Colossal wildfire plumes that can be spotted from space have erupted on several California wildfires in the past months.

The Mosquito Fire burning in Placer and El Dorado counties produced torrents of smoke that soared tens of thousands of feet into the air. The cloud of soot and debris could be seen 60 miles away. Smoke from the blaze blanketed large swaths of Northern California and western Nevada, resulting in hazardous-level air quality.

Wildfire plumes in the western US are reaching greater heights than ever, a recent study reports — especially in California’s Sierra Nevada.

“The higher the plume reaches, the more likely it is to be transported rapidly over large distances,” said David Peterson, a meteorologist with the US Naval Research Laboratory-Monterey who was not part of the new study.

That means smoke, carrying a hodgepodge of chemical compounds, wafts farther distances and impacts more people. Wildfire smoke can irritate lungs and even cause wider health issues, especially for vulnerable populations like older adults, children and those with underlying health conditions.

A pyrocumulonimbus cloud from mosquito fire as seen from the air of a commercial airline flight over Sacramento, September 8, 2022. Video: Courtesy Gregory Van Acker

“Once these particles enter our bloodstream they can pretty much affect our entire bodies,” said Rosana Aguilera Becker, an environmental health scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

The study, out of the University of Utah, used mathematical models to simulate plume heights for about 4.6 million wildfires. The analyzes examined burned areas detected by satellite in the western US and Canada from 2003 through 2020, during August and September. The researchers found that over those years, plume top heights increased hundreds of feet across much of the mountainous western US

But not all areas saw the same amount of growth.

“Sierra Nevada definitely stands out,” said study author John Lin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah. In the Sierra, the researchers found that plumes grew about an additional 750 feet per year. On wildfires like the Mosquito, that’s meant intense plumes have soared to some 40,000 feet.

Firefighters watch a smoke column from a distance during the Mosquito Fire in unincorporated Placer County.

Stephen Lam/The Chronicle

Other regions, like the Southern Rockies and Eastern Cascades, increased by over 300 feet per year.

This upward trend increased even more after 2015, although the results weren’t statistically significant.

This uptick in plume top height was accompanied by increases in wildfire emissions that cause poor air quality, especially in the Sierra Nevada region. As the plumes explode in height, smoke can surge above the planetary boundary layer, the layer of the atmosphere closest to the ground.

You’ve encountered this boundary any time you’ve been on a plane descending to land.

“If you’re going into SFO, you probably are familiar with the times when it suddenly gets really rocky,” Lin said, “That’s a pretty good indication of where the (planetary boundary layer) starts.”

Smoke that makes it to these altitudes — about 3,000 feet above the ground — disperses more readily due to strong winds.

The researchers propose that the increase in wildfire plume height is due in part to climate change: Drier conditions and warmer temperatures enable fires at higher elevations. This vertical shift gives wildfire plumes a head start toward sending smoke particles higher into the atmosphere, above the planetary boundary layer.

Some plumes make it even farther, past the boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere. These are pyrocumulonimbus clouds, also known as pyroCbs.

“A pyroCb generally reaches the typical cruising altitudes of jet aircraft and beyond,” Peterson said. “So we’re talking 30,000 feet or higher.”

PyroCbs are similar in appearance to thunderstorm-producing cumulonimbus clouds: puffy and towering. A recent example is the immense plume produced by the Mosquito Fire, which soared to heights observed from airspace.

These clouds act like chimneys, funneling smoke up into the stratosphere.

“It’s a thunderstorm that’s ingesting smoke at the cloud base,” Peterson said. “And then it gets accelerated through that thunderstorm cloud and ejected through the top of it.”

The researchers identified increasing pyroCb activity within the Colorado Plateau over the study period. They also found a slight uptick in pyroCbs in the Sierra Nevada in recent years. Additional research is needed to get a clear picture of what’s happening with these extreme plumes, which are still a developing research area.

What is known, however, is that smoke that makes it to these altitudes can linger for months and spread over vast distances, potentially causing health issues for many.

“There is a great concern that wildfires will be — and are already — a major source of air pollution,” Aguilera Becker said.

Jack Lee (he/him) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jack.lee@sfchronicle.com

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Don’t be fooled. The downtown area, the city’s primary economic driver, is teetering on the edge, facing challenges greater than previously known, new data shows. The wounds suffered by the economic core are deep, and city officials have yet to come up with a plan to make the fundamental changes that some economists and business leaders argue could make the area thrive again.

“A general economic decline is what we’re trying to avoid,” said Wade Rose, president of Advance SF, a business group that advocates on behalf of several major employers in San Francisco. The group is working with the city on short-term ideas to bring more people back downtown, but Rose agrees that the problem needs a rethink in the long run.

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Before the pandemic, office work was responsible for a whopping 72% of the city’s gross domestic product, according to the Controller’s Office — work that was heavily concentrated in the Financial District, the Market Street corridor, the Embarcadero and Mission Bay. A  precise definition for downtown doesn’t exist, and various city agencies use different boundaries, with some regarding it as the northeast portion of the city.

It is easy for San Franciscans who don’t work downtown to ignore it. The city is made up of neighborhoods that serve many of the needs of residents living in them. Relative to many other American cities, few people live in what is loosely considered downtown. The result is that many see the area as largely for office workers, tourists, conventioneers and a handful of destination restaurants.

When all office work shut down, BART ridership dropped catastrophically, and it is not projected to recover fully until the 2029-30 fiscal year at the earliest. The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap. Without commuters spending money near their San Francisco offices each day, other downtown businesses closed, destroying the incomes of many who could ill afford it.

If swaths of shops, restaurants and cafes downtown stay shuttered, it could cause lasting harm to tourism, said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of  San Francisco Travel, the city’s primary tourism and convention trade association.

“We don’t have a Disney park here,” D’Alessandro said, so San Francisco relies heavily on its hospitality industry to attract families and business groups. “Most of the hospitality industry is made up of small businesses,” he said.

Office employees make their way to work down a deserted Sutter Street at Montgomery Street in San Francisco. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

A slow recovery

It has been a year since vacant office-space rates soared to their highest levels since the 2008 Great Recession, as some business activity has picked up. And while other major cities face large numbers of workers not going back into offices, San Francisco’s numbers are among the highest nationwide.

The San Francisco metropolitan area has consistently lagged behind nearly all other major urban centers in worker returns, according to office-occupancy trend data from Kastle Systems, a security company that monitors access-card swipes at client buildings.

In San Francisco’s downtown area specifically, office attendance has been even lower than reported. At The Chronicle’s request, Kastle provided swipe data for the eight ZIP codes that make up the city’s office-heavy northeast. The data shows the rate of worker return, relative to pre-pandemic levels, has not broken 30% and was 26.4% the week of May 18, the most recent period the company provided.

Other news reports have cited higher figures — for example, 34.6% for the same week in May — because they drew from Kastle data that included swipes from Oakland and Hayward, the two other large cities in the San Francisco metro area. And this is despite efforts by Mayor London Breed and some business leaders to urge workers to come back to their offices. A recent COVID-19 variant surge isn’t helping.

If those suites and retail spaces remain empty in the long run, “the buildings will be devalued,” Rose said, “which ultimately means that tax revenues will decline dramatically” and endanger city coffers. Another potential challenge, Rose said, is that many tech firms might see San Francisco, with its high real estate prices and taxes, as no longer worth it, given how many employees are working remotely.

“If the number of companies diminish and the number of people working in the tech industry diminishes, the network effect diminishes, and the digital engine starts cooling down,” Rose said. “And that is not a good thing.”

Even if tourism returns to pre-pandemic levels by 2024, as projected, the levels of remote versus in-office work will be the major factor in when and how the city, and downtown in particular, recovers. And the outlook is not encouraging.

“San Francisco is not likely to ever get office workers returning more than 50% of the time,” according to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economics professor who studies remote work trends. In other words, an average of 2.5 days per workweek. Attempts to surpass that threshold would be like “trying to push water uphill,” he said.

Some downtown office buildings are all but deserted. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Bloom is part of a team that has conducted monthly nationwide surveys since early in the pandemic, each with between 2,500 and 5,000 participants. Respondents reported their employers’ latest plans for post-pandemic work policies — the number of days per week that staff would probably work from home.

In August 2020, the first instance of the survey, employers expected staff to work an average of 1.6 days per week in the office once society normalized. The figure has steadily risen since then and was 2.3 days in April, the most recent period measured. It appears to be stabilizing.

“It will likely flatten out at 2.3, 2.4, 2.5,” Bloom said. “I’ve talked to hundreds of employers, and that’s the same message we’re getting. So that triangulates very well.”

But remember: That’s just the national average.

“San Francisco would just look like a more extreme version of this,” Bloom said, because it surpasses many other cities in key traits that foster remote work. With its highly educated workforce and prevalent technology and finance industries, many of its employees can work on a laptop from the comfort of their own couches.

Indeed, a separate, one-time survey that Bloom conducted from January to March of this year found San Franciscans wanted to work remotely 53% more often than they did before the pandemic, outpacing office workers in the other cities studied.

A single commuter exits the Embarcadero BART Station near California and Drumm streets downtown. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Those figures stand in sharp contrast with budget projections from the city’s Controller’s Office, which rest partly on the assumption that remote work will normalize at 33%, meaning workers would be in the office two-thirds of the time.

“There’s not a precise calculation that led to our specific estimates,” said Carol Lu, citywide revenue manager for the office. “There is a lot of uncertainty about this projection.”

Her team based its estimate on the level of office attendance that some major employers like Google and Apple were requiring, as well as what smaller employers expected and what experts in the commercial office market were hearing.

Two days per week of telecommuting, or 40%, was the most common answer. The office lowered it to 33% “to account for employees who choose to come into the office more,” Lu said, as well as “financial and legal industries which seemed to expect more days in the office than the technology companies.”

But Lu acknowledged “we don’t know how well hybrid plans will work for companies. We don’t know how telecommuting will evolve over time. We don’t know what employees’ expectations will look like a year from now.”

Bloom, on the other hand, is more certain.

“It’s pretty clear what’s coming,” he said. “The sooner I think we face that, and adjust, the better it will be.”

City revenues may suffer

Over time, multiple tax revenues for City Hall could be at risk: property taxes, from emptied buildings that drop in value; sales taxes, from businesses that are struggling or gone, and others. That could lead to a reduction of public services, Bloom said.

“My biggest fear is the city either has to slash spending on, say, police, or it aggressively puts up taxes on businesses to cover the shortfall and drives them out of the city,” he said.

In March, the Controller’s Office said it expects a budget surplus of $74.7 million over the next two years, based in part on the city’s projections of office-worker returns, federal financial aid and record-high returns on pension investments. But that estimate was revised downward to $15 million last month, in large part due to expected salary increases for public-sector union workers.

Remote work aside, vacant offices — space that is either not leased or leased by an absent tenant who is trying to sublease it to recoup rental costs — are of continuing concern. A record high 20.4 million square feet of San Francisco office space, or roughly 24% of the citywide total, was vacant at the end of the first quarter of this year, according to real estate brokerage firm CBRE.

Vacancies could increase as companies get better at coordinating their hybrid staff, efficiently staggering in-office days so they can permanently reduce their total square footage, Bloom said.

A former Walgreens is one of many deserted storefronts along Kearny Street in the Financial District. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Businesses hobbled

The impact on local businesses cannot be overstated. During the pandemic, absent office workers’ earnings stopped flowing to cafes, retail outlets, restaurants and entertainment. Even once office work normalizes, the average worker will still spend an estimated $5,293 less per year in San Francisco, according to joint research by Bloom and economists at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and the University of Chicago.

The fallout: Empty, abandoned office and commercial spaces mar the Financial District and surrounding areas. Many of the windows are bannered with signs for leasing opportunities, an odd appeal along these sparsely inhabited streets, where depressed consumer demand is obvious.

On one stretch of Kearny Street between Sutter and Pine, The Chronicle counted 11 closed ground-floor businesses out of nearly 50.

Casualties include neighborhood favorites like Topsy’s Fun House bar and Pachino Pizzeria. At Anthony’s Shoe Service, Gino Gentile is holding on for now. His family has run the business for 56 years, and in the “before times,” Gentile managed a team of five people. Now it’s down to him, and he’s far from turning a profit.

Gino Gentile of Anthony’s Shoe Service looks out the window of his shop on Kearny Street in the Financial District. Gentile now takes clients by appointment only, and has scaled down from a six-person operation to working solo due to reduced clientele Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

“As far as really getting an income? Not an option. Not even close. I’m just living off my savings,” Gentile said. “Eventually, I’m going to have to scale down.”

Some commercial real estate firms say that as interest in opening businesses downtown has dropped, it has risen in other areas of the city.

“We had our best year in 2021,” said Santino DeRose, managing broker at Maven real estate. “The neighborhoods by far, where people lived and worked, came back the fastest.”

Top: a closed sign sits in the window of the former Vision First optometrist now shuttered along Kearny Street. Above: an office building at 181 Fremont St. is seen through an empty Salesforce Transit Center in the South of Market district of San Francisco. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Searching for solutions

For city planners, businesses and residents, the question is, what’s to be done?

City officials and business leaders are working together, understanding that unless the city can defy national remote-work trends, its economic core will be forever altered.

“The goal is not to assume that offices and those tenants renting those offices are themselves going to just go back to five days a week in the same size footprint in the office buildings that they were in,” said Kate Sofis, director of the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development. “I think that’s a permanent change.”

Sofis’ office is working with business leaders to craft a strategy for bringing the economic core back to life. The immediate plan is to hold recurring events like concerts in local bars, restaurants and public spaces to entice office workers and others to the area. Breed has pitched spending $48.9 million over the next two fiscal years on a variety of  pandemic recovery efforts, including events.

As these efforts get under way, Sofis will watch for upticks in tourism and daily commuters into the city, among other key metrics. If, about six months from now, those figures are stalling out, “that’s when we really need to sort of look at bigger guns,” she said, declining to clarify what that might entail.

The city is searching for ideas to bring workers and others back to Financial District streets like Sutter and Kearny, which were emptied by the pandemic. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

“It’s a bit premature for us to share specifics at this stage,” said Gloria Chan, the office’s director of communications, in a follow-up email. Ideas for new initiatives would result from conversations with the area’s stakeholders, she said, focused on things like keeping streets cleaner, attracting new businesses and encouraging office workers to eat at local restaurants.

Sofis said the six-month timetable might change in response to big environmental upsets, for instance “another significant wave of the coronavirus.”

“You don’t want to be planting something in the ground where the ground is still shifting,” Sofis said. Bloom agrees that there is no rush, citing the uncertainty of the pandemic.

“It seems little,” said UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti. “Concerts and events like those are a good idea, but they’re likely to help on the margins. I don’t think they’re going to be transformative.”

If officials are looking for immediate fixes, then Breed should require all municipal workers to fully return to the office, Moretti said. To sweeten the deal, maybe the city could cover those people’s transit costs, he added.

“I’m surprised by how slowly the mayor is bringing back the public workforce,” Moretti said. Requiring a full return would set an example for the private sector, increase BART ridership, “and it would be a shot in the arm for the small businesses that have been struggling for two years.”

In November, Breed required that city staff work on site at least two days per week, though individual departments could demand more — and that is still the policy, said Aliya Chisti, senior policy analyst at the San Francisco Department of Human Resources. Chisti did not directly answer the question of whether Breed could immediately require full-time office attendance. Instead, she said in an email: “The Interim COVID-19 Telecommuting Policy is an addendum to the City’s already existing standard Telecommuting Policy … and will continue for the duration of the local emergency unless ended sooner by the City with reasonable advance notice.”

Data on how many public employees have worked on site during the pandemic “is currently not centralized,” Chisti said, though she estimated it was about two-thirds. The total public workforce is 36,782 people, said Mawuli Tugbenyoh, the department’s deputy director of policy and external affairs.

The owners of Nigella SF on Market Street in the Financial District have to keep one door locked to discourage unwanted intrusions. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Public safety a big concern

Any strategy that the city undertakes will have to account for fractious politics and two big, related concerns: homelessness and public safety.

“I hear it all the time, that people don’t feel safe walking around,” said Andy Chun, owner of Schroeder’s restaurant and multiple other businesses in the downtown area, and a board member of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which advocates for restaurants’ interests. Chun said he frequently sees “drug abuse, people using the street as a toilet,” though he said he doesn’t personally feel unsafe during the day.

Nancy Oakes, chef and co-owner of Boulevard on Mission Street near the Embarcadero, said the area is a hot spot for car break-ins — it’s happened to her twice — and can feel generally threatening. She recounted an instance in February when a man wandered in off the street and got aggressive with the floor manager.

“The manager approaches him, he gets punched. It happens again. Three guests get up and help remove him from the building,” Oakes said.

“It would be nice if we could feel safer,” said Rubie Kade Campbell, co-owner with James Russell Austin of Nigella SF Botanical Boutique, on Market Street near the Embarcadero. The duo moved into their downtown location during the pandemic, capitalizing on lower commercial rents and hoping to hold out until the streets came back to life and they could grow their clientele from interested passersby. The strategy worked, and orders have risen in recent months.

But with the renewed foot traffic, they must always be ready to react when someone struggling with severe mental illness enters and gets loud and frightens customers.

Nigella SF co-owner Rubie Kade Campbell  and co-owner James Russell Austin have confronted  safety concerns in their recently leased Market Street space. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

“On any given day, we keep one door locked, and we’re ready to close the other very quickly,” Campbell said, adding that they try to avoid calling the police because they don’t want to land anyone in jail. “We’ve had people kick in our door. It’s hard. We feel for people, but we need to run a business.”

Stanford professor Bloom believes the city should consider using vacant commercial space for new housing that would help address San Francisco’s interminable affordability crisis. It would also create a local clientele to offset the impact of remote work.

“Apart from the transition cost, what’s not to like?” he said. Numerous news stories have detailed the high cost and complexity of conversions. But that only makes it difficult — not impossible.

UC economist Moretti supported the idea of converting work spaces to homes. “I don’t see an enormous downside, and I see all the potential upside,” he said. He cautioned that it wouldn’t immediately breathe life into the city’s core. Even in a hypothetical scenario “that let the property owners switch without any cost tomorrow, it would take many, many years for that to occur.”

Richard Florida, an urban theorist and professor at the University of Toronto, offered a more expansive version of the idea: Yes, downtown should get more housing, but that should include homes for low-income people and give rise to a “15-minute neighborhood.” All of a resident’s needs — work, recreation, groceries, laundry, school for children — should be within a 15-minute walk from their doorstep.

Florida presented the idea in an April meeting with city officials and business leaders. Robbie Silver, head of the Downtown SF Community Benefit District, said he has a forthcoming plan that emphasizes a more walkable downtown. It’s unclear how closely it will follow Florida’s vision.

Whatever plan takes root, the result had better be interesting, Florida said, quoting urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs:

“When a great place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

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SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – California, and the Bay Area in particular, continues to experience slowing population growth, according to a recent analysis by the California Policy Lab.

In the results released on Wednesday, the lab said that by the end of September 2021, compared to March 2020, an even lower rate of people had moved into the state – it’s 38% lower.

The rate of people leaving the state is now 12% higher than it was before COVID-19, the data shows.

Population growth has been particularly slow for the Bay Area since the pandemic began. The data shows that the rate of people moving to San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties from abroad has decreased by 48–53%.

Why California’s Inner Mask Mandate is Different for Some Bay Area counties

At the same time, more people were contacting moving companies and leaving California entirely.

Of all California counties, the lab said San Francisco is the only one where the county churn rate has increased more than 30%, meaning the number of people leaving San Francisco is increasing.

The California Policy Lab’s analysis used data from the University of California Consumer Credit Panel on residential locations for Californians with credit history.

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A dirty and trash-strewn bathroom in Norfolk, Virginia in February 2021. Some families don’t even have that. Source – Yitzilitt, CC SA 4.0.

When they need to go to the bathroom, more than 1 million people in the United States must turn to chamber pots, school showers, and public toilets. Almost half a million households do not have basic indoor plumbing, new research has shown.

While some rural and indigenous communities have never had indoor plumbing, you may be surprised to learn that the vast majority of Americans “plumbered” live in urban areas – with one in three households in 15 Cities across the country, according to research by the Plumbing Poverty Project (PPP).

The Plumbing Poverty Project is a joint venture between King’s College London and the University of Arizona. The work is based on the community surveys of the US Census Bureau. The full analysis was released Monday in association with the Guardian as part of a long-running series exposing America’s water crisis.

The researchers found that even in some of the richest cities in the country, renters and people of color were more likely to live in a house with no running water or flush toilets. The situation is particularly dire in San Francisco, California and Portland, Oregon.

Both cities are considered to be advanced technology centers on the west coast with a growing wealth gap and a homeless crisis. And San Francisco has more billionaires than any other metropolis except New York and Hong Kong, according to Wealth-X.

In San Francisco, nearly 15,000 families live in homes without adequate plumbing. That number has increased 12 percent since 2000, while the median price of a home has tripled. The data also showed that while black Americans make up 9 percent of the city’s population, they make up 17 percent of households with no indoor plumbing.

Captive twilight real estate photography captured in Cleveland, Ohio as part of real estate and corporate virtual tours in 2020. Source – Captivlymedia, CC SA 4.0.

Here’s an example: In San Francisco, Rosa Ramirez and her two daughters lived in a studio apartment for $ 2,300 a month until recently. Yellow water was coming from the tap on the sink and the toilet could not be used because it was not connected properly; her landlord wouldn’t fix it.

The family went to a nearby donut shop or coffee shop to use the restroom. When the pandemic started, the doors were closed to them. “It was unbearable,” said Ramiréz.

“The history of sanitary poverty in San Francisco is inextricably linked with priceless housing, falling incomes, transformations in California’s post-recession rental sector, and racist prosperity gaps fueled by a kind of ‘anti-black urbanism’ that has either propelled blacks in San Franciscans precarious or out of the bay, ”said Katie Meehan, senior researcher at PPP and Professor of Environment and Society at King’s College London, according to The Hill.

Tenants in San Francisco make up less than half of households in the city’s metropolitan area, but nearly 90 percent of homes have no working plumbing, The Guardian reported.

The report also notes that cities like Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, Seattle, and Cleveland made little or no progress in improving plumbing problems between 2000 and 2017. All five of these cities have more than 3,000 households without proper plumbing.

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The Bay Area has the dubious honor of having the most expensive gasoline in the United States.

The average value for normal gas in the Bay Area was about $ 4.33 a gallon on Sunday, an increase of about 7 cents over the past week, said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

Industry analyst Trilby Lundberg said the spike across the country is less than rising crude oil prices, which means another spike is in sight. This, in addition to wholesale increases and new taxes on gas, could fuel cost hikes across the country.

These cost increases as well as the shortage of labor in the industry mean that gas prices will probably continue to rise in the summer without any major relief. Truck drivers and other gasoline workers were laid off during the pandemic, creating staffing problems.

“It can take a while [until gas prices go down] because of the ongoing COVID-induced headache, “said De Haan.” The oil industry has made long-term decisions to stop production and here we are and now the oil industry is in the same boat as everyone else with work challenges. “

In the Bay Area and all of the west coast, the problem will be worse than in many other parts of the country, according to De Haan.

“Unfortunately, the west coast, including California, Oregon, and Washington, has not just seen the traditional surge in demand like the rest of the country like COVID has [increased demand], but there were some refinements that made the issues worse, “he told SFGATE.

These refining problems, while minor, are significant enough to “overturn” the supply, he said.

De Haan believes that gas prices in the Bay Area could hit $ 4.50 in the summer due to pandemic demand, pandemic labor shortages and these refining issues. Peak gas prices are likely to come in four to six weeks.

There’s a small silver lining, De Haan says, that gas prices are unlikely to break the record highs of 2012 when a gallon could average $ 4.75 in the bay.

Another point of help could come if remote workers are allowed to stay away all year round, said De Haan. The gas industry usually sees prices drop at the end of summer when the summer road trips and weekend getaways run out, but he fears that once people are encouraged to re-enter the personal world of work, this well-known source of reduced gas prices could disappear.

“If these commuters return this fall, it could offset this seasonal downturn and keep prices high,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Lisa Qiu Li was the only person working on the ground a few weeks ago.

As a housekeeper at the Hotel InterContinental San Francisco, she has lived in San Francisco for more than 25 years – and has worked in hotels for 20 of them.

But on that August day she was confronted with a hotel guest. He was furious about the lack of new towels in his room and asked her to give him some immediately.

She had already given the last set to another customer who had just asked about it.

He broke out.

“He gets really mad at me and yells at me, ‘Is that a new towel? Give it to me! ‘”Recalls Li.

His harassment became so aggressive, Li said, that she feared he would physically beat her. She was hiding in the room she was cleaning up.

“I was really, really scared, and then I called the manager,” she said.

Li peered through the peephole, and when she saw that the customer had left, she ran to the elevators and asked to be moved to another floor – where hopefully she would not be bothered again.

Service employees of all stripes have dealt with bad people, especially during the pandemic. Poor dump trucks, unruly passengers, annoying customers; Rudeness and a lack of tact on the part of some members of the general public are a feature of working in any service industry.

But incidents like Li’s are becoming more common (and arguably less well known) for a variety of reasons.

The accommodations travelers were used to before the pandemic – think the daily cleaning of hotel rooms, fast room service, nightly bar service – have been all but eliminated by the coronavirus.

After all, the hotel industry – like other minor facets of the travel industry – was hammered hard.

Statistics from the San Francisco Travel Association estimate that hotel room demand was down 68% year over year in 2020 – the largest decline in at least 11 years and perhaps one of the largest declines in the country.

And while other service industries are on their way to recovering from the pandemic, as first reported by SF Weekly, the San Francisco travel industry has recovered more slowly than other industries.

But hotel workers and the unions they represent are especially angry that hotels continue to fall short with their workers even as the tide begins to stabilize for the travel industry as a whole. Li told SFGATE that there are at least 30 to 40 other cleaners who are still on leave and are still waiting in the wings to get back to work.

This, coupled with the “vengeance” phenomenon – the influx of jet-set tourists following a catastrophic event such as a pandemic – has created a confluence of problems for hotel workers.

Blanca Reyes coordinates housekeeping in the Hilton Financial District. She has worked for hotels for 31 years and says the work in the past few months has not been comparable to any experience in her three decades in the industry.

“It’s not like it used to be, it used to be very different from now.”

Hotel workers report that they were verbally abused.

Ralf Geithe / Getty Images / iStockphoto

Reyes told SFGATE that Hilton hotels have stopped cleaning all rooms on a daily basis (unless otherwise requested), which means that she has had to take angry calls from visitors for most of her shifts.

“The real stress we have is that the hotel, the company, didn’t assign the occupied rooms to be cleaned every day,” she said.

And, as Li noted, hotel guests who visit tend to stay much longer, which means that already strained housekeepers are forced to clean thoroughly after more guests. It is an added burden for workers who are already suffering from staff shortages.

This leads to incidents like the one she saw recently when a customer called her one evening and asked why his room was dirty.

“I said: ‘We don’t have any housekeeping on duty at the moment, everyone has gone home’. [he said], ‘You have to explain to me why my room isn’t ready,’ “she said.

“So I just tell him what the situation is like, why we don’t clean [his] Room. And he starts telling me, ‘Bitch, you have to tell me why my room isn’t ready.’ “

She endured worse verbal abuse, but refused to utter the words used to hit her. And with this harassment comes the fear of physical harm to workers. A 2015 study found that eight out of ten female hotel workers have experienced verbal harassment and incidents of assault and assault on workers have surfaced across the country.

Hotel workers in San Francisco won a strike in 2018 that guaranteed them “panic buttons” in dire situations.

A Hilton spokesman told SFGATE that workers are receiving “de-escalation training” with guests and that their hotels are actively looking for more workers.

“These hotels are working to ensure that they continue to provide a safe environment for both guests and team members,” the Hilton spokesman said in a statement to SFGATE.

(IHG, which manages the InterContinental, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from SFGATE.)

Sure, one could argue that given the challenges of the pandemic, hotels need to keep costs down – be it by reducing hours for workers or by reducing amenities for visitors. But now that travel is rushing again, the challenge of dealing with angry guests rests right on the shoulders of cleaners, cashiers and other hotel service staff.

May Lee works at the in-house Grab and Go at the Hilton in Union Square. And almost every other restaurant and food service in the hotel, she said, is closed for much of the week – even as hundreds of rooms fill up. This has resulted in long lines in front of their store, disgruntled customers and increased stress for guests and workers.

She remembered a guest waiting in line who was “so loud and angry that I could feel everyone in the cafe watching”.

And she knows that the guests won’t want to visit the hotel again because of a lack of staff.

“I’m so frustrated that we want to provide … good service to our guests so that they will come back,” she said. “Why do guests come back when they expect our hotel to be so tight that everything is closed and we can’t even do the basic things?”

As it stands, Lee’s fears are not entirely unfounded. At least four prominent hotel operators have announced plans to cut staff costs, the largest operational cost of running a hotel.

A Guardian report confirmed that at least three different hotel chain executives have pledged to cut full-time employees on investor calls.

The latest report on hotel cuts is from Hilton, which has two employees who spoke to SFGATE.

“The work we are currently doing with each of our brands is aimed at bringing them higher margin business and greater work efficiency, especially in the home, food and beverage and other sectors,” said Christopher Nassetta, CEO of Hilton during a February call with investors, several outlets reported.

Li, Reyes, Lee, and other San Francisco workers know they will be the ones to take the outrage over the cost reduction.

“Sometimes we’re the only ones working on the floor all day,” said Li. “The guests only see us, the guest doesn’t see the manager, they don’t see the boss on the floor, right, they only see the housekeeping see the ground so the hotel infuriates them and the guests [get] mad at us. “

None of the hotel employees really blamed the guests for being so angry. It just hurts that their anger is out of place.

“I’m not blaming them for having reasons, but it’s not because we created this problem,” Reyes said.

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Art is always experienced through a personal prism of mood and experience that varies from moment to moment. So it’s really impossible to say whether the Labor leadership video Liz Kendall uploaded on YouTube is better or worse than the one Andy Burnham uploaded on YouTube. Admittedly, that’s mainly because they’re both pretty bad.

At least Burnhams looks like a guide video. It is a textbook “Man of the People” profile piece. There’s our Andy, a brother and a son and a husband and a father. There’s our Andy, eating store-bought sandwiches and making keepy-uppies. There is our Andy, who is played by Monica von Friends at the university. There’s our Andy talking about himself next to a suspiciously pristine white leather sofa while his buddy Charlie Falconer whines about what a good guy he is. I wonder who this “Charlie Falconer” character is? Maybe he’s a greengrocer. Or a chimney sweep. Perhaps we’ll never know – surely he’s not related to longtime Labor colleague Lord Falconer?

The message from the Burnham video is that Andy is just like us. He is a man you can trust. That is, as long as you want him to be a man you can trust. If not, just say the word. He can change. He can be whatever you want as long as he’s in power. That’s the most important. Nice, sweet strength.

The Kendall video is something else entirely. She is the only star. We don’t learn anything about their life. We don’t learn anything about their family, background, regrets, or ambitions. The only thing we learn about Liz Kendall is that she doesn’t know what an erase key is.

At least that’s the only possible explanation for her confusing approach to writing. The video shows the process by which Kendall got into creating her own narrative for the video we’re watching. First she writes it all down on a notepad. Then she carefully types it into a computer. There can’t be any mistakes. The last time she tried typing a speech into a computer from scratch, she misspelled the word “aspirational” and couldn’t figure out how to undo it, and she had to toss the entire computer in the trash can.

Sometimes Kendall gets up and paces up and down. The lamp is on. She is the last person in the office. This is what a Kendall tour would look like. If you want your leader to take 3 times longer to complete a simple task, she is your wife. If you want someone to squint the technology like it’s trying to sell her a seedy timeshare, she is your wife. If you’re looking for a leader who lives in an abandoned MFI home office that could be floating around in space for anyone who damn well knows, the choice is clear. You have to choose Kendall.

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