Oakland and SF Officials Push Workers to Return to Office

With a third of their downtown offices empty, Oakland and San Francisco want to populate their streets by ordering employees back to their desks.

Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson called city workers back to their offices four days a week, while newly elected San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie wants a third of the city’s workforce to report for office duty, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The office vacancy in Oakland’s central business district is 34.8 percent, according to CBRE, while vacancy in San Francisco is 36.5 percent.

The vacuum upstairs has robbed the sidewalks below of foot traffic, hurting local shops and restaurants. Crime and homelessness have led to business losses or closures.

Observers have criticized Oakland for delaying a return to office since the pandemic, and have called upon the city to lead by example if officials want more employers to order their workers back to Downtown to help people up the streets and support local businesses.

Beginning Feb. 18, Johnson ordered all unrepresented department directors, deputy directors, managers and supervisors to report to the office four days a week. Starting April 7, all other city employees are expected to do the same, according to a letter he sent to labor leadership last week.

The letter said the city intends to discontinue its telecommuting work program set up during the pandemic that began in 2020.

“I recognize that telecommuting remains a part of modern life and that even before the pandemic, not everyone was in the office every workday,” Johnson said in the letter. “When surprises or obligations force us away from the workplace for the day or a few days, there has always been a need to occasionally work remotely, and we will maintain that flexibility and understanding on a case-by-case basis.”

Employers have blamed crime for their slow return to office buildings across Oakland. Major companies, including Clorox, Blue Shield, PG&E and Kaiser Permanente, have pooled together millions of dollars to beef up security, add buddy escorts and conduct safety training.

In San Francisco, Lurie is looking to slash the city’s $867 million budget deficit. Like Oakland, he’s also targeting homelessness and crime.

The mayor’s measure of street improvement: whether he can walk down a San Francisco street with his kids and feel safe, he said.

The city’s poor street conditions have contributed to less foot traffic in Downtown, with stores closing and retailers hunkering down and locking up merchandise to prevent shoplifting, according to the Business Times.

At a 2025 Mayors’ Economic Forecast hosted by the newspaper, Lurie said he’s looking to get almost a third of the city’s workforce of 33,000 who are working from home part of the week back into the office. But Lurie fell short of saying how he’d get those workers back to their desks.

Supervisors from different city departments have approved and enforced the city’s telecommuting policy. But the Lurie administration has said a few changes are on the way, according to ABC7 News.

According to an internal memo sent to department heads obtained by the TV station, Lurie is asking that every current telecommute agreement be reviewed immediately. He also wants to evaluate the operational needs of every city department to make sure the public is well-served and that any agreement must be renewed every year, or more frequently.

Lurie hopes workers will come back — without hesitation.

“We are going to be in constant communication with the public sector union and labor, we will be in constant communication and what our hope is that we get as many people back as many days in the office as possible, many of which are five days a week already,” Lurie told ABC7.

— Dana Bartholomew