It’s a chicken-and-egg problem though: No visitors without interesting places to spend money, but no interesting places without visitors.

The mayor is doing what he can within his power, i.e. control over city employees, but it’ll be a wait-and-see to find out whether it works, or at least how much it works.

You’re right that commercial retail space should be worth a lot less in both capital value and rent than it used to.

But we’re in a weird situation where there’s little incentive, or there are even counter-incentives, for commercial building owners to lower retail rents.

For example, part of a commercial building’s valuation is how much they can charge for rent. If they list a space at say $100/sq ft, the building is valued at such. If they actually rent it out at $50/sq ft, the building’s value goes down by about half. This de-incentivizes lowering rents in down markets because that would lower the value of the asset.

Another is Prop 13, which limits the rise of property tax on commercial buildings to 1 percent of assessed value per year, which is much lower than inflation. Under Prop 13, commercial buildings are re-assessed when ownership is transferred. Commercial buildings are increasingly owned by corporate entities, because it is better to buy the ownership entity in order not to trigger the property tax re-assessment. This de-incentivizes lowering rents because the ownership entity is not under financial pressure to rent the space out because the property taxes are so low in relation to its actual value.

That’s my un-educated understanding of the situation anyway.