LinkedIn is latest Silicon Valley giant to move workers out of San Francisco –  leasing out the top five floors of its skyscraper – as WFH ticks up amid high rents and rampant crime

LinkedIn is poised to become the latest company to lease the top floors of its glass-encased San Francisco skyscraper to the public.

The job-focused social media platform has put the top five floors of its 63,000-square-foot, 26-story building up for lease through December 2027.

The news comes a few months after Meta announced it was ready to vacate its 435,000-square-foot San Francisco building once its lease expires in 2031.

Companies like Airbnb, Paypal, Slack, Lyft and Salesforce have left tens of thousands of square footage buildings in the city in the past year.

While AirBnb and Paypal have fully embraced remote work setups, others have simply left town.

Companies such as Starbucks, which has ended remote work altogether, also closed seven stores in San Francisco this week.

Disney also recalled all of its employees to its offices, including its headquarters in Burbank, California.

A big reason is the increase in crime and homelessness in the city that has forced major retail stores like Target, CVS and Crate and Barrel to vacate land.

Fashion store Express also announced its plans to vacate its 301 Geary Street location today.

Reports of homeless pirates raiding houseboats in San Francisco Bay also come in. Residents along the Oakland-Alameda estuary said at a community meeting last week that boats were cut loose so they floated out to sea.

One woman even recounted how she rescued another resident on a sailboat in the middle of the night after pirates cut his rigging lines during an argument.

The brazen thieves – whose homeless encampments have spilled out of the city – take small motor-powered dinghies and use them in loot-and-grab raids on larger vessels and houseboats.

During one San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission enforcement meeting, community members spoke of having to fight the pirates themselves, since police in the Democratic city failed to intervene.

Last week, the city extended the duration of its most expensive homeless response initiative — spending $12,000 each month for each RV parking space — more than three times the cost of a typical apartment.

The Bayview Vehicle Triage Center in Candlestick Point State Recreation Area was intended to provide a ‘safe parking area’ for people living in their cars or RVs. Initial plans called for them to have electricity, showers and sanitary facilities.

The program was meant to help the city avoid building low-income housing, but on Oct. 3, city officials agreed to spend more on the parking than it would have cost to build a tiny house.

The city’s supervisors unanimously approved a staggering cost of $312,000 a year to lease the parking space. The lease is intended to last for the next 24 months.

Despite pirates roaming the ocean and RVs parked everywhere, Mayor London Breed deflected blame for viral videos showing smash-and-grab incidents in San Francisco, claiming it doesn’t always happen in the Golden Gate City not.

Nearly 40,000 people struggling with homelessness and more robberies and car thefts reported by the San Francisco Police Department than the same time last year – Breed said the “city has changed.”

Speaking to Yahoo Finance Live, Breed, who was at the helm in 2018, said her beloved San Francisco was in fact the victim of false advertising.

“Sometimes (negative stories and videos) … what you see go viral, it’s not always just in San Francisco,” Breed preached desperately.

“We’ve been credited for things that have happened in other cities in the Bay Area, as well as even as far away as Los Angeles. Unfortunately we were the punching bag.’

Breed said the negative press has not clouded her view of the city she claims is the ‘tech capital of the world’.

“In fact, of the top 20 artificial intelligence companies in the world, eight are here in San Francisco,” she said, seemingly ignoring multiple reports of accidents, chaos and traffic jams caused by the introduction of driverless vehicles to the area. .

‘People still want to be here. They start their companies, their businesses here.’

While she trumpeted her delusions as fact, the numbers tell a contrasting story with street drug use and retail crime still a daily issue for many who live in the city.

According to crime data recorded between January and September 2023, robberies saw a 15.9 percent increase from last year.

Meanwhile, motor vehicle theft has seen a 10.8 percent increase as viral videos of smash-and-grabs with ferocity circulate online.

According to a recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey, 70 percent of San Francisco residents cite homelessness among the city’s top three problems.

On any given night, 38,000 Bay Area residents are homeless, the study found, Yahoo reported.

But not all tech companies have left the Bay Area. Reddit, Life360, Bolt and Masterclass remain in town. They have not yet commented on whether they would end their time in San Francisco.