The Urban Doom Loop Could Still Happen
“It’s another truly amazing gold rush!” Marc Benioff posted on X in September 2023. The founder and CEO of Salesforce was celebrating San Francisco’s AI-fueled revival, touting a report that pegged demand for new office space in the city at nearly 1 million square feet. By February 2024, The Economist was declaring that “San Francisco staged a surprising comeback.”
It looked like quite a turnaround for a city whose epitaph had been written again and again since the pandemic.