San Francisco Sees Its Future and It’s . . . Us!

The old news is that San Francisco is amid a long and painful economic decline. The jewel of the West is tarnished; the financial capital is tattered; the warehouse of the Pacific is closed. Jobs have fled to Walnut Creek and Vacaville and other points east, north and south.

So what’s the new news? San Francisco is reinventing itself economically, and it’s beginning to look like . . . Los Angeles.

It’s now called the Bay Area economy, thank you very much, and it’s doing quite well. So what if San Francisco’s population isn’t growing? The Bay Area (which economists and planners say includes 10 or 11 counties, depending on who is counting) is the nation’s fourth-largest metropolitan region, with 6 million inhabitants. Bigger than Philadelphia, to use a comparison that a few years ago would have drawn groans here.

So what if San Francisco’s job growth has been insignificant and the city has been losing employers? Regional unemployment is very low, personal income is very high and the outlook is good, all things considered. “Well-positioned,” as the economists say, to weather even a recession, if we have one.

Just as in Los Angeles, people here use the name San Francisco to apply to the much larger regional economy. And, also just as in Los Angeles, people who have moved their jobs and homes out of the city often view what remains with distaste, even though they must admit that the region’s economic heart is still there.

Sprawling, low-slung industrial and commercial parks in a dozen locations around the bay house many of the retailers, warehouses, data processing operations and manufacturers that used to be located in the city of San Francisco.

People in two-income households work at jobs from San Jose to San Rafael to afford the astronomical mortgages on their homes in Mill Valley or Mountain View. More and more people are moving as far away as Modesto, a two-hour commute, to find an affordable new house. And they fight traffic on outmoded freeways and transit systems designed to get people into San Francisco, not to a half dozen population and economic hot spots spread across a sprawling megalopolis.

Hear an echo?

What’s more, over the past 20 years the job patterns in the Bay Area have been startlingly similar to those in Southern California. A decline in government and better-paying manufacturing jobs has coincided with a huge increase in professional, retail, service and low-wage manufacturing jobs. Meantime, both economies have experienced explosive growth in the creation of small businesses, many started by new immigrants or laid-off corporate workers.

And both places have experienced the flight of middle-wage jobs from the central business districts to the suburbs, leaving behind a core of high-paid professionals and corporate chieftains, and an army of homeless and unemployed.

This Los Angeles-izing of San Francisco, once so strongly denied, is now grudgingly admitted here.

“The only difference is, we have the bay, which acts as a blue belt to limit sprawl, and you don’t,” said Mike McGill, executive director of the Bay Area Economic Forum, a nonprofit group that is studying ways to improve regional economic cooperation.

The creation during the past five years of McGill’s organization and others, such as Bay Vision 2020, a regional planning group, speaks volumes about growth of the Bay Area outside San Francisco.

For the city itself, the wounds caused by this shift have been damaging and have not healed. “It takes a period of mental adjustment to recognize that you’re the core city of a region, not a separate economy,” said Eunice Elton, president of the San Francisco Private Industry Council.

Two years ago, the city formed the San Francisco Economic Development Corp. to promote its economy. It’s about to begin something that earlier-day San Franciscans would have haughtily disdained: an image campaign to promote the local economy, a campaign that Hollywood itself would be proud of.

This fall, the campaign begins with a 60-page, four-color brochure that extols San Francisco as the cultural and professional heart of the rich and growing Bay Area. That will be followed with image advertising in major national business publications.

The $500,000 campaign is the brainchild of former bank regulator Kent O. Sims, president of the Economic Development Corp.

“The city has been used to thinking of itself as the Bay Area,” Sims said. “It is a difficult repositioning for us.”

What the campaign intends to do is tout San Francisco’s reputation as a creative, innovative place with a strong tradition in developing technology and new products.

What it won’t do is tout the city of San Francisco as a dominant, independent economic entity that competes with its big neighbor to the south for business. The city is the region’s professional core, Sims said. It’s where the lawyers, consultants, accountants and marketing people are. It’s the home of the artists and the intellectuals. And it’s where the wholesale trade in everything from home decor to apparel congregates.

Hear another echo? The same could be said of Los Angeles’ role in the Southern California economy.

That San Francisco is willing to advertise that it understands its changed role in the region is a sign both of how bad things became here economically and of how good things may be becoming. But it’s ironic that San Francisco now advertises, at least implicitly, that its economic future looks so much like that of Los Angeles.

The cold wind howling down Market Street seems colder these days because of the poverty, the homelessness, the panhandlers and the noticeably smaller number of office workers rushing into skyscrapers.

And, as on Spring Street or Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, it’s hard to tell those left behind that the future is in the suburbs.