Quote:
Originally Posted by pdxtex
Its almost as if occupancy and sunshine hours are correlated. Top ten mostly sunny. Bottom ten, mostly cloudy cities.
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Not really. For example, SF and Oakland (can't find stats for Oakland, but it's very similar to SF) get more sunshine and less cloud cover than most of the cities on the top ten most-recovered list:
Annual average sunshine hours / clear days (30% or less cloud overage during daylight hours):
Columbus - 2190 hours / 72 clear days
Baltimore - 2520 hours / 105 clear days
Tampa - 2927 hours / 101 clear days
Salt Lake City - 3029 hours / 125 clear days
Honolulu - 3038 hours / 90 clear days
San Diego - 3055 hours /146 clear days
San Francisco - 3072 hours / 160 clear days
Bakersfield - 3342 hours /191 clear days
Albuquerque - 3415 hours / 167 clear days
Fresno - 3579 hours / 194 clear days
El Paso - 3760 hours / 193 clear days
SF/Oakland also gets more sunshine and clear days than every city on the top 10 least-recovered list. The closest one is Kansas City, MO, with 2800 hours per year, and 120 clear days.
A note on the data: SF's data is almost always taken from SFO because I guess that's where the weather station is, but SFO does have a similar climate to the eastern part of SF. Downtown SF for example, gets about the same pecent of yearly sunshine as San Diego (66% vs 68%, can't find sunshine hour stats for downtown SF), and other eastern neighborhoods should get a similar amount. For comparison, downtown LA is at 73%. And of course a neighborhood like say, the Richmond district, would get less than downtown SF (and less than the Mission district, Bayview, etc).
EDIT: apparently those downtown SF stats are from a weather station that's actually at the SF Mint, which is at the edge of the Castro/Hayes Valley/Lower Haight (and why the hell do so many sources use the SFO station instead of this one?), and not in downtown, despite being named "downtown". So downtown SF (and the eastern neighborhoods) should be warmer than the numbers above show.
SF's weather can be confusing, thanks largely to the geography (hills, water, cold ocean air + hot inland air). It's relatively unique in that it gets giant fog banks, and most of that fog/overcast weather/strong winds occurs during the summer, when the majority of tourists visit, who mostly come from places that are always hot during the summer. SF's micro-climates also contribute to the confusion, no doubt...if you spend most of your time on the western and northern sides of the city (like many tourists do, along with many of the more upper class residents), especially during the summer (and especially if most of your outside-time is in the mornings and evenings, when the fog/wind is at its peak, which is certainly the case for some people who spend all day working inside), it might truly seem like a cold and cloudy city. Especially if your point of comparison is the tropics, or a desert. But even the west side can get nice and warm during the summer, around midday/the early afternoon, and if you spend most of your time on the east side of the city, SF is consistently warm and sunny. And as far as micro-climates go, you don't even have to cross the city, or even an entire neighborhood to experience big changes. There are times where an area at the bottom of a hill is 75 degrees, but then two blocks away, at the top of the hill, it's 60 degrees and windy.
Overall SF isn't particularly cloudy, rainy, etc, compared to most other American cities. In fact it's the opposite, which makes sense when you consider that SF has a Mediterranean climate. Like other big CA cities, it's quite dry and sunny compared to most of the rest of America, aside from the southwest. You can grow thing like palm trees, cacti, lemon trees, avocados, peppers, etc, outside in SF, all year long. Try doing that in Columbus or Minneapolis lol.
Anyways, I'm guessing that the main reason downtown SF isn't recovering as fast as other places, is because in the years leading up to the pandemic, SF saw a high proportion of office space switch over to tech-related businesses, which disproportionately switched over to work-from-home during the pandemic, without switching back afterwards. SF, and the Bay in general was also one of the top cities in America when it came to people masking, quarantining and avoiding crowds and whatnot. Downtown (especially the financial district) was a ghost town for a long time (and consequently, so was BART), to an extent you didn't see in many other places, and a lot of businesses couldn't cope with it, especially when you throw in the insanely high rents, which are always a problem.
A little is probably caused by all the crime hysteria that the media and right wing politicians/pundits have been amplifying, as well. But even then, as we saw with CVS, and undoubtedly some other business as well, the real reason they closed their stores down was not crime, as they first stated publicly (for political/PR reasons, to shift blame, and save face), but due to existing plans they had to cut back operations on a nationwide scale, to save money. The SF closures were just a few of 900 planned closures across the US.
All that being said, tourism spending in SF is almost back at pre-pandemic levels, and when you talk about tourism in SF, that includes a big chunk of downtown (Union Square, for example):
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/busi...b8b276617.html
Things really aren't quite as bad overall as the media makes it out to be. Anecdotally, rush-hour crowds on BART and Muni in downtown SF seem almost back to normal.
Also, this list is only counting half of downtown SF. It excludes Union Square, Yerba Buena/Central SOMA, the Tenderloin, and Civic Center. Lists about downtown areas often do this with SF.