From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is a daily.

For the past decade, San Francisco has been held out as an economic success story, a model

that cities around the country sought to emulate.

So why, in the wake of the pandemic, has its downtown had the worst recovery of any big

city in America?

Today, my colleagues Connor Dordy and Emma Goldberg on what went wrong in San Francisco.

It's Thursday, February 9.

So Connor and Emma, tell us about this story that you have been both reporting on and

how it brought your two lines of coverage at the times together.

So I covered the economy and I really focus on cities and kind of urban planning, how

the city comes together.

And I cover the future of work, kind of what happens in and around the office, which

is a space where we often spend more time than we end up spending with our own families.

And both of us have been really interested in trying to tell this big story that's been

playing out simultaneously on both our bees, which is what happens at downtown districts

across the country when workers stop going to the office.

Because of our post-pandemic reality.

Yes.

People working at home, people zooming into their jobs from cities that are thousands of

miles from their headquarters.

And this leaves a giant hole in downtown and really in sort of our culture.

This idea of having a central place where people come together to trade goods, to find

...