In This Issue

• Rising Office Occupancy and Additional Jobs
• SF Adopts Active Approach to Jobs Attraction
• The Promise of the Film Industry
• Working Families Credit
  

2004 Rise in Office Occupancy Signifies Thousands of Additional Jobs

According to industry sources, San Francisco office occupancy grew by a robust 1.4 million square feet in 2004. Vacancies are correspondingly reported to have dropped to 16.5% by the end of 2004 from 20.6% at the end of 2003. While vacancies are still high, the trend is moving in a good direction.

An increase in occupancy is one indicator of improving employment conditions. By some counts, occupancy growth of 1.4 million square feet would signify an addition of up to 6,500 or 7,000 jobs. Our city’s active approach to attracting jobs is paying off. Not only do jobs mean employment for our citizens, but each job contributes substantial direct revenues to the city.

SF’s Active Approach to Jobs Attraction Paying Off

Something in San Francisco has changed, and the word has been getting out. Now is a time of rapid shifts in the nation’s economy, with companies going in and out of business and stalwarts like AT&T being acquired and new ones like Google rising up. Great competition exists between cities and states for a share of the jobs being created by firms both large and small.

In the face of these challenges, San Francisco is now working with more focus than it ever has previously to attract and retain jobs. We are not sitting back and expecting the economy to recover automatically from the 55,000 + job losses of the 2000-2003 period.

Says SFCED executive director Dennis Conaghan, “There has been a realization that we cannot rest on our laurels, but must compete for jobs the way other cities have been doing for a long time. Every day ourselves, the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and others reach out to new companies for their new jobs.”

While economic changes do not occur overnight, there is ample evidence that the effort has been paying off:

• Getting New Jobs, New Companies Large and Small Olivia Travel, Design within Reach, Primitive Logic and more than a dozen have received attention for the 2,500 jobs they have brought here, but there are also many smaller firms that have been coming here including the likes of Orbid, a small technology company from Florida (www.orbid.com) bringing jobs with them too. We actively recruit such firms on a regular basis.
• Keeping Jobs The Mayor’s 100 in 100 program of outreach to the CEO’s of existing firms has surpassed its targeted 100 firms goal and will continue. Active interventions like the SFCED’s late 2003 outreach to the California Culinary Academy (which was considering a multi-year temporary move outside of San Francisco to accommodate expansion plans) have resulted in the retention of several hundred jobs.
• Expanding the Economic Base and Extending its Benefits In comparison to larger cities across the country, San Francisco’s economic base is not extremely diverse. The industries more concentrated than the national average include only five: business services, financial services, media, information technology, and tourism. The SFCED and others have been working both to enhance the city’s economic base by attracting new industries and to extend the benefits of these new industries to newly trained workers. Bioscience is one industry where attraction and worker training efforts have been reaping important benefits over the past year with increasing numbers of firms inquiring regarding a San Francisco location. Another strategic sector: clean and green technologies such as solar power.

Expanding the Base: Film Industry Spurred $1 Billion in Spending

Who can keep track of all the films and TV programs that have been filmed in San Francisco? From Vertigo to Bullitt, from the Streets of San Francisco to Nash Bridges. (See www.mistersf.com website’s “Cinematic SF” page for more detail on SF’s film history). Our cinematic history is rich indeed and it has helped make San Francisco famous around the world.

Even with this rich history, San Francisco has declined significantly as a film location in recent years. In 1996, eight feature films were shot here in a single year and $462 million was spent directly on productions. Six years later, that figure had fallen to $139 million – a drop of 70 percent.

On Friday, February 4th, the SFCED in partnership with McKinsey presented a report to Film Commission Director Stefanie Coyote on the SF film industry that charts this decline and that looks at strategies other cities have been using to successfully compete in this industry.

As Director Coyote and her Commission works hard to help us recover from our film industry’s decline, it is worth noting that in its heyday in 1996, overall spending totaled more than $1 billion, including direct and indirect amounts. This is because, according to the report presented to Director Coyote, spending on film production carries with it a 2.3 economic multiplier. If we can eventually return to the $1 billion levels, our economy will benefit greatly.

See KGO news story click here

Working Families Credit to Help Bring Federal Money to San Francisco

In January, Mayor Newsom and Treasurer Cisneros launched the Working Families Credit. This tax credit is a local match to the Federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The EITC is available to eligible families earning less than $36,000 per year, and is a credit of up to $4,300. The new San Francisco Working Families Credit (WFC) replicates the EITC program on a local level and multiplies the money that the recipients claim. Last year, San Franciscans left more than $12 million in Washington, DC because they did not claim the EITC. The hope is that with the WFC in place more people will be motivated to claim both, and that we will bring some of that unclaimed EITC money home. In this way, we can support work, reduce poverty, and pump more money in our city’s economy. For more information on the WFC, please contact Terri Feeley, executive director of SFWorks at tfeeley@sfworks.org or 415-217-5183.

For more information on these and other stories, please contact SFCED managing director Todd Ewing at tewing@sfced.org or 415-352-8838.