneath the surface here is that these local recalls are really impacting our city politics in a way that I think is destructive,” John Hamasaki, a member of the San Francisco Police Commission and criminal defense attorney, told The Daily Beast.

“It feels political because it doesn’t address the actual problems.”

— John Hamaski

Hamasaki was referring primarily to the upcoming June recall vote of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Boudin, elected in Jan. 2020, had previously served as a public defender in the city and has quickly come under fire for being soft on prosecuting repeat offenders.

Hamasaki also noted viral videos of robberies in the city being shared widely on social media. Given the attention, he said, it seemed Breed was “tacking right.”

“It feels political because it doesn’t address the actual problems,” Hamasaki said.

Breed did not respond to a request for comment. Boudin also did not respond to a request for comment.

During her press conference, Breed pushed back on the idea she was making some kind of “reversal” by demanding more resources for police, among other changes. “I would say that things have changed as it relates to our significant need for law enforcement and so an investment is necessary as a result of it,” Breed said.

Chris Canning, Captain of the Tenderloin Station for the San Francisco Police Department, told The Daily Beast he was “grateful” for the mayor’s call for action. He said that while there have been police-led efforts in the past to address issues in the Tenderloin, what feels different to him is what he called an “all-hands on deck approach for a sustained period of time” that would also involve other city agencies and community organizations.

San Francisco Police Department Chief Bill Scott said during Wednesday’s press conference that there has been a longstanding struggle to balance enforcing laws in the Tenderloin and getting people help. And while he said there will still be an effort to connect people with needed mental-health and substance-abuse services, there is also now a green light to seek enforcement. “People will not be allowed to smoke meth, to smoke fentanyl, to inject heroin in their arms in public spaces,” he said.

But looming behind the relatively unified front—at least this week—between the police department and the mayor were long-standing tensions over justice in a city known both for progressive politics and gilded liberalism.

Tony Montoya, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, the local cops’ union, told The Daily Beast Breed’s statements were further proof of the “failed experiment” to defund the police and welcomed her words. “I’m glad the mayor has finally publicly acknowledged that things are, for lack of a better word, out of control,” he said.

“This is not fear mongering. This is reality.”

— Tony Montoya

While he agreed that there needed to be more police in the Tenderloin, he said the calls for more bodies would have to be backed up by resources. “Unless they’re going to make that financial investment, right now they’re just placating some of the community that are putting pressure on them,” Montoya told The Daily Beast. “At the end of the day, put your money where your mouth is what I say.”

Hamasaki, the local police commissioner, said he was not surprised about the police department’s embrace of Breed, arguing her recent statements were an “early Christmas present” to Montoya and the union, which he accused of overstating problems with crime in the city and the Tenderloin area to call out liberal policies. That is, doing what cop unions tend to do across the country.

“Our crime numbers are lower than a lot of big cities in liberal and conservative districts,” he said. “It’s not a reflection on the government. It’s just a reflection of what’s happening across the nation.”

“This is not fear mongering. This is reality,” Montoya pushed back, in response. He noted that many issues in the area are not new. “But that’s no excuse not to try and find solutions and address it now.”

According to data from the San Francisco Police Department, homicides and thefts have seen rises in recent years in the city across the board—mirroring rises in crime nationwide.

According to the agency’s dashboard, the city has seen a 15 percent year-over-year increase in homicides in 2021 and an 18 percent increase in larceny theft. In the Tenderloin area, homicides are up 13 percent compared to 2020, and burglaries and motor vehicle thefts are up about 7 percent each.

The rise in certain crimes so far this year comes after an already significant city-wide increase in 2020, where homicides were up 17 percent compared to 2019 and burglaries and motor vehicle thefts were up nearly 40 percent compared to 2019.

But what has been more striking, according to city data, is the prevalent drug use and calls for help in the Tenderloin area. According to a recent city report, since Jan. 2020, more than 20 percent of all drug overdose deaths in the city have occurred in the Tenderloin.

According to an emergency declaration released by Breed on Friday, overdose deaths in the city as a whole have increased 200 percent since 2018. In 2020, the number of deaths from drug overdoses in San Francisco exceeded the number of people who died of COVID. The proclamation cited an increase in fentanyl use as a large reason for the deaths. According to the proclamation, the substance was a factor in more than 70 percent of the overdose deaths between January and October.

In the Tenderloin, the proclamation stated that emergency medical calls for service for a “sick person” have increased more than 150 percent between June and November compared to the same period in 2020, and medical calls for service for all reasons during this time period also increased.

On Thursday evening in the Tenderloin neighborhood, a day after Breed’s announcement, the city’s heightened contradictions seemed to be on display.

On one street, tents pitched wall-to-wall crowded both sides of the sidewalk, forcing foot traffic onto the street among strewn trash and debris. In another corner, someone sat slumped on a sidewalk next to an overstuffed suitcase spilling its contents, while someone else appeared to be passed out on the bench in a bus shelter.

Nearby, however, in the windows of restaurants and bars, affluent-looking urban professionals could be seen socializing as if all of this was completely normal.

Those who work in the area every day, like Andrew Bloom, director of operations for Brenda’s Soul Food, a restaurant in the Tenderloin, told The Daily Beast they’ve noticed the neighborhood “nosedive” during the pandemic. Among other things, he cited the widespread selling and consumption of drugs in the street at all times of the day, as well as petty theft and, in some cases, violent incidents.

“It’s not just like a couple of guys now. It’s literally like crowds of people. ”

— Andrew Bloom

Bloom acknowledged the area has always struggled with drug use and homelessness in the 11 years he’s worked there. But he called the problem “manageable” in the past, and said that’s changed.

“The whole neighborhood has just been really worse than ever,” he told The Daily Beast.

Bloom described dealers frequently attempting to hawk drugs to him daily, and large numbers of people using hard drugs in doorways, streets, and alleys. “It’s not just like a couple of guys now,” he said. “It’s literally like crowds of people.”

Amanda Michael, owner of Jane on Larkin, a cafe in the area, chalked up the change to the increased sale of fentanyl in the area and a lack of drug enforcement and police presence that became more apparent during the height of the pandemic.

“It was kind of like this perfect storm,” she told The Daily Beast, adding that more tents began popping up in the streets and she could see drug dealers going from tent to tent from her store window. “It was heartbreaking because you just saw this real downhill turn for a lot of people.”

Both Bloom and Michael said they were pleased to hear Breed’s comments this week, but they hoped it would lead to a real change, instead of mere politicking. “I’d like to think it’s real,” Michael said about Breed. Still, she said, she’s worried it might just be “grandstanding.”

Of course, some residents are calling “bullshit” on the mayor, too.

Del Seymour, a longtime resident who leads walking tours in the area and runs a nonprofit to teach coding to many people he says are homeless, said Breed’s talk wasn’t all that stirring to him.

“This is like the fifth mayor to have vowed to clean up the Tenderloin,” he said. “So, I’m not really expecting a lot out of this.”

Seymour, 75, said that until he turned his life around 13 years ago, he spent many years in the Tenderloin homeless, selling and using drugs in the streets there. Given his own history of arrests, he said, he fears the mayor’s new tune won’t help those struggling with substance abuse in the area.

“I really don’t want to see another war on drugs,” he said. “Drug use is a disease, it’s not a crime.”

Seymour said he knows the mayor believes this, and cited her investments in treatment centers and social services in the area in the past. But he said the “publicity event” on Wednesday seemed like an effort to “bow down” to special interests.

During her press conference, Breed acknowledged that the city has always been a “compassionate” one that prides itself on “second chances and rehabilitation.”

She said her new initiatives would also encompass more support for people experiencing homelessness, addiction and mental health issues. But she also took a strong stance and said the compassion would only go so far: “Our compassion should not be mistaken for weakness or indifference.”

Tracey Mixon, 50, a Tenderloin resident who works as a peer organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness, said she agrees with others that things have gotten worse. Particularly when it comes to people dying and being on edge or prone to unpredictable outbursts—and this, she said, can be explained by what drugs are out there.

“There’s been a state of emergency in the Tenderloin for 40 years. It’s always been a state of emergency. ”

— Tracey Mixon

“You can talk sense into a crack user and tell them ‘kids are coming,’” she said. But with fentanyl and crystal methamphetamine as the drugs of choice, it’s not quite so simple.

Mixon was deeply skeptical of Breed’s plan and its likelihood of success, however. She said she’s lived in the Tenderloin too long and has seen and heard similar pronouncements before.

“There’s been a state of emergency in the Tenderloin for 40 years. It’s always been a state of emergency,” said Mixon, who said she can remember at least “two or three” grandiose announcements of a crackdown before this one.

“They do this every few years,” she said. “They make it seem like there’s gonna be something big. From that, it’s like it becomes cool or quiet and a little bit peaceful for a while.”

Nonetheless, Mixon said she feels the wrong people will be targeted by Breed’s plans and doesn’t feel that more police is the right approach to deal with the issues. “I get what Mayor Breed wants to do,” she said. “That’s not what we need here.”

The post How San Francisco Misplaced Its Cool and Panicked About Crime appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area both lost population during the pandemic, according to new data released Friday as the nation’s most populous state posted just its second year-over-year decline in history.

California estimates its population twice per year. The first report, released in May, estimates the population for the previous calendar year. The second report, released in December, estimates the population for the previous fiscal year, which ends June 30.

Back in May, California reported its first ever annual population decline when the state said it lost 182,083 people in 2020. Friday, the state said it lost 173,000 people between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021.

The latest estimate confirms California’s once seemingly boundless population growth has ended. It also shows that, for the first time ever, Los Angeles County and the nine counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay simultaneously lost population in the same year. Together, those two areas account for more than 44% of the state’s nearly 40 million residents and have some of the most expensive housing prices in the nation.

Los Angeles County lost 67,500 people to fall just under 10 million residents. The nine Bay Area counties, which have a combined population of about 7.7 million, lost roughly 64,000 people.

California has 10 counties with at least 1 million people, and seven of them lost population. That includes San Diego County, which lost 15,000 people for its first reported annual decline. Counties in the Central Valley that are near the San Francisco Bay reported population increases, including Fresno, Placer, Merced and Tulare.

“I don’t think this is completely surprising,” said Walter Schwarm, California’s chief demographer. “People are trading a commute for a level of housing that they could not afford or could not even purchase in the Bay Area.”

For nearly all its existence California’s population growth seemed limitless. It leapfrogged other Western territories when it became a state in 1850, propelled by the discovery of gold in Sierra Nevada foothills that attracted hundreds of thousands of settlers while hastening the decline of native populations.

That kicked off a period of intense growth that lasted more than a century as the state found prosperity in the years after World War II and again following the tech boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

But that growth has slowed significantly in recent years until, in the spring of this year, California lost a congressional seat for the first time in its history because it did not grow as quickly as other states in the past decade. The state’s congressional delegation now is now at 52 members, still the most in the nation.

State officials blame the decline on a declining birth rate, decreases in international migration and the increased deaths associated with the coronavirus. Schwarm said he expects California to eventually start growing again, perhaps finally surpassing 40 million people by the middle of the decade.

“I don’t think we’re in a period of long decline,” he said.

Critics have blamed California’s high cost of living and increasing crime. The median price of a single-family home is nearly $800,000, putting homeownership out of reach for many while also driving up rental prices. A cottage industry has sprung up of helping people leave California for other states.

“When you can’t afford to live in some semblance of comfort or you can’t feel safe, those are huge drivers in quality of life,” said state Assemblyman Tom Lackey, a Republican from Palmdale. “They’ve become compromised, at least in some degree, because of public policy.”

California’s government is run by Democrats, and Republicans have routinely pointed to the declining population numbers as proof people are fleeing the state in droves because they are frustrated by the state’s policies. But new research from the nonpartisan California Policy Lab at the University of California suggests the problem is fewer people are moving to California from other states instead of leaving it.

The number of people moving to California from other states fell 38% since the start of the pandemic, the California Policy Lab reported this week. The number of people leaving California for other states rose 12% over that same time period, which researchers say is in line with pre-pandemic trends.

Combined, researchers say California’s population loss because of domestic migration has more than doubled since the pandemic began in March 2020.

The San Francisco Bay area has been impacted the most by this trend. By the end of September, there were 45% fewer people moving into the Bay Area from other states compared to the beginning of 2020, according to Evan White, executive director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California-Berkeley.

“The public’s attention has been focused on the so-called ‘CalExodus’ phenomenon, but the reality is that the dramatic drop in ‘CalEntrances’ since the pandemic began has been a bigger driver of recent population changes in the state,” said Natalie Holmes , a research fellow at the California Policy Lab and co-author of its recent report.

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An influx of confused self-driving cars has swarmed through a nominally peaceful neighborhood of San Francisco for “six, eight weeks, maybe more,” according to local residents. The vehicles that are part of the Waymo robot taxi fleet pour into a cul-de-sac in the Richmond District. While some are doing a complicated multi-point turn, others are queued one after the other. KPIX 5 reported on Wednesday that on some days “up to 50” of the technology-heavy driverless cars can turn up, disrupt the routes of the drivers and disrupt local residents. “It’s literally every five minutes,” said Jennifer King, a local homeowner. “And we all work from home, so we hear this.” Waymo has yet to provide an explanation for the technological malfunctions behind the invasion. Waymo cars also regularly get confused by puddles and left turns, according to CNN.

Read it below KPIX 5

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When I heard that the waters of the bay could be camped 20 miles north of San Francisco on the site of a historic Chinese shrimp bay dating from the 1880s, I didn’t expect the original village to still be standing.

But there it sits somehow, on a hidden beach under the low Marin hills, little sun-bleached huts on the sand and a rickety pier that stretches across the brackish water, almost ghostly through the fog, as if time has been lost.

—

I arrived at China Camp State Park with my family late on a Friday afternoon to explore the fabled fishing village, so we postponed this adventure until the morning. Instead, we took a short family-friendly twilight hike around a curious cliff called Turtle Back Hill. (The entire state park has more than 15 trails of varying degrees of difficulty.)

Turtle Back Hill is an ecologically unique peninsula – it is almost an island, apart from a dune island that borders Marin. It rises from the reed swamp like, well, a turtle shell. The easy three-quarters of a mile heart-shaped trail winds through open grasslands and a shady oak forest.

The farthest point of the trail overlooks Jakes Island, about 60 meters offshore, over a muddy plain. This little island is inaccessible to hikers, but not deer, and we were lucky enough to see three peek out from the oak trees, jump over the reeds, and make their journey through the swamp.

China Camp State Park campsite.

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

After watching the deer, we headed back to the campsite, pitched our tent, made a fire, charred marshmallows, and stared at the sky. Despite being only half a mile from San Rafael, the place feels wonderfully solitary thanks to the hills and canyons that separate it from the rest of Marin County.

It was a beautifully peaceful California night and we slept well (I didn’t tell my daughters about the gruesome barbecue murders that happened in this exact place 46 years ago).

In the morning we excitedly made our way one kilometer around the coast to the historic fishing village without really knowing what to expect.

The old settlement is both desolate and magical and at first glance looks like a ghost town that has remained on the sandy beach of San Pablo Bay for a century and a half. An old, battered log cabin with faded signs for Tacoma beer and fresh crabs looks out over the narrow pier. But we were surprised that it was still doing business, and even though crabs were no longer on sale, we bought some sodas from a kind man named Ernie Stanton, and I gave my kids a few dollars to put in the Friends donation jar of China Camp to throw.

China Camp Village, Marin, California.

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

Stanton’s story intersects with a man who formed the final link in part of Bay Area history, Frank Quan.

“I grew up in San Francisco and was a beachgoer here, but I would help Frank with the store,” Stanton tells me, and he’s been running the cabin with friends since Quan died in 2016.

Frank Quan spent his last years in the hut right on the beach and was the last Sino-American shrimp fisherman to practice his craft at China Camp, where he went to the pier to his fishing boat almost every day for over 80 years.

China Camp State Park.

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

Frank’s parents met in the camp, he was born there, and his grandfather was one of the first Chinese immigrants to haul in shrimp nets from this very spot in the 1880s.

The bay was once the ancestral home of the indigenous coastal Miwok. The Miwoks took only what they needed from land and sea, hunted deer and rabbits in the hills, fished in the bay and harvested acorns from the surrounding oak groves.

As with so many indigenous settlements, the population was almost wiped out by the arrival of the Spaniards in the late 18th century.

China Camp Village, Marin, California.

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

After the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, Chinese workers, many of whom had immigrated from the maritime province of Kwangtung or what is now Guangdong, found themselves looking for work. The fertile Wadden Sea on the coast of Marin Bay was perfect for grass shrimp and after leasing the bay, 500 fishermen settled there to catch shrimp from the rich Wadden Sea. In its prime, the small village had 28 buildings, including three general stores, a fishing tackle, boat rentals, and a barber shop.

The villagers sailed from the pier in junks (long wooden boats) and fetched the shrimp in hand-sewn nets. The bamboo buckets of crustaceans were boiled and then dried in the California sun on a nearby hill before being sent across the ocean to market. In the early 1880s, nearly 3 million pounds of shrimp were caught at China Camp and exported to Hawaii and China each year.

Archive photo of villager processing shrimp for shipment to China Camp Village, date unknown.

Archive / Unknown

At the time, there were around 30 similar Chinese shrimp villages around the bay, from Hunters Point to the Sacramento River Delta.

As vicious anti-Chinese resentment grew in San Francisco, the villages became isolated, maintaining their culture, language and traditions, although villagers used the in winter when the shrimp were bad and the fog was too dense to dry their shells Take a boat there Visit San Francisco’s growing Chinatown.

China Camp Village, Marin, California.

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

The booming success of the fishing company was short-lived, however, as anti-Chinese violence and racism spread, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented new Chinese workers from migrating to the U.S. The wide nets of the community in the China Camp were even banned . Nevertheless, the remaining families continued to fish into the early 20th century. One of these first fishermen, Quan Hock Quock, Frank Quan’s grandfather, moved from San Francisco to the bay to run the oceanfront store that still exists today.

The bay’s largest population came unexpectedly in 1906 when the village sheltered about 10,000 Chinese Americans who were evicted from San Francisco after being devastated by earthquakes and fires.

However, by World War II, industry had dwindled, and all 30 Chinese fishing villages in the Bay Area had disappeared, except for this small bay outside of San Rafael. The Quans were the only family that still pulled shrimp from the swamp.

China Camp Village, Marin, California.

Andrew Chamings / SFGATE

Thanks to the fact that the area was granted state park status in the 1970s, the town remained as it is, and Quan was allowed to live in the small hut by the water until his later life, where he continued to fish and the Shrimp sold as bait. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Fewer locations in California can demonstrate the value of historical protection afforded.

Quan never married, and his centuries-old ancestry at China Camp attracted like empty nets at low tide.

When asked in 2014 if he was sad that after his death there will be no more Chinese fishermen to continue the legacy, Quan smiled. “No, I don’t think about it,” he said. “None of us are immortal.”

It’s hard to believe that this little piece of well-preserved history is so close and yet so hidden from San Francisco. China Camp, often shrouded in mist rolling down from the low hills, can feel lonely, a corner of the bay that stands on the water almost exactly as it was 140 years ago.

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W.Though the Christmas box office charts are likely to be dominated by Disney’s family-friendly singer-songwriter sequel Frozen II, anyone looking for something more adventurous in animation should check out this remarkable French gem, which will see limited releases ahead of its UK release on Netflixon November 29th .

It’s a story about broken hearts and body parts. Loosely adapted from the book Happy Hand by Guillaume Laurant (who was Oscar-nominated for his scriptwriting on Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie), it was the first animated feature to top the Cannes Critics’ Week Award before further major wins in Sitges, Strasbourg and at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. This feature film debut by co-writer / director Jérémy Clapin combines a tender love story with the macabre feel of a body horror film and builds on the success of his acclaimed short films Une histoire vertébrale (2004), Skhizein (2008) and Palmipédarium (2008) in 2012 ) confirming the arrival of an important new voice in international animation.

Like Thing from the Addams family or a kind relative of the title attachments from The Hands of Orlac, I Lost My Body finds a severed hand that is brought to life in a Parisian medical laboratory. After the hand is released from its surgical bond, it learns to crawl, then run, then run, and scurry out of sterile captivity into the hustle and bustle of the outside world like a frightened animal. It’s a terrible place filled with thundering traffic, crushing machines, and predatory rodents, all of which are encountered when the hand crawls across rooftops, streets, and subways, searching for its former self.

On the surface, the story seems steeped in horror, but the main tone is delicate and melancholy

In the meantime, a second flashback takes place in parallel; tactile memories of the hand’s life when its lost body was whole. This body belongs to Naoufel, a pizza delivery boy trying to meet his deadlines and who is intrigued by the disembodied voice of Gabrielle (an angry customer) on a high-rise intercom. As the kaleidoscopic narrative retreats even further, we see Naoufel as a child in Morocco who, accompanied by his parents, laughs and records the sounds of his world on a beloved cassette recorder – sounds that become symbols of a lost innocence and broken childhood.

Themes of dismemberment – physical, emotional, temporal – run through this beautifully haunting story as it effortlessly interweaves the real and the surreal, the spoken and the still. Clapin carefully leaves the narrative voice of the dismembered hand from Laurant’s source novel aside and manages to convey huge amounts of emotional information through the simple movement of the fingers, creating a completely rounded (and above all completely personable) character whose sensory experience is the world is eloquently expressed through gestures and pantomime.

The most impressive thing about I Lost My Body, which producer Marc du Pontavice (who cites Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata as an inspirational influence) envisions as “fictional animation for teens and adults” is the way in which he different marriages marries tones and formats. On the surface, the story seems steeped in horror, and there are a few moments that will send a chill down your spine – the accidental strangulation of a pigeon trying to protect its eggs, for example; or an attack by wild rats in the bowels of the subway. There are also pulsating action sequences as the hand scurries through crowded streets and reaches for the underside of a speeding train.

The primary tone, however, is gentle and melancholy – an almost existential evocation of memory and the longing to become whole. In an early sequence in which the hand climbs over the rib cage and skull of a display skeleton (watched by a soon-to-be-crushed eyeball!), The gallows humor turns into something more awe-inspiring as it escapes onto a high windowsill overlooking the horizon. I was unexpectedly reminded of an illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep that I owned as a child – a picture of the engaged characters gazing at the greatness of the world beyond them, filled with a terrible sense of wonder. Fear and infinite sadness.

Just as the themes of I Lost My Body cleverly juggle light and shadow, the film seamlessly combines 2D and 3D animation techniques with elements of rotoscoped live action to create what Clapin “is an animated world halfway between the tangible and the imaginary “. . It’s an impressive feat, reminiscent of Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit’s combination of analog and digital processes at The Red Turtle, creating something that maintains a grainy, hand-drawn texture while harnessing the possibilities of new technology.

A beautiful electronic score by Dan Levy rounds off the picture, emphasizing the romantic themes of longing and loss and pulling our hearts without resorting to sentimentality.

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Almost every major metropolitan area in the US saw an exodus of residents in 2020, but no more than the notoriously expensive San Francisco, according to a new study.

In the most expensive city in the United States, at least twice as many residents traveled to other places in the past year as in 2019, around 18 per 1,000 residents. CBRE Group, a commercial real estate company, conducted its migration analysis based on data from the US Postal Service.

Much of the outgoing residents were young, affluent workers, Eric Willet, CBRE research director in Los Angeles, told Newsweek. The high-end rental housing markets had the most vacancies and fell overall.

“We can assume that a large chunk of those were technicians because they’re a large segment of the economy,” Willet said. “If we look at the data, most of the residents who moved out of the Bay Area moved nearby. Very few people who moved out of San Francisco have moved out of the state.”

The results reflect the appeal of cheaper housing and more bay space, as well as the flexibility of remote working, which motivated so many Franciscans to leave the city.

Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center, told Newsweek that many people, especially in San Francisco, were finding they didn’t have enough space to work from home during the pandemic. Additionally, with the unique amenities that lure people to disused cities, there was little reason to stay.

According to the study, millennials have been gradually moving out of San Francisco for years before the pandemic, reflecting a growing trend of tech giants targeting other subway areas. Data from nonprofit sf.citi shows that 63 percent of San Francisco-based businesses downsized their physical offices during the pandemic, freeing up 15.8 million square feet of commercial space.

This corresponds to an increase in vacancies of almost 20 percent. According to a survey by sf.citi of 83 founders and CEOs, at least a quarter of those surveyed said that around 30 percent of their workforce will stay away. More than a dozen large companies, including Airbnb, PayPal, Salesforce, and Twitter, have either scaled down or moved from home after work.

Digital Realty and Oracle announced plans to move their headquarters to Austin, Texas, and Credit Karma has completely closed its San Francisco offices, according to the data. Optimizely, a software company, rents all of its headquarters’ 78,000 square feet, and although Yelp plans to maintain a presence in the city, it has also rented its entire headquarters.

Some CEOs have berated California, such as Elon Musk, who very publicly announced last year that he would move Tesla’s facilities to Texas after a dispute with the local government over COVID regulations during the pandemic. Silicon Valley has had longstanding tensions with the general public and local government, which hit the tech sector with a “homeless tax” passed in 2018 and maintained in September 2020 after legal challenges.

The tax put on the ballot paper by the Coalition for Homelessness to increase funding for homeless services such as shelters, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and the city’s Chamber of Commerce are campaigning against the move, which legislation will raise taxes by 0.5 percent for companies making more than $ 50 million annually.

While the city permits obtained from the Teslarati publication show Tesla’s plans to expand Fremont, California, the factory suggests that Musk’s threats were nothing more than bravery. The number of people who moved from San Francisco to Texas during the pandemic rose more than 30 percent, according to the study.

Most of the city’s pandemic emigrants stayed nearby, however, and moves from San Francisco County to Sacramento County increased 70 percent in 2020. Yasukochi said he was not concerned about the corporate sector losing influence or strength. In fact, he expects a kind of boomerang effect in his population very soon.

“People were suddenly free to report to an office,” said Yasukochi. “We expect people to somehow return to the city of San Francisco as soon as their employers demand that they return to the offices at least temporarily. We have already seen some early announcements volunteering to open their faces.” Base, but we expect to see this on a much larger scale this summer. “

Protesters hold signs as they march down Market Street prior to a rally to show solidarity with Asian Americans at the Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco, California on March 26, 2021. A new study found that the city lost more residents to resettlement than any other metropolitan area in the United States
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

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