Decline is a choice and San Francisco keeps choosing it, again and again.

BLUE CITY BLUES: Hotel Owners Start to Write Off San Francisco as Business Nosedives.

Hotel owners in New York and Los Angeles are filling nearly as many rooms this year as they did in 2019, according to hotel-data firm STR. Their revenue per available room exceeds what it was before the pandemic.

But in San Francisco, hotels are still struggling badly in both occupancy and room rates compared with before the pandemic. Revenue per available room was nearly 23% lower in April compared with the same month in 2019.

The city’s lodging business has been squeezed by crime and other quality-of-life issues that have kept many convention bookers away. Tech companies’ embrace of remote work also undercuts business travel to the city and hotel activity.

Now, a growing number of San Francisco hoteliers are signaling they may be ready to give up. In recent months, the owner of the city’s Huntington Hotel sold the property after facing foreclosure and the Yotel San Francisco hotel sold in a foreclosure auction. Club Quarters San Francisco, which has been in default on its loan since 2020, may also be headed to foreclosure, according to data company Trepp.

Other lodging properties in the city are also vulnerable. More than 20 additional San Francisco hotels are facing loans due in the next two years, according to data company CoStar.

In San Francisco’s biggest potential hotel default yet, Park Hotels & Resorts last week said it has stopped making loan payments on debt secured by the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 San Francisco. The two hotels, with nearly 3,000 rooms between them, are in the heart of San Francisco’s shopping and cultural district.

IT LEANS TO THE LEFT, WHICH IS WHY IT’S DESTINED FOR COLLAPSE. . . . The tilt of San Francisco’s Millennium Tower has deepened as engineers work to reverse lean. “The Bay Area’s 545-foot-tall Millennium Tower has only continued to tilt further and sink deeper west in spite of architects’ best efforts to steady the ritzy building. The multimillion-dollar-per-unit tower is leaning more than 29 inches at the corner of Fremont and Mission streets — a slant over half an inch deeper than previously revealed.”

S.F.’s hotel pain could spread as more than 30 owners face mortgage deadlines

San Francisco’s Decline is a Warning to Other American Cities

h/t Stephen Green