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Xi Jinping to Address U.S. Business Leaders Amid Rising Skepticism of China Ties

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Corporate executives will pay $2,000 a head to dine with China’s leader in San Francisco next week, in one of a series of engagements aimed at stabilizing the U.S.-China relationship.The Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is set to meet with President Biden in San Francisco next week, is expected to speak to top American business executives at a dinner following that bilateral meeting.Mr. Xi, who is traveling to the United States for an international conference, will address business leaders at a challenging moment in U.S.-China relations. The United States has expressed growing concern about China’s military ambitions and has sought to cut off Beijing’s access to technology that could be used against the United States. China’s treatment of Western companies, which are facing tougher restrictions in how they do business, have also prompted firms to question the wisdom of investing in China.Still, Chinese and American leaders have expressed interest in bolstering ties between their economies, the world’s two largest, which remain inextricably linked through trade. The Biden administration has sent several top officials to China this year to try to make clear that while the United States wants to protect national security, it does not seek to sever economic ties with Beijing.It is unclear whether Mr. Xi’s visit will do much to alleviate the skepticism of foreign businesses, many of which are deterred both by China’s slowing economic growth and the tighter grip of the Chinese Communist Party on business activity under Mr. Xi.Tickets to the dinner and reception, hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the U.S.-China Business Council, cost $2,000 each, according to an invitation circulating online. For $40,000, companies can purchase eight seats at a table plus one seat at Mr. Xi’s table, a person familiar with the event said.Engagements between Chinese officials and the U.S. business sector will try to send the signal that China remains an attractive place to do business, “as evidenced by these companies flocking to meet with Xi Jinping and have dinner with him,” Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a briefing on Tuesday.Beijing wants this for “tactical reasons,” Mr. Blanchette said. “I don’t think, at a broad level, they’re expecting or see the prospect of resetting or recalibrating the relationship.”Foreign firms are particularly concerned about Chinese regulations that block them from selling to the government or into certain markets, and a broader counter-espionage law that can lead to prison time for company executives and researchers who deal in sensitive industries. At the same time, the United States is stepping up restrictions on investing and selling advanced technology to China, saying that such ties can pose national security concerns.Many businesses still see China as an essential market, but an increasing number are starting to look to other countries for their new investments. A survey by the U.S.-China Business Council of its members this year found that 34 percent had stopped or reduced planned investment in China over the past year, a higher percentage than in previous years.Mr. Blanchette said Chinese officials would also see the meeting as an opportunity to try to shift the U.S. trajectory on the technology controls it has placed on China. But the United States is unlikely to change its stance, he said.“I think this will be one of the issues where the U.S. and China will have longstanding tensions. And I’m sure this will be communicated to Beijing,” Mr. Blanchette said.The visit will be Mr. Xi’s first trip to the United States since 2017, when he met with President Donald J. Trump at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Since then, U.S.-China business relations have changed drastically, with the countries carrying out a trade war and sparring over advanced technology and geopolitical influence, and China turning notably more authoritarian under Mr. Xi.The dinner and reception featuring Mr. Xi will be part of a two-day “C.E.O. Summit” taking place next week on the sidelines of a bigger meeting of the leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, a group of 21 countries that ring the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Biden is expected to meet with Mr. Xi earlier next Wednesday, in their first face-to-face meeting in a year.Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi are expected to discuss business and technology ties, as well as issues like communication between the countries’ militaries, stopping the flow of fentanyl to the United States and new agreements for governing artificial intelligence.In recent weeks high-level Chinese officials have met with U.S. counterparts to lay the groundwork for the trip. In a news release Wednesday, the organizers of the C.E.O. summit said that Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi would be in attendance at the two-day summit, along with other world leaders and the chief executives of companies including Microsoft, Mastercard and Pfizer. More

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    The AI Boom Is Pulling Tech Entrepreneurs Back to San Francisco

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    Doug Fulop’s and Jessie Fischer’s lives in Bend, Ore., were idyllic. The couple moved there last year, working remotely in a 2,400-square-foot house surrounded by trees, with easy access to skiing, mountain biking and breweries. It was an upgrade from their former apartments in San Francisco, where a stranger once entered Mr. Fulop’s home after his lock didn’t properly latch.But the pair of tech entrepreneurs are now on their way back to the Bay Area, driven by a key development: the artificial intelligence boom.Mr. Fulop and Ms. Fischer are both starting companies that use A.I. technology and are looking for co-founders. They tried to make it work in Bend, but after too many eight-hour drives to San Francisco for hackathons, networking events and meetings, they decided to move back when their lease ends in August.“The A.I. boom has brought the energy back into the Bay that was lost during Covid,” said Mr. Fulop, 34.The couple are part of a growing group of boomerang entrepreneurs who see opportunity in San Francisco’s predicted demise. The tech industry is more than a year into its worst slump in a decade, with layoffs and a glut of empty offices. The pandemic also spurred a wave of migration to places with lower taxes, fewer Covid restrictions, safer streets and more space. And tech workers have been among the most vocal groups to criticize the city for its worsening problems with drugs, housing and crime.But such busts are almost always followed by another boom. And with the latest wave of A.I. technology — known as generative A.I., which produces text, images and video in response to prompts — there’s too much at stake to miss out.Investors have already announced $10.7 billion in funding for generative A.I. start-ups within the first three months of this year, a thirteenfold increase from a year earlier, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups. Tens of thousands of tech workers recently laid off by big tech companies are now eager to join the next big thing. On top of that, much of the A.I. technology is open source, meaning companies share their work and allow anyone to build on it, which encourages a sense of community.“Hacker houses,” where people create start-ups, are springing up in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, known as “Cerebral Valley” because it is the center of the A.I. scene. And every night someone is hosting a hackathon, meet-up or demo focused on the technology.In March, days after the prominent start-up OpenAI unveiled a new version of its A.I. technology, an “emergency hackathon” organized by a pair of entrepreneurs drew 200 participants, with almost as many on the waiting list. That same month, a networking event hastily organized over Twitter by Clement Delangue, the chief executive of the A.I. start-up Hugging Face, attracted more than 5,000 people and two alpacas to San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum, earning it the nickname “Woodstock of A.I.”More than 5,000 people attended the so-called Woodstock of A.I. in San Francisco in March.Alexy KhrabrovMadisen Taylor, who runs operations for Hugging Face and organized the event alongside Mr. Delangue, said its communal vibe had mirrored that of Woodstock. “Peace, love, building cool A.I.,” she said.Taken together, the activity is enough to draw back people like Ms. Fischer, who is starting a company that uses A.I. in the hospitality industry. She and Mr. Fulop got involved in the 350-person tech scene in Bend, but they missed the inspiration, hustle and connections in San Francisco.“There’s just nowhere else like the Bay,” Ms. Fischer, 32, said.Jen Yip, who has been organizing events for tech workers over the past six years, said that what had been a quiet San Francisco tech scene during the pandemic began changing last year in tandem with the A.I. boom. At nightly hackathons and demo days, she watched people meet their co-founders, secure investments, win over customers and network with potential hires.“I’ve seen people come to an event with an idea they want to test and pitch it to 30 different people in the course of one night,” she said.Ms. Yip, 42, runs a secret group of 800 people focused on A.I. and robotics called Society of Artificers. Its monthly events have become a hot ticket, often selling out within an hour. “People definitely try to crash,” she said.Her other speaker series, Founders You Should Know, features leaders of A.I. companies speaking to an audience of mostly engineers looking for their next gig. The last event had more than 2,000 applicants for 120 spots, Ms. Yip said.In Founders You Should Know, a series run by Jen Yip, leaders of A.I. companies speak to an audience of mostly engineers looking for their next gig.Ximena NateraBernardo Aceituno moved his company, Stack AI, to San Francisco in January to be part of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator. He and his co-founders had planned to base the company in New York after the three-month program ended, but decided to stay in San Francisco. The community of fellow entrepreneurs, investors and tech talent that they found was too valuable, he said.“If we move out, it’s going to be very hard to re-create in any other city,” Mr. Aceituno, 27, said. “Whatever you’re looking for is already here.”After operating remotely for several years, Y Combinator has started encouraging start-ups in its program to move to San Francisco. Out of a recent batch of 270 start-ups, 86 percent participated locally, the company said.“Hayes Valley truly became Cerebral Valley this year,” Gary Tan, Y Combinator’s chief executive, said at a demo day in April.The A.I. boom is also luring back founders of other kinds of tech companies. Brex, a financial technology start-up, declared itself “remote first” early in the pandemic, closing its 250-person office in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. The company’s founders, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, decamped for Los Angeles.Henrique Dubugras, a co-founder of Brex, in 2019. After decamping to Los Angeles, he recently returned to the Bay Area.Arsenii Vaselenko for The New York TimesBut when generative A.I. began taking off last year, Mr. Dubugras, 27, was eager to see how Brex could adopt the technology. He quickly realized that he was missing out on the coffees, casual conversations and community happening around A.I. in San Francisco, he said.In May, Mr. Dubugras moved to Palo Alto, Calif., and began working from a new, pared-down office a few blocks from Brex’s old one. San Francisco’s high office vacancy rate meant the company paid a quarter of what it had been paying in rent before the pandemic.Seated under a neon sign in Brex’s office that read “Growth Mindset,” Mr. Dubugras said he had been on a steady schedule of coffee meetings with people working on A.I. since his return. He has hired a Stanford Ph.D. student to tutor him on the topic.“Knowledge is concentrated at the bleeding edge,” he said.Ms. Fischer and Ms. Fulop said they would miss Bend but craved the Bay Area’s sense of urgency and focus.Will Matsuda for The New York TimesMr. Fulop and Ms. Fischer said they would miss their lives in Bend, where they could ski or mountain bike on their lunch breaks. But getting two start-ups off the ground requires an intense blend of urgency and focus.In the Bay Area, Ms. Fischer attends multiday events where people stay up all night working on their projects. And Mr. Fulop runs into engineers and investors he knows every time he walks by a coffee shop. They are considering living in suburbs like Palo Alto and Woodside, which has easy access to nature, in addition to San Francisco.“I’m willing to sacrifice the amazing tranquillity of this place for being around that ambition, being inspired, knowing there are a ton of awesome people to work with that I can bump into,” Mr. Fulop said. Living in Bend, he added, “honestly just felt like early retirement.” More

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    San Francisco Fed Ties to S.V.B. Chief Attracts Scrutiny to Century-Old Setup

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    As Greg Becker, the former C.E.O. of Silicon Valley Bank, prepares to testify before Congress, boards that oversee regional Federal Reserve branches are in the spotlight.The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has drawn attention to the relationship between the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which was in charge of overseeing safety and soundness at the lender, and the bank’s former chief executive, Greg Becker, who for years sat on the San Francisco Fed’s board of directors.The bank’s collapse on March 10 has prompted criticism of the Fed, whose bank supervisors were slow to spot and stop problems before Silicon Valley Bank experienced a devastating run that necessitated a sweeping government response.Now, Mr. Becker could face lawmaker questions about his board role — and whether it created too close a link between the bank and its regulators — when he testifies on Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee about Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse.In prepared testimony published before the hearing, Mr. Becker said he was “truly sorry” for the bank’s failure. “I do not believe that any bank could survive a bank run of that velocity and magnitude,” he said.Mr. Becker’s position on the San Francisco Fed board would have given him little formal power, according to current and former Fed employees and officials. The Fed’s 12 reserve banks — semiprivate institutions dotted across the country — each has a nine-person board of directors, three of whom come from the banking industry. Those boards have no say in bank supervision, and serve mainly as advisers for the Fed bank’s leadership.But many acknowledged that the setup created the appearance of coziness between S.V.B. and the Fed. Some outside experts and politicians are beginning to question whether the way the Fed has been organized for more than a century makes sense today.“They’re like a glorified advisory committee,” said Kaleb Nygaard, who researches central banks at the University of Pennsylvania. “It causes massive headaches in the best of times, potentially fatal aneurysms in the worst of times.”The Fed boards date back to 1913.In the days after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, headlines about Mr. Becker’s close ties to his bank’s regulator abounded, with many raising questions about a possible conflict of interest.Though regional Fed presidents and other officials play a limited role in bank oversight — which is mostly in Washington’s domain — some critics wondered if supervisors at the San Francisco Fed failed to effectively police Silicon Valley Bank partly because of the reserve bank’s close ties to the bank’s chief executive.And some asked: Why do banks have representatives on the Fed Board at all?The answer is tied to the Fed’s history.When Congress and the White House created the Fed in 1913, they were skeptical about giving either the government or the private sector unilateral power over the nation’s money supply. So they compromised. They created a public Fed Board in Washington, alongside quasi-private reserve banks around the country.Those reserve banks, which ended up numbering 12 in total, would be set up like private companies with banks as their shareholders. And much like other private companies, they would be overseen by boards — ones that included bank representatives. Each of the Fed reserve banks has nine board members, or directors. Three of them come from banks, while the others come from other financial companies, businesses, and labor and community groups.“The setup is the way that it is because of the way the Fed was set up in 1913,” said William Dudley, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who said that the directors served mainly as a sort of advisory focus group on banking issues and operational issues, like cybersecurity.The boards may give members benefits.Several former Fed officials said that the bank-related board members provided a valuable function, offering real-time insight into the finance industry. And 10 current and former Fed employees interviewed for this article agreed on one point: These boards have relatively little official power in the modern era.While they vote for changes on a formerly important interest rate at the Fed — called the discount rate — that role has become much less critical over time. Board members select Fed presidents, though since the 2010 Dodd Frank law, the bank-tied directors have not been allowed to participate in those votes.But the law didn’t go so far as to cut bank representatives from the boards altogether because of a lobbying push to keep them intact, said Aaron Klein, who was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department at the time and worked closely on the law’s passage.“The Fed didn’t want that, and neither did the bankers,” Mr. Klein said.From a bank’s perspective, directorships offer prestige: Regional Fed board members rub shoulders with other bank and community leaders and with powerful central bankers.They might also offer either an actual or a perceived information advantage about the economy and about monetary policy. Although the discount rate is not as important today, directors at some regional banks are given economic briefings as they make their decisions.Mr. Becker would have seen Mary C. Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, at meetings held roughly once a month, her calendars suggest.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesRegional board discount votes have often been seen as a sort of weather vane for how a regional bank’s leadership is thinking about policy — suggesting that directors might know how their president is going to vote when it comes to the federal funds rate, the important interest rate that the Fed uses to guide the speed of the economy.That is notable in an era in which Wall Street traders hang on Fed officials’ every word when it comes to interest rates.“It’s a very awkward thing,” said Narayana Kocherlakota, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. “There’s no gain to having them vote on discount rates.”Renée Adams, a former New York Fed researcher who studies corporate boards and is now at the University of Oxford, has found that when a bank executive becomes a director, the stock price of their firm rises on the news.“The market believes that they have some advantage,” she said.And Board members do get substantial face time with Fed presidents, who meet regularly with their directors. Mr. Becker would have seen Mary C. Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, at meetings held roughly once a month, her calendars suggest.‘Supervisory leniency’ is a risk.Bank-tied directors have no direct role in supervision, nor can they appoint officials or participate in budget decisions related to bank oversight, according to the Fed.But Mr. Klein is skeptical that Mr. Becker’s position on the San Francisco Fed’s board did not matter at all in the case of Silicon Valley Bank.“Who wants to be the person raising problems about the C.E.O. who is on the board of your own C.E.O.?” he said, explaining that even though the organizational structure might have drawn clear lines, those may not have cleanly applied in the “real world.”Ms. Adams’s research found that banks whose executives sat on boards did in fact see fewer enforcement actions — slaps on the wrist from Fed supervisors — during the director’s tenure. “There may be supervisory leniency,” she said.Changing the system might prove difficult.This is not the first time the Fed regional boards have raised ethical issues. In the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, Dick Fuld, the Lehman Brothers chief executive at the time, and Steve Friedman, who was a director at Goldman Sachs, both served on the New York Fed board.Mr. Fuld resigned just before Lehman collapsed in 2008. Mr. Friedman left in 2009, after news broke that he had bought Goldman Sachs stock during the crisis, at a time when the Treasury and the Fed were drawing up plans to bolster big banks.Given that controversy, politicians have at times focused on the Fed boards. The Democratic Party included language in its 2016 platform to bar executives of financial institutions from serving on reserve bank boards. And the issue has recently garnered bipartisan interest. Draft legislation under development by members of the Senate Banking Committee would limit directorships to small banks — those with less than $10 billion in assets, according to a person familiar with the material.The committee has a hearing on Fed accountability planned for May 17. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, and Rick Scott, Republican from Florida, plan to introduce the legislation ahead of that, a spokesperson for Ms. Warren said.“It’s dangerous and unethical for executives from the largest banks to serve on Fed boards where these bankers could secure preferential regulatory treatment or exploit privileged information,” Ms. Warren said in a statement.But — as the Dodd Frank legislation illustrated — stripping banks of their power at the Fed has been a heavy lift.“As a political target,” said Ms. Binder, the political scientist, “it’s a little in the weeds.” More

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    Lingering Virus, Lasting Inflation: A Fed Official Explains Her Pivot

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    Mary Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, wanted to withdraw economic help slowly. Now, she might support a rate increase as soon as March.SAN FRANCISCO — Mary C. Daly was in line behind a woman in her neighborhood Walgreens in Oakland, Calif., this fall when she witnessed an upsetting consequence of inflation. The shopper, who was older, was shuffling uncomfortably as the clerk rang up her items.“She starts ruffling in her pockets, and in her purse,” Ms. Daly said in an interview. “And she says: This is a lot more expensive than it usually is. I buy these things — these are my monthly purchases.”The woman had to put something back — she chose potato chips — because she couldn’t afford everything in her basket.It would have been sobering to watch for anyone, but the moment hit especially hard for Ms. Daly, who is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. As one of the Fed’s 18 top officials, she is one of the people who sets economic policy to help to ensure a strong job market and to keep prices for goods and services stable.Like many of her colleagues, Ms. Daly initially expected inflation to fade relatively quickly in 2021 as the economy reopened and got back to normal. But continued waves of virus that have interrupted and complicated the recovery and increasingly broad price increases have made central bankers nervous that rapid inflation and pandemic-caused labor shortages might linger.Those risks have prompted the Fed to speed up its plans to pull back policies meant to stimulate the economy. Officials had previously suggested that they would keep interest rates low for a long time to allow more people who lost or quit their jobs during the pandemic to return to the job market. But in recent weeks, they announced a plan to more rapidly scale back their other main policy to boost the economy — large-scale bond purchases that have kept long-term borrowing costs low and kept money flowing around the financial system. Concluding that program promptly could put them in position to raise interest rates as soon as March.Ms. Daly, who spoke to The New York Times in two interviews in November and December, has shifted her tone particularly dramatically in recent weeks. How she came to change her mind highlights how policymakers have been caught off guard by the persistence of high inflation and are now struggling to strike the right balance between addressing it while not harming the labor market.As recently as mid-November, she had argued that the Fed should be patient in removing its support, avoiding an overreaction to inflation that might prove temporary and risk unnecessarily slowing the recovery of the labor market. But incoming data have confirmed that employers are still struggling to hire even as consumer prices are rising at the fastest clip in nearly 40 years. Rising rents and tangled supply chains could continue to push up inflation. And she’s running into more people like that woman in Walgreens.“My community members are telling me they’re worried about inflation,” Ms. Daly said last week. “What influenced me quite a lot was recognizing that the very communities we’re trying to serve when we talk about people sidelined” from the labor market “are the very communities that are paying the largest toll of rising food prices, transportation prices and housing prices.”Ms. Daly said she supported ending bond buying quickly so that officials were in a position to begin raising interest rates. A higher Fed policy rate would percolate through the economy, lifting the costs of mortgages, car loans and even credit cards and cooling off consumer and business demand. That would eventually tamp down inflation, while also likely slowing job growth.Ms. Daly said it was too early to know when the first rate increase would be warranted, but suggested she could be open to having the Fed begin raising rates as soon as March.“I’m comfortable with saying that I expect us to need to raise rates next year,” Ms. Daly said last week. “But exactly how many will it be — two or three — and when will that be — March, June, or in the fall? For me it’s just too early to know, and I don’t see the advantage of a declaration.”Many investors and economists now expect the Fed to lift rates from their current near-zero level in March, and Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, suggested last week that he could support a move then.That higher rates could be coming so soon is a big change from what officials were signaling — and what people who watch the Fed closely were expecting — until very recently.Fed officials have long said they want the economy to return to full employment before they lift interest rates. Early in the pandemic, many policymakers suggested that they would like to see the number of people with jobs rebound to levels approaching those that prevailed in early 2020, suggesting a long period of low rates would be needed.But increasingly, officials have argued that the economy is close to achieving their employment target by focusing on the overall unemployment rate and the rates for different racial groups.The jobless rate has fallen to 4.2 percent, and Fed officials expect it to drop to 3.5 percent next year. That would match the rate that prevailed before the pandemic, and would be a marked improvement from a pandemic high of 14.8 percent in April 2020. Black unemployment is dropping swiftly, too.“The economy has been making rapid progress toward maximum employment,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during a news conference this month.Yet that unemployment rate tells just part of the story, because it counts only people who are actively applying for jobs. The share of people in their prime employment ages, between 25 and 54, who are either working or looking for work has dropped notably, and is only starting to recover. Ms. Daly said she was thinking about the Fed’s full employment target in terms of what is achievable in the short term, as the coronavirus keeps many workers at home, and in the longer term, when more employees may be able to return because the virus is more under control.“There’s the labor market we can get eventually, after Covid,” she said. “And there’s the labor market that we have to deal with today.”For now, job openings far exceed the number of people applying for positions, and wages are climbing briskly, two signs that suggest that workers are — at least temporarily — scarce.It may be the case that “in the short run, this is all the workers we have,” Ms. Daly said. “But in the long run, we expect more workers to come.”Retailers in her area are cutting hours on busy shopping days because they can’t hire enough staff. Production lines are shuttered. And with virus infections rising again and the new Omicron variant spreading rapidly, there is no immediate end in sight.“If we get past Covid, inflation comes down, the labor supply recovers — then definitely we want more patience, because we want time for that to work itself through,” she said. “But we have Covid, and it won’t go away.” More

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    Tech Workers Who Swore Off the Bay Area Are Coming Back

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    SAN FRANCISCO — Last year, Greg Osuri decided he’d had enough of the Bay Area. Between smoke-choked air from nearby wildfires and the coronavirus lockdown, it felt as if the walls of his apartment in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks neighborhood were closing in on him.“It was just a hellhole living here,” said Mr. Osuri, 38, the founder and chief executive of a cloud-computing company called Akash Network. He decamped for his sister’s roomy townhouse in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, joining an exodus of technology workers from the crowded Bay Area.But by March, Mr. Osuri was itching to return. He missed the serendipity of city life: meeting new people, running into acquaintances on the street and getting drinks with colleagues. “The city is full of that — opportunities that you may never have expected would come your way,” Mr. Osuri said. He moved back to San Francisco in April.The pandemic was supposed to lead to a great tech diaspora. Freed of their offices and after-work klatches, the Bay Area’s tech workers were said to be roaming America, searching for a better life in cities like Miami and Austin, Texas — where the weather is warmer, the homes are cheaper and state income taxes don’t exist.But dire warnings over the past year that tech was done with the Bay Area because of a high cost of living, homelessness, crowding and crime are looking overheated. Mr. Osuri is one of a growing number of industry workers already trickling back as a healthy local rate of coronavirus vaccinations makes fall return-to-office dates for many companies look likely.“I think people were pretty noisy about quitting the Bay Area,” said Eric Bahn, a co-founder of an early-stage Palo Alto, Calif., investment firm, Hustle Fund. “But they’ve been very quiet in admitting they want to move back.”Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region’s bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live.Twitter reopened its headquarters in San Francisco on Monday. The company plans to open more offices in the Bay Area.Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesAnd on Monday, Twitter reopened its office, becoming one of the first big tech companies to welcome more than skeleton crews of employees back to the workplace. Twitter employees wearing backpacks and puffy jackets on a cold San Francisco summer morning greeted old friends and explored a space redesigned to accommodate social-distancing measures.London Breed, San Francisco’s mayor, said she welcomed the return of tech workers, though she acknowledged that it also brought challenges. “Yes, we need to do the work to build more housing and address the many challenges that big cities face, but San Francisco is successful when we have a growing economy, and that includes tech,” she said in a statement.No one is quite ready to declare that things have returned to normal. Ridership on Bay Area Rapid Transit remains low, and nearly half of San Francisco’s small businesses are still closed. Office vacancy rates are high. The city’s downtown is still largely empty on weekdays.But recent data supports the notion that tech workers are coming back. In an area near San Francisco’s Financial District, where tech workers tend to cluster, average apartment rental prices dropped more than 20 percent in 2020, according to census and Zillow data compiled by the city. That area saw the biggest price jumps in the city in the first five months of 2021.In the bayside ZIP code surrounding the San Francisco Giants’ Oracle Park, where nearly 15 percent of residents worked in tech, average monthly rental prices dropped from $3,956 in February 2020 to about $3,000 a year later. They rose to $3,312 in May, according to Zillow data.“This could mean that tech workers are coming back, although it could also mean that other people, who also value those areas, are taking advantage of the lower rents to move in,” said Ted Egan, San Francisco’s chief economist.Median San Francisco home prices, which bottomed out at a still-jarring $1.58 million for a single-family home in December, recently hit $1.9 million, according to the California Association of Realtors. That’s higher than before the pandemic.Traffic this month on a highway leading toward downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge.Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesNearly 1.4 million cars drove across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco in May, the most since February 2020, and afternoon freeway speeds have dropped to about 30 miles per hour, which was the prepandemic norm, according to city data. Some types of crime are close to prepandemic levels.Rizal Wong, a junior associate at the tech and business communications firm Sard Verbinnen and Company, left the Bay Area in December, trading a studio apartment in Oakland for a cheaper one-bedroom in his hometown, Sacramento, close to his family. But after getting vaccinated, he moved to San Francisco in April.“I felt like I was getting back to my life,” said Mr. Wong, 22. “Meeting up with co-workers who were also vaccinated and getting drinks after work, it definitely makes it feel more normal.”Mr. Wong, like many who left the Bay Area, didn’t go very far. Of the more than 170,000 people who moved from the vicinity of San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland in 2020, the vast majority relocated elsewhere in California, according to United States Postal Service change-of-address data analyzed by CBRE, a real estate company.About 20,000 moved to the San Jose area, for example. A further 16,000 went to Los Angeles, nearly 15,000 to Sacramento and 8,000 to Stockton, in California’s Central Valley. The more than 77,000 people who left the San Jose metro area, a proxy for Silicon Valley, went to similar places: San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles. In February, The San Francisco Chronicle reported similar numbers using Postal Service data.The net migration out of the San Francisco and San Jose regions — that takes into account people who moved in — was about 116,000 last year, up from about 64,000 in 2019, according to the analysis of the Postal Service data.Nearly every year for several decades, thousands more residents have left Silicon Valley and San Francisco than moved in, according to state data. Often, this movement is offset by an influx of immigrants from other countries — which was limited during the pandemic.Greg Osuri, center, and his employees meeting in their co-working space, Shack15.Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesThe majority of those who left the Bay last year, the real-estate firm’s analysis found, were young, affluent and highly educated — a demography that describes many tech workers. It’s a group that wants urban amenities like bars, restaurants and retail shopping, said Eric Willett, CBRE’s director of research.“That’s the group that left urban centers in large numbers,” he said. It is also the group “that we are increasingly seeing move back.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}There were some prominent industry defections from the Bay Area over the last 18 months. Oracle and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise moved their headquarters to Texas. The software maker Palantir moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Colorado. Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, said he was moving to Austin.“CA has the winning-for-too-long problem,” Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter in October. “Like a sports team with many championships, it is increasingly difficult to avoid complacency & a sense of entitlement.”Miami’s mayor, Francis X. Suarez, campaigned to lure tech workers to his city, and he was joined by some high-profile investors who said they had found a better life in South Florida. But the analysis of Postal Service data found that Austin was the 13th-most-popular destination for people leaving San Francisco. Miami was 22nd.Also not as well noticed in the exodus headlines: Oracle and HPE told most Bay Area employees that they would not need to leave.Now some companies are expanding their Bay Area footprints. Google said in March that it would spend $1 billion on California developments this year, including two office complexes in Mountain View. The company is also building a massive, mixed-use development that includes a 7.3-million-square-foot office space in San Jose. In September, Google will reopen its doors to employees. Most will come in three days a week.Twitter is also opening a 30,000-square-foot office in San Jose’s Santana Row this fall and an Oakland building next year, said Jennifer Christie, the company’s chief human resources officer.The share of Twitter’s work force in San Francisco declined to 35 percent last month, from 45 percent a year earlier, as the company grew quickly elsewhere, Ms. Christie said. But the total number of Bay Area employees is similar: about 2,200, compared with 2,300 last year.About 45 percent of employees at Twitter said they wanted to return to the office at least part time, Ms. Christie said, but she expects that number to grow. “I do think there’s a good number of people who still want to be in the San Francisco area,” she said.At Cisco Systems, a tech gear maker that is one of San Jose’s biggest employers, just 23 percent of employees want to return to the office three or more days each week. But many who prefer to work remotely will do so from nearby, said Fran Katsoudas, the company’s chief people officer. People have expressed a desire for work flexibility “more than a desire to have a different location,” she said.San Francisco’s Embarcadero, along the waterfront.Cayce Clifford for The New York TimesSome tech workers have found compromises — or at least a way to avoid long commutes. Annette Nguyen, 23, who works for Google’s ad marketing team, appreciated the outdoor space and lack of a commute when she moved from San Francisco last year to live with her parents in Irvine, Calif. She plans to return to the Bay Area in August, but will live near her office in Silicon Valley.“I couldn’t imagine spending three hours a day commuting anymore like I used to,” she said.Of course, some of the people who moved away are gone for good. Others are still in the process of leaving.Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple with Steve Jobs, said he and his wife had recently bought a house in a Denver suburb, Castle Pines, and would likely live there at least part time. He was eager, he said, to fulfill a lifelong dream of living close to the Colorado snow and away from the California crowds.“I don’t think people want to go back full time when they have the sort of job that can work well from home,” Mr. Wozniak, who currently lives in Los Gatos, Calif., said in an interview. “We’ve learned something that you really can’t take back.” More

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    Upended by the Pandemic, Haute Chefs Move Into Hotels

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    Hotels not necessarily known for fine dining are drawing award-winning chefs seeking opportunities for reinvention. Yogis and nature enthusiasts have long flocked to Ojai, a verdant mountain enclave 90 minutes north of Los Angeles — gastronomes, not so much. That changed during the pandemic, when the Ojai Valley Inn turned its sprawling, indoor-outdoor farmhouse — formally a wedding venue before the coronavirus upended plans — into a stage for a revolving cast of high-end chefs.Among the marquee names: Christopher Kostow, the executive chef of California’s three-Michelin-starred paragon of fine dining, the Restaurant at Meadowood. Located more than 400 miles to the north in Napa Valley, it burned down in a September wildfire. “That, on top of Covid, gave us this feeling like, ‘God only knows what’s going to happen next,’” Mr. Kostow said.To pay his staff, Mr. Kostow would have to set up shop elsewhere. Before the fire, he’d had the foresight to look into a Plan B outside Napa, aware that constantly shifting restrictions could keep businesses in wine country shuttered while other parts of the state were open.It turned out that Howard Backen, the same architect responsible for the plush environs of Meadowood, had also recently built the Ojai Valley Inn’s Farmhouse, equipped with an open kitchen and state-of-the-art Viking appliances. One call led to another, and Mr. Kostow and his team decided to temporarily shift their operations to Ojai, where they engineered a tasting menu of can’t-cook-this-at-home delights like “champagne-bubbled” oysters and caviar dressed with eucalyptus and broccoli.“I hadn’t been to Ojai before,” said Mr. Kostow. “It’s like what I imagine California might have been like in the 1930s: rolling hills, rustic, really bucolic.”The partnership between the Restaurant at Meadowood and the Ojai Valley Inn exemplifies an accelerating trend: in the wake of the pandemic, hotels have become havens for high-end chefs. Whether displaced by disaster, like Mr. Kostow, seeking to make up for lost revenue, wanting to explore new markets or simply craving an opportunity to try out new things, well-regarded chefs are flocking to hotels not necessarily known for their cuisine. Last year chewed up and spit out the fine-dining playbook: now, there’s an opportunity for reinvention.Christopher Kostow, the executive chef of California’s three-Michelin-starred paragon of fine dining, the Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa Valley, recently presided over sold-out dinners at the Ojai Valley Inn’s Farmhouse. Ojai Valley Inn“Serving outside on a lawn or in a space that’s not your own is not ideal, but it does make you scratch your head, like, ‘Oh, this is cool. What other cool things could we be doing?’” said Mr. Kostow, who also owns a more casual eatery, The Charter Oak, in Napa Valley. “I think the result, post-pandemic, regarding fine dining, will be more license, more fluidity. All the old rules are blown up, at this point.”“The Restaurant at Meadowood Residency” began on March 3. Over the course of five weeks, it got the culinary equivalent of a standing ovation: all 44 dinners Mr. Kostow presided over at the Ojai Farmhouse sold out, including a finale weekend of meals in May that featured wine pairings from the renowned Krug Champagne house and Harlan Estate, a famed Napa Valley producer of Bordeaux-style blends. Tickets for that dinner cost $999 per person.“They sold out within the first hour,” said Ben Kephart, the Ojai Valley Inn’s director of operations. “It’s crazy. That’s about as much as you can charge for a dinner anywhere. It shows you how much of a demand there is, and it speaks to people wanting to get out and support a venture that they feel is deserving.”One of Mr. Kostow’s March dinners in Ojai offered 13 courses, several pours of wine, and, maybe most importantly, the opportunity to dress up and people watch (from well over six feet away). It felt like the opposite of sitting on the couch, numbly chewing Postmates by the glow of Netflix. Apparently, people want that.“We could have had a month of these dinners, straight,” said Mr. Kephart. “That’s how many people tried to book them.”Besides Mr. Kostow, the Farmhouse has played host to chefs such as Nancy Silverton, the grande dame of Italian food in Los Angeles. Next month brings David Castro, the chef of Fauna in Baja California, which was recently honored by World’s 50 Best, one of the hospitality industry’s major ratings organizations, as well as Neal Fraser, the owner of the revered eatery Redbird in Los Angeles.Across the country and south of the border this summer and fall, similar guest chef-resort collaborations are in the works:Dominique Crenn’s San Francisco restaurant, Atelier Crenn, holds three Michelin stars. She will spend part of June at the Montage resort in Los Cabos, reimagining signature dishes like her geoduck tart, above, with citrus, lemongrass and verbena mousseline.Montage Los CabosDominique Crenn at Montage Los Cabos, Cabo San Lucas, MexicoDominique Crenn, whose San Francisco restaurant, Atelier Crenn, holds three Michelin stars, will move her avant-garde French feast 1,500 miles down the Pacific Coast this month, to the Montage resort in Los Cabos. For six days, beginning June 15, Ms. Crenn will serve a menu of signature favorites from her restaurant reimagined with local Baja ingredients and flavors. It’s Ms. Crenn’s way of marking her restaurant’s 10th anniversary, and as part of the celebration, she’s organizing volunteering activities in the Los Cabos community through a local organization, and encouraging dinner attendees to join her.Culinary partners Mashama Bailey, right, and Johno Morisano will preside over the southern fare served in the cushy environs of the Thompson Austin, opening soon.Adam KuehlMashama Bailey at Thompson Austin, Austin, TexasThe Bronx-born Mashama Bailey, who won a James Beard Award for best chef of the Southeast in 2019, and her culinary partner Johno Morisano will be traveling from their home base, Savannah, Ga., to Austin this summer and fall to launch two restaurants at the soon-to-open Thompson hotel, which promises guests “mid-century modern meets late-century luxury.” While the restaurants, The Diner Bar and The Grey Market, will be permanent, Ms. Bailey herself will be steering the kitchen on selected dates, to be announced.The celebrated chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten will decamp to the One&Only Palmilla in Los Cabos to spin fresh takes on the region’s seafood and steak.One&Only PalmillaJean-Georges Vongerichten at the One&Only Palmilla, San José del Cabo, MexicoGiven the popularity of Los Cabos among Americans, who make up the bulk of the region’s international tourists, and its proximity to the United States, it’s no surprise that several top-tier chefs are flocking there. From June 28 to July 2, Jean-Georges Vongerichten — who has restaurants in Shanghai, Paris, Tokyo and several other cities, in addition to his two-Michelin-star hallmark in New York — will hunker down at the One&Only Palmilla, on the Sea of Cortez. At one of the property’s restaurants, Suviche, he’ll riff on traditional sushi and ceviche, at another, he’ll see to the searing of steaks as the waves crash and recede: surf and turf, à la Jean-Georges.The Culinary Weekend Series put on by the Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal features a diverse array of chefs, seated dinners and cocktail parties, like this one, from chef Matt Zubrod’s April takeover of the property.Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos PedregalTop-tier chefs at Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal, Cabo San Lucas, MexicoThere will be no shortage of star chefs at the Waldorf Astoria in Los Cabos this year: June brings Chicago native Stephanie Izard, a multiple James Beard Award winner and the first woman to win Bravo’s “Top Chef.” In July, James Beard Award semifinalist Ronnie Killen will bring his Texas-style barbecue to the beach. October sees two more James Beard Award winning Chicagoans, Sarah Grueneberg and Mindy Segal, and in November, “Top Chef’s” Brian Malarkey will come on down from California. The Waldorf is calling it their Culinary Weekend Series and plans to continue these stints with notable chefs into 2022.The pub-inspired fare at the Mayflower Inn & Spa, above, is the work of April Bloomfield, the chef of the Michelin-starred Breslin and the now-closed Spotted Pig in New York. She has a residency at the Connecticut resort.Mayflower Inn & Spa, Auberge Resorts CollectionApril Bloomfield at the Mayflower Inn & Spa, Washington, Conn.At the Michelin-starred Breslin and the now-closed Spotted Pig, April Bloomfield presided over some of the best pub fare in New York. When the pandemic hit, she searched for an outlet to continue her craft and help her staff. She found one in the Mayflower Inn & Spa, an Auberge resort in the bucolic Connecticut countryside. Her residency began in September and will continue for the foreseeable future.“I’m excited for the next few months,” Ms. Bloomfield said, “and looking forward to growing the chef’s garden at the Mayflower this year.” She is, quite literally, putting down roots. Current menu highlights include cauliflower tikka masala and pan-roasted lamb chops with burnt satsuma and pistachio.“It’s meant a lot,” Ms. Bloomfield said of her residency. “I’ve been able to hire some of my staff from New York and therefore keep them employed. It’s been great to have them experience the country and the produce it has to offer. We feel very grateful for the experience and to be of service.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021. More

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    Companies Put Return-to-Work Plans in Motion

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerBuildings in Manhattan, where the amount of sublet office space available to rent surged nearly 50 percent last year.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesReturn-to-Office Plans Are Set in Motion, but Virus Uncertainty RemainsMany employers are not making a decision until many workers are vaccinated. And some are making plans for “hybrid” work arrangements.Buildings in Manhattan, where the amount of sublet office space available to rent surged nearly 50 percent last year.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyJulie Creswell, Gillian Friedman and March 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETA year and a pandemic ago, over 100,000 people filled the central business district in Charlotte, N.C., pouring out of offices, including several recently built skyscrapers, and into restaurants, bars and sports venues. Then as the coronavirus sent employees to their homes, much of the city center quickly went quiet and dark.The return of those employees to their offices has been halting and difficult. Last fall, Fifth Third Bank began bringing back workers, but soon reversed course. LendingTree, which is moving from the suburbs to the city, is waiting for the end of the school year. Wells Fargo has delayed its return to the office several times, telling its employees recently that they will continue to work remotely through at least May 1. And Duke Energy will bring some employees back in June, and most of the 6,000 people at its headquarters in September, when children should be able to go back to schools.Corporate executives around the country are wrestling with how to reopen offices as the pandemic starts to loosen its grip. Businesses — and many employees — are eager to return to some kind of normal work life, going back to the office, grabbing lunch at their favorite restaurant or stopping for drinks after work. But the world has changed, and many managers and workers alike acknowledge that there are advantages to remote work.While coronavirus cases are declining and vaccinations are rising, many companies have not committed to a time and strategy for bringing employees back. The most important variable, many executives said, is how long it will take for most employees to be vaccinated.Another major consideration revolves around the children of workers. Companies say they can’t make firm decisions until they know when local schools will reopen for in-person learning.Then there is a larger question: Does it make sense to go back to the way things were before the pandemic given that people have become accustomed to the rhythms of remote work?“Everyone has different comfort levels with coming back,” said Chuck McShane, a senior vice president at the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, an organization that has helped lure businesses to the area. “For some companies, it depends on the type of work you’re doing and whether you can remain at home. But a concern about continued remote work is, how do entry-level workers get socialized into the office culture?”About a quarter of employees across the country are going into offices these days, according to Kastle Systems, an office security firm that gets data from 3,600 buildings in the United States.Many companies, paying to rent empty office space, are eager for that number to rise. Their executives believe having employees working side by side improves collaboration, supports the development of younger employees and nurtures the heart and soul of any company — its culture.A mass return to the office would help revive the economies of city centers that have been ghost towns for months.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesA lone pedestrian in Midtown Manhattan. The number of workers returning to the office remains below 20 percent in New York.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesThat’s why some managers like Mark Rose, chief executive of Avison Young, a commercial property consulting and property management firm based in Chicago with offices around the world, is asking employees to return to the office in April.“You’re not going to be fired or written up if you don’t come back, but it is the expectation that, subject to local laws, and subject to your individual issues, that you start to make your way back,” Mr. Rose said about his 5,000 employees. “It absolutely is going to be an expectation.”A mass return to the office would, of course, be a boon for commercial real estate companies like Avison Young. Landlords, whose revenues are under threat as corporations move out or reduce the amount of space they rent, would breathe a sigh of relief. Many tenants have more space than they need. In Manhattan, the amount of sublet office space available to rent surged nearly 50 percent last year and it is currently 27 percent of all available space, the highest share since the period right after the 2008 financial crisis, according to Savills.Moreover, a return to the office would help revive city centers that have been ghost towns for months. Restaurants and bars could start hiring again and returning commuters could generate much-needed revenue for struggling transit systems.The course of the pandemic has largely dictated office attendance. That number crashed in March and April last year as the pandemic took hold and started slowly rising in the late spring, according to Kastle. Another surge in infections after Thanksgiving drove occupancy down but it appears to be on an upswing.There are big regional differences. In large cities in Texas, more than a third of workers are back, while the New York, San Francisco and Chicago areas remain below 20 percent.[embedded content]Some of these regional differences might be explained by how people get to work. “In places where people are commuting through public transportation, we know that makes people much more vulnerable to Covid because of the sheer presence of others, compared to if you’re commuting in your own car,” said Tsedal Neeley, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work.The Coronavirus Outbreak More