(Jacob Barss-Bailey/Flickr)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – San Francisco has the highest rate of substandard plumbing among California’s 58 counties, an issue that is made even more pronounced during the coronavirus pandemic when washing hands is one of the most effective ways of warding off disease.

Nearly 2% of houses in San Francisco don’t have adequate plumbing, more than four times that in Los Angeles, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

The San Francisco-based institute drew its data from The American Community Survey, conducted by the US Census Bureau.

The survey found that in more than 6,300 housing units in California, people have no piped hot and cold water, no bathtub or shower, or no flush toilet.

After San Francisco, the three counties with the worst plumbing are: Shasta, Yolo, and Humboldt.

Those three counties lack hot and cold piped water at the highest rates, while housing in urban San Francisco, Alameda, and Los Angeles counties tends to lack a shower or tub, according to the survey.

The California county with the best plumbing is Napa County, where only .11% of the homes don’t have the proper plumbing.

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(Jacob Barss-Bailey/Flickr)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – San Francisco has the highest rate of substandard plumbing among California’s 58 counties, an issue that is made even more pronounced during the coronavirus pandemic when washing hands is one of the most effective ways of warding off disease.

Nearly 2% of houses in San Francisco don’t have adequate plumbing, more than four times that in Los Angeles, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

The San Francisco-based institute drew its data from The American Community Survey, conducted by the US Census Bureau.

The survey found that in more than 6,300 housing units in California, people have no piped hot and cold water, no bathtub or shower, or no flush toilet.

After San Francisco, the three counties with the worst plumbing are: Shasta, Yolo, and Humboldt.

Those three counties lack hot and cold piped water at the highest rates, while housing in urban San Francisco, Alameda, and Los Angeles counties tends to lack a shower or tub, according to the survey.

The California county with the best plumbing is Napa County, where only .11% of the homes don’t have the proper plumbing.

The post San Francisco has highest lack of plumbing in California, making washing tougher throughout pandemic appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

As Bay Area audiences return to their beloved venues, they’ll be hearing a lot about upgrades to HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning). Many venue managers tout their use of 100% outside air, for instance, to assure visitors’ COVID fears.

But all that air pumping comes with complications that homes and office buildings don’t have to deal with.

“Performance areas are really tough, because you blow more air and it’s louder. Curtains can ripple,” said Matt Suidan, a senior product manager at Enpowered Solutions, who has consulted with War Memorial Opera House, Davies Symphony Hall and American Conservatory Theater. Or any theater haze, used for a special effect, could get blown away.

Or, in the case of Davies Symphony Hall, at a certain fan speed, the acoustic dishes that hang from the ceiling can start moving and eventually bang into each other.

Matt Suidan, the senior project manager at Enpowered Solutions, stands on the roof of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco before inspecting an HVAC system. Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

More outside air also means less control over temperature, and the Opera House doesn’t have air conditioning, which isn’t just a patron comfort issue.

“When it comes to the dancers in the ballet and the members of the orchestra, they have stipulations in their collective bargaining agreements about what the temperature can be,” said John Caldon, who manages the War Memorial Opera House, Davies Symphony Hall and the Veterans Building, three San Francisco venues each the size of a city block.

Performing is physical, and if the temperature in the War Memorial’s pit exceeds a certain range, for instance, orchestra members are allowed to take their jackets off so they don’t overheat. (It hasn’t come to that so far this season.)

In the old days, whenever Caldon thought about a space’s HVAC, his primary concern was energy efficiency—how much indoor air he could recycle. More outside air meant more heating and cooling, which would mean more energy and higher costs for the city-owned venues.

“The overnight switch — once the CDC figured out that (the coronavirus) was an airborne infectious disease — was to run everything at 100% outside air,” he recalled, noting that the directive meant environmental concerns became secondary. “The concern is how many times can you turn that air over in a room?”

Individual HVAC ventilation fan systems that lead to various spaces inside American Conservatory Theater’s Geary Theater are seen from the roof of the San Francisco venue. Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

For Caldon and other venue managers, the pandemic has meant an immersion into HVAC. In May 2020, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, a nonprofit organization, issued its first pandemic guidance for all indoor spaces in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They were later modified, as many buildings in extreme climates found their machinery couldn’t handle 100% outside air. Despite the Bay Area’s milder climate, more outside air poses a risk here, too. For instance, the San Francisco fog can make equipment more vulnerable to corrosion.

Still, many of ASHRAE’s initial core recommendations remain, including:

• Using air filters with an efficiency of at least MERV-13, which means they can catch not just pollen, dust and pet dander but also smaller particles such as those from wildfire smoke as well as airborne bacteria and some viruses.
• In between a room’s occupied periods, flushing its air supply three times, which should eliminate 95% of contaminants.

Craig Lichtle of Legacy Mechanical and Energy Services checks the filters of a HVAC system leading to the auditorium of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

For local venues — some of which were built a century ago — these guidelines first meant finding out if their existing systems could meet the new standards. After months of assessing equipment produced an affirmative, Caldon recruited a stagehand to use a laser distance measure in all his buildings’ rooms to calculate volume, so he’d know how much air he’d have to move.

Venue managers who wished to exceed minimum requirements, perhaps so that they could prove to timid audiences that they were going above and beyond, quickly learned that only specially built facilities such as labs and hospitals can filter air much more finely and efficiently.

“Some of the ideas that have been suggested from different sources ask for things the building systems literally cannot do without completely ripping out an HVAC system and effectively almost tearing down the building,” said Suidan. “Your ducts can only handle a certain amount of airflow.”

Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the San Francisco Symphony during the symphony’s Re-Opening Night at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Photo: Laura Morton / Special to The Chronicle

and a capital campaign for an entirely new HVAC system would be an unlikely fundraising scheme during a pandemic, especially when staff may have been laid off or furloughed.

Perhaps for related reasons, Alyse Falconer, who is a board member of ASHRAE’s Golden Gate Chapter as well as an associate principal at San Francisco engineering firm Point Energy Innovations, hasn’t seen a surge of HVAC business since the pandemic hit.

“The problem is that nobody’s going into offices,” she said, which means some clients figure they can delay improvements. Still, Falconer said of the pandemic, “everybody instantly became an indoor air quality specialist, which is kind of funny. It’s interesting to explain what a MERV filter is to someone like my mother.”

Craig Lichtle of Legacy Mechanical and Energy Services adjusts and repairs various elements of an HVAC system on the roof of ACT’s Geary Theater. Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

With many entertainment venues, high ceilings can be a virtue, but the tight seating of theaters, auditoriums and stadiums means that HVAC interventions can only help so much to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Vaccinations and masking are still key.

“You can have amazing airflow, and somebody right next to you coughs in your face,” Suidan posited. “(The HVAC) doesn’t matter. You’re not going to be able to engineer that away.”

That doesn’t mean that HVAC can’t help reduce the risk of airborne transmission during a pandemic, but it’s difficult to quantify its role in practice, according to William P. Bahnfleth, a professor of architectural engineering at Penn State and chair of ASHRAE’s pandemic task force.

“We know that poorly ventilated facilities and ones that don’t have other ways of cleaning the air have been the places where there have been clusters of infections, super-spreading events,” he said. “We know more what doesn’t work than how well things actually work, and that’s a hard concept to get across to the public.”

The Warriors’ Stephen Curry lobs a pass to a teammate in a game against the Minnesota Timberwolves at Chase Center in San Francisco. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Venues still have other industry-specific concerns.

Chase Center, which marked its opening in September 2019 with a sold-out concert by Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony, has much greater HVAC capacity than many older performing arts venues. The facility has 16 air handlers that regulate and circulate air; 12 smaller ones about the size and shape of a truck’s box trailer, approximately 20 feet in depth; and four larger ones, for the bowl, that could fit multiple San Francisco apartments. By contrast, ACT’s Geary Theater has six air handlers, and its largest is about the size of one of Chase Center’s smaller ones.

But the home of the Golden State Warriors still has its limitations.

“I’m sure Steph Curry doesn’t want to be shooting into headwinds,” said Ian McDoom, Chase’s director of engineering. Not only must the center keep the temperature between 65 and 72 degrees for guest and talent comfort, it must also maintain relative humidity below 55% or the basketball court’s wooden floorboards might start to warp.

Chase Center is seen ahead of a game between the Warriors and the Pelicans in November. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

McDoom’s task has been to flush the air in the facility, which occupies a little more than 1 million square feet, with 100% outside air at least four times per hour. Accomplishing that, he estimates, has meant the arena’s electricity bills have increased by 10%, though pre-pandemic comparisons for the young facility are hard to come by.

For Bahnfleth, pandemic-era upgrades might have the virtue of furthering industry experts’ longer-term HVAC goals. He’s part of a group of advocates who have been pushing for better indoor air standards for decades.

“We’ve known for a long time that buildings that have higher ventilation rates, which means lower contaminant levels indoors, generally tend to have fewer sick building syndrome symptom complaints,” he said, referring to the well-documented phenomenon by which poor ventilation in offices and schools causes a variety of health problems, including headaches, fatigue and respiratory, skin and gastrointestinal problems. Well-ventilated buildings, he said, “have a positive effect on the learning of schoolchildren, higher worker productivity. The economic impact of that is hundreds of billions of dollars per year in the US, but it’s fallen on deaf ears for a long time.”

Craig Lichtle of Legacy Mechanical and Energy Services adjusts and repairs various elements of an HVAC system on the roof of ACT’s Geary Theater in San Francisco. Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

His hope, he said, is that “the desire to do something about diseases like the COVID epidemic or the seasonal influenza” can spur action to “step up the standards for indoor air quality.” Pre-pandemic standards, he noted, were focused on disease and odor.

“That’s a different approach than saying we’d like to have indoor air quality that promotes the best levels of productivity and cognitive function and reduces other types of illnesses.”

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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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Cohen said her department is ramping up outreach work in the Mission District, in part by increasing partnerships with nonprofits that serve the Latinx community.

Francisco Herrera, who works on housing and homelessness issues for the city’s Latino Task Force, said evictions and difficulty accessing COVID rent relief played a major role in forcing more Latinos onto the streets.

“Right in the middle of the pandemic, when there was supposed to be a moratorium on evictions, in fact there were tons of evictions,” he said.

It all comes down to the severe shortage of affordable housing, Herrera added, a problem that can only be addressed through major policy changes.

“We need to prioritize affordable housing for people who live, work and have made this city, not market rate housing for people who do not even live here,” he said.

When the Latino Task Force surveyed more than 100 unhoused residents in the Mission earlier this year, it found that almost a quarter of them said they became homeless during the pandemic, and most were not on any housing waiting list.

The city’s February homelessness count found a total of 7,754 people living on the streets or in shelters, down from 8,035 in 2019. Of those, Black people continued to be the most overrepresented, making up 38% of the city’s unhoused population, despite accounting for only 6% of its general population.

Correction: An earlier version of the chart in this story listed the wrong percentage increase among unhoused Latinx residents between 2019 and 2022. It is an increase of 55%, not 30%.

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April 26, 2022

Payment processing giant Visa’s profits rose 21% in the first three months of the year fueled by a large jump in spending on the company’s namesake credit and debit card network.

The San Francisco-based company reported Tuesday that it earned $3.65 billion, or $1.70 a share, in its fiscal second quarter that ended March 31. That was up from $3.03 billion, or $1.38 a share, in the same period a year earlier.

Its earnings adjusted to exclude one-time items amounted to $1.79 a share. The results topped the expectations of analysts who were looking for Visa to earn $1.65 a share on an adjusted basis, according to FactSet.

CBS Local Digital Media personalizes the global reach of CBS-owned and operated television and radio stations with a local perspective.

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Even after a tumultuous pandemic that sent many households into crisis, the number of persons experiencing homelessness in San Francisco dropped to 7,754 in 2022 from 8,305 in 2019, a 3.5% decline, according to data released Monday from the city’s biennial count.

While the Point-in-Time Count of San Francisco’s homeless is considered by many to be an undercount, the survey’s findings hint that new policies, such as the Proposition C tax for homelessness services and other housing programs that San Francisco utilized during the pandemic, may have alleviated an even worse homelessness crisis.

The total decrease includes a 15% drop in unsheltered homelessness, meaning individuals who are sleeping outside in tents or on sidewalks rather than in a shelter or another form of temporary housing. An estimated 4,400 unsheltered individuals are estimated to be living in San Francisco currently, compared with 5,180 recorded in the 2019 survey.

There was simultaneously an 18% increase in the number of individuals living in shelters and transitional housing, according to the survey.

“The fact that we were able to make this progress during the course of a global pandemic shows that when The City and our nonprofit partners work together, we can make a difference,” said Mayor London Breed. “But this is only a first step. We will keep focused on implementing our Homelessness Recovery Plan to add more housing and shelter, and getting our street response teams out to connect people on the streets to services.”

Officials credit the results to an increase in both permanent and temporary housing options such as the Shelter-in-Place hotel program, which provided hotel rooms to homeless individuals and families starting in November 2020.

The program had activated up to 25 hotels at its peak and has been working to exit residents into other permanent and transitional housing options as the pandemic has eased. Ten hotel sites with 918 people remain operating, according to a public dashboard on the program.

In 2020, Breed also launched the Homelessness Recovery Plan, which has involved bringing on nearly 1,500 new permanent supportive and transitional housing options to The City’s inventory, and about 1,000 are slated to open in July.

“Our investments in shelter and housing are resulting in improvements in the lives of people experiencing homelessness and conditions on our streets,” said San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing Executive Director Shireen McSpadden. “The Point-in-Time Count’s critical data will inform our programs and our mission to make homelessness rare, brief and one-time.”

Others also point to policies such as the eviction moratorium and rent relief programs as crucial homelessness prevention tools during the pandemic and beyond.

“With the pandemic, we had real concerns that people would be evicted and fall into homelessness. With the eviction moratoriums and resources put into homelessness prevention and prop. C dollars, we were prepared to ward off an increase,” said Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Proposition C is a measure passed by San Francisco voters in 2018 that taxes large technology companies to fund homelessness services.

“What we’re seeing and what I was hoping to see is Prop. C’s dollars are starting to work,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, which advocated for Proposition C. “There have been hundreds of people housed and homeless prevention dollars are starting to roll out, and more people are getting behavioral health treatment. We’re starting to see the promise of Prop. C.”

This year’s Point-in-Time survey was conducted on Feb. 23. It is an imperfect yet critical measure required by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for cities to receive funding for homelessness services. The most recent prior count occurred in 2019; the 2021 count was delayed a year due to COVID-19.

The survey records those who are living in homeless shelters and transitional housing on the night of the count, as well as a visual count of unsheltered homeless individuals sleeping outdoors in tents, vehicles and other places. The preliminary data will be followed by a more in-depth report this summer with qualitative and demographic data based on interviews.

Most stakeholders agree the methodology for the Point-in-Time Count leaves room for error and subjective judgment based on what may or may not look like homelessness. But it remains one of the few and primary reporting mechanisms The City has for understanding its homeless population.

Due to the count’s imperfections, it’s hard to fully decrease credit in homelessness to any particular initiative. There were fewer surveyors this year in San Francisco than in the past, and some people were almost certainly missed in the count.

Just across the bridge in Alameda County, the same Point-in-Time Count found the population of homeless people increased by 22% in the last three years. The vast majority of the 9,747 individuals counted were unsheltered, living on the street, in tents or in vehicles.

Alameda County’s results reflect what many advocates for homeless resources warned could be a result of the pandemic, which led many to experience layoffs, illness and other challenges that fuel housing insecurity and homelessness.

“(Alameda) county doesn’t have the same tax base we have or an initiative that tapped into large corporations in the way we did. Prop. C taxes corporate income over $50 million, and we’re able to turn that around and address the effects of severe poverty,” Friedenbach said.

Other several neighboring counties also saw significant decreases in homelessness, signaling a mixed outcome overall across the Bay Area in terms of responding to and preventing homelessness.

“Bay Area governments and nonprofits played deep defense on homelessness during the pandemic and we have more or less held the line — but now we need to go on offense and end the suffering on our streets,” said Tomiquia Moss, CEO of All Home, a regional homeless advocacy organization. “Programs like Roomkey and Homekey, as well as eviction moratoria and emergency rental assistance programs, have changed what is possible.”

The San Francisco survey found an 11% decrease in adults who are chronically homeless, meaning they experience homelessness for more than one year or fall in and out of homelessness. There was also a 6% decrease in unaccompanied youth.

San Francisco’s results challenge the idea that visible street homelessness has gotten worse over the pandemic.

“A large percentage of people experiencing homelessness are not seen every day. They are in shelters, going about their work and daily lives, and we pass by them every day,” said Cohen. “But the folks who stand out and cause concern on the street are displaying symptoms of behavioral health crises. That is a fraction of the population, but they are incredibly visible and the scenes can be upsetting on the street.”

sjohnson@sfexaminer.com

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A lot has been written about the so-called “Bay Area exodus” during the pandemic — the floods of people who fled the region’s high prices and frenzied lifestyle for places like Bozeman, Montana, and Austin, Texas, for an easier, more affordable life.

The latest data from the US Census Bureau shows that people did indeed leave the San Francisco Bay Area counties during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro area saw the third-highest number of residents in the country packing up and moving between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021, with a net migration loss of 128,870 people. By comparison, New York-Newark-Jersey City recorded a net migration loss of 385,455, and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim saw 204,776 people leave.

Where did the people in the San Francisco metro area go? The census didn’t specify where people moved from a certain area, but we can assume some of those people may have gone to Texas, Arizona or Florida. The data shows that Texas had “four of the top 10 largest-gaining metro areas.” Of the metro areas, the largest net domestic migration gains were Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler (66,850), Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (54,319), and Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater (42,089), the US Census said in a news release.

On a more granular level, San Francisco saw the sixth-highest numeric decline among counties across the country, with its population shrinking from 873,965 in April 2020 to 815,201 in July 2021, marking a 6.7% decline. Numeric decline is “the difference between the population of an area at the beginning and end of a time period,” the US Census said, and it takes into account births and deaths and people moving into and out of an area.

Santa Clara County saw the seventh highest numeric decline with the population dropping by 50,751 residents, and Alameda County the ninth highest with a 33,797 person drop.

Many Bay Area-based companies made it easy for people to pack up and move, allowing employees to relocate and work remotely. Google said last month that more than 14,000 of its workers transferred to a new location or went fully remote during the pandemic, with 85% of applications approved. Google didn’t specify the number of Bay Area employees that left the area, but the company is based in Mountain View with offices all around the region.

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Having inched down to just under 20 percent at the end of last year, the effective office vacancy rate in San Francisco ticked back up to a pandemic high of 21.7 percent in the first quarter of 2022, representing 18.7 million square feet of vacant office space in the city, including 5.3 million square feet of space which is technically leased but sitting vacant and 13.4 million square feet of un-leased space, according to data from Cushman & Wakefield.

As a point of comparison, there was under 5 million square feet of vacant office space in San Francisco prior to the pandemic with a vacancy rate of 5.7 percent, versus a long-term average of around 12 percent. And as we outlined last quarter, foreshadowing the first quarter rise:

“Despite the drop in the overall vacancy rate at the end of 2021, the amount of un-leased office space in San Francisco actually ticked up, both in the absolute and relatively, with 1.3 million square feet of space that was being offered for sublet in the third quarter having been leased, reoccupied or returned to the market as directly vacant space. And total leasing activity actually dropped from the third to fourth quarter of last year, with “a scarcity of large transactions,” a push back of return to office dates (yes, the surge in COVID cases is meaningful, beyond increasing hospitalizations and deaths) , and under 1 million square feet of space having been leased, including sublets, for a negative net absorption.”

And in terms of active demand for the 18.7 million square feet of vacant space, Cushman & Wakefield is currently tracking active requirements for 4.9 million square feet, which was down from the fourth quarter of last year and 33.8 percent below the pre-pandemic demand.

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SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The 2022 Game Developers Conference (GDC), the world’s largest and longest-running event serving professionals dedicated to the art and science of making games, concluded its 36th edition today, after a week of networking, learning and inspiration. The conference was the largest in San Francisco in the past two years, with a total of 12,000 industry professionals attending at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center from March 21-25 and a further 5,000 joining on the virtual platform of the conference, which was available to increase attendee accessibility, for a total of 17,000 attendees. The conference prioritized health and safety for all attendees and required proof of vaccination and face masks to be worn indoors. GDC will be returning to the Moscone Convention Center Monday, March 20 to Friday, March 24, 2023. The call for submissions for GDC 2023 will open in the summer.

GDC 2022 featured over 1,000 speakers across over 600 lectures, workshops and roundtable discussions and networking events, physically reuniting the game development community. More than 200 exhibitors showcased their newest technologies, software and services on the GDC Expo Floor, including industry leaders such as Amazon, AMD, ARM, Google, Nintendo, Unity, Wemade and more. The Expo Floor also provided attendees with the opportunity to play some of the most exciting and boundary-pushing independent games, meet the developers at the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Pavilion and to experience the uniquely experimental games of the alt.ctrl.GDC exhibit that is home to games that use alternative controllers.

The conference featured sessions full of insights from some of the biggest names in electronic entertainment. Josh Wardle, creator of the international phenomenon Wordle, gave a talk on how he created, grew and sold the ubiquitous word game, with a focus on all the mistakes made along the way to its status as a huge hit. Top voices spoke on learnings from the creation of hit games including, Baldur’s Gate 3, Clash of Clans, Horizon Forbidden West, Life is Strange: True Colors, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Psychonauts 2, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Sable, the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser experience at Disney World, classics such as Wolfenstein 3D and Q-bert and much more.

A centerpiece of GDC was the multi-part presentation “GDC Main Stage: The Developer’s Renaissance,” which focused on the future of game development and the evolving workplace with esteemed speakers from Eidos-Montréal, PlayStation Studios and Devolver Digital/DeepWell DTx. The speakers discussed finding the right balance in a remote/hybrid work environment, taking a stronger approach to addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and empowering developers to “kill it with kindness.”

GDC 2022 celebrated the top developers of the past year with the 24th annual Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards and the 22nd annual Game Developers Choice Awards. Daniel Mullins Games’ genre-bending, deck-building roguelike game, Inscryption, made history by being the first game ever to win both the Seumas McNally Grand Prize in the IGF Awards and the Game of the Year Award in the Game Developers Choice Awards in the same night. An archive of the IGF and GDCA ceremonies can be viewed at http://twitch.tv/gdc.

“It’s been an honor to reunite the exceptional video game development community at GDC 2022 and to share in the love for games and each other that has brought so many people to San Francisco this week,” said Katie Stern, who oversees the GDC as VP of Entertainment Media at Informa Tech. “The learnings, accomplishments and people that have made up GDC 2022, have made it clear that the video game industry community is stronger than ever and we’re already so excited for what is to come in GDC 2023.”

For more details on the Game Developers Conference visit www.gdconf.com. The GDC Vault website – www.gdcvault.com – will offer access to a wide variety of GDC lectures and sessions in the coming weeks. GDC All Access Pass holders and individual Vault subscribers will get access to hundreds of video sessions from GDC 2022 and previous GDC shows. Official photos of the conference are available via the GDC Flickr account: www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/.

About GDC

The Game Developers Conference® (GDC) is the world’s largest professional game industry event with market-defining content for programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals, business decision makers, and others involved in the development of interactive games and immersive experiences . GDC brings together the global game development community year-round through events and digital media, including the GDC Masterclass, GDC Vault, gamedeveloper.com, Game Career Guide, Independent Games Festival and Summit, and the Game Developers Choice Awards.

GDC is organized by Informa PLC, a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B events organizer in the world. To learn more and for the latest news and information visit www.informa.com.

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