Staff: downtown office demand strengthened in 2018 while retail softened; transit and jobs‑housing balance remain concerns

Audrey Harris, senior planner with the San Francisco Planning Department, presented the 2018 Downtown Plan monitoring report at the Planning Commission meeting on June 20.

Harris said the downtown office vacancy rate fell from a 2016 high to 7.7% in 2018 while average downtown office rents increased about 6% to just over $75 per square foot. She said more than one million square feet of office space was completed in 2018 and the downtown pipeline grew from roughly 2.9 million sf to 3.4 million sf. By contrast, retail vacancy in downtown rose to about 6.6%.

The report summarized housing production and transportation metrics: downtown accounted for an estimated 38% of new housing citywide in 2018, and roughly 2,300 new units were constructed citywide that year (down from 4,270 the prior year). Harris said transit data are mixed; transit ridership has generally declined while census estimates suggested an increase in transit mode share in some measures. She also noted collections for the older Transportation Impact Development Fee and its successor, the Transportation Sustainability Fee.

Public commenters and commissioners pressed staff on the jobs‑housing balance and whether fee levels reflect current needs. Longtime community advocate Sue Hester said pending projects were not always located in the central C3 downtown districts and urged the commission to address the jobs‑housing imbalance. Commissioners asked staff for additional detail on district boundaries (C3 variants) and how shared data sources (transit agency ridership vs. census mode estimates) were reconciled.

Harris said the full report and data tables would be published on the department website and at DataSF.