San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower opened almost five years ago as a monument to the region’s tech-driven economy, piercing the skyline as the tallest office building on the US West Coast. It symbolized a boom for the city’s downtown, alongside a new futuristic transit center and an elevated park spanning nearly four blocks.

On a recent afternoon, just a smattering of people walked the park’s trail, some of them tech workers wearing badges and company-branded clothing. Nearby restaurants were open, but without the lines that once snaked out the door.

It’s no wonder. These days, the signature 61-story tower is partially empty. Salesforce Inc., the main tenant and the city’s largest private employer, is embracing flexible work — and, like many tech giants, cutting jobs. Nearby is a skyscraper leased by Meta Platforms Inc. Last month, the Facebook owner announced plans to fire 11,000 workers worldwide.

As mounting signs point to a global recession in 2023, perhaps nowhere in the US stands to struggle more than San Francisco, the center of the technology boom that’s now fast unraveling. Nearly three years into the Covid era, persistent work-from-home habits, inordinately expensive real estate, homelessness and crime are colliding to threaten the city’s growth and its spot among the world’s top-tier metropolises.

Thousands of tech layoffs, falling equity values and the crypto meltdown have only deepened the blow to an area long known for innovation and astonishing wealth. It’s here where some of the world’s biggest startup successes over the past decade and a half — Twitter, Uber, Airbnb — were born. Just to the south in Silicon Valley, giants such as Google and Apple Inc. flourished and supercharged the region’s economy.

Now a city built on booms and busts, from the 19th-century gold rush to the dot-com collapse and global financial crisis, must pull off its biggest reinvention ever. Most pressing: a long-term shift to remote work that has hollowed out San Francisco’s downtown core and battered the local economy. The financial district, awash with glittering, half-empty office towers, has limited other uses. Few people live there; few tourists visit.

Even Marc Benioff, the billionaire co-CEO of Salesforce and one of San Francisco’s most prominent boosters, recognizes that the city urgently needs a revival.

“We need more diversity” in the business district, he said in an interview with Bloomberg, lamenting how San Francisco feels much less alive than places like New York. “We need more residential downtown. We need more museums downtown. We need more clubs downtown. We need more universities downtown. Office space was maximized for the tech boom.”

While San Francisco is far from alone as cities around the world grapple with shifts in work norms, its dependence on so-called knowledge workers makes the recovery more difficult: About 72% of the economy is driven by office-based industries. The city’s office-vacancy rate has soared to more than 25%, hurting local businesses dependent on workers.

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