LA, San Francisco enhance for broader enterprise reopening – KIRO 7 Information Seattle

LOS ANGELES – (AP) – When Angeleno Wine Co. reopened its tasting room, co-owner Amy Luftig Viste was in tears as old friends reunited for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic closed so many stores that big cities looked like ghosts Cities.

Even with limited capacity, lively conversations flowed from the tables between the casks of aging wine and echoed off the brick walls of the winery, tucked away in an industrial area on the edge of downtown Los Angeles.

“It felt like the winery had come back to life,” Luftig Viste said on Sunday, the day after it reopened after being closed for but two weeks for the past 13 months.

The noise in a small space is likely to get louder if capacity is allowed to double to 50% as Los Angeles and San Francisco point the way to a broader reopening of California operations.

On Tuesday, they became the first major urban areas in California to meet infection thresholds to reach the least restrictive level for reopening. Indoor bars have been able to welcome people back, larger crowds cheer for Major League Baseball’s Dodgers and Giants, and expand capacity in restaurants, cinemas, amusement parks, gyms, and other facilities.

A total of seven of the state’s 58 districts are now on what is known as the yellow plain. This is the final phase of a phased reopening plan before a scheduled return to normal business operations on June 15th. The other five counties are all remote areas in northern California.

It’s a notable turnaround for LA, considering it was zero for infections and deaths when California was the epicenter of the virus outbreak in the nation just a few months ago.

The two cities weathered the pandemic differently, but are emerging at the same time after roads across the country were closed, shops and restaurants closed, and office buildings darkened in March 2020.

While San Francisco largely defeated coronavirus by avoiding it, Los Angeles was almost beaten during the winter flood. In the worst case scenario, more than 500 people died daily in California, and hospitals in the LA area were barely able to handle the overwhelming influx of patients.

San Francisco briefly hit the Least Restrictive Level for a brief period in October, the only urban area to do so before an alarming surge forced a withdrawal in some cases. LA only emerged from the most restrictive tier in March.

Now California has the lowest infection rate in the country. Los Angeles County, home to a quarter of the state’s nearly 40 million residents and a disproportionately large number of the state’s 60,000 deaths, did not record a single COVID-19 death on Sunday or Monday.

As spring warms up, highways are congested, workers are returning to offices, and people are going to restaurants and breweries.

On Sunday, drivers in the Arts District in downtown LA circled the block looking for parking. The guests filled the sidewalk tables in the sausage kitchen, ate sausages and drank Belgian and German beer. A line of people waiting to be seated at Angel City Brewery stretched down the street.

Chris Sammons said he felt a civic obligation to get out and support businesses.

“It almost feels like a chore to be involved with the city,” said Sammons. “We have to bring LA back to life.”

It was the first time for his friend Stephen Tyler to say he was excited after crouching and vaccinating for so long.

“It’s just good to be back in town, to be with people,” Tyler said.

In San Francisco, business has picked up in Mixt, a popular lunch spot for salad lovers in the financial district. But it’s not pre-pandemic levels when lines spill outdoors, said Leslie Silverglide, the chain’s co-founder and CEO. She plans to open two more stores in the city center in the coming weeks.

“It seems like people are coming back,” she said. “They look forward to having lunch with colleagues again.”

Fear of contracting the virus led to a huge drop in local transport passenger numbers. Jason Alderman said he felt like a kid on his first day of school riding a local train to San Francisco. He works for the online payment start-up Fast, which will reopen its headquarters as soon as San Francisco allows it at the end of March.

“Instead of feeling like a hollowed-out ghost town that people were quick to leave, it felt like there were green shoots of life,” he said. “I felt a stab of energy that was there earlier.”

When the blocking order came in March 2020, an estimated 137,500 employees at companies in San Francisco, including Google, Facebook and Uber, disappeared seemingly overnight.

Moving trucks being moved from households to more spacious suburban homes and younger folks just packed up their cars and left as they could work from anywhere. Apartment rents have gone down, but now they’re increasing.

The vacancy rate in San Francisco is 18% compared to 10% last year, said John Chang, senior vice president at Marcus & Millichap, a commercial real estate finance and advisory firm. In Los Angeles the vacancy rate is 17.5% compared to 13.5% in the previous year.

Perhaps more tellingly, only 14% of key cards are used to access offices in San Francisco, compared to 24% in LA. At the other end of the spectrum is Dallas, where data showed that 41% of the cards were used, reflecting the different approaches to the virus across the two states.

Chang said workers suddenly left San Francisco when the original shutdown order went into effect. He assumes that the return will be gradual.

Lisa Elder, a paralegal who has been with her office since July, said that even with some restaurants and cafes that recently reopened, the area is a shadow of their former selves.

“Before COVID, this place was full, tons of people were eating in the alley and now it’s quiet. It’s crazy, ”she said.

At Angeleno Wine, Luftig Viste said most of their customers had been vaccinated and they were all looking forward to being outside.

“It’s just a great honor to be where people come to break the seal when we get out,” she said.

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Har reported from San Francisco. Associate press writer Olga R. Rodriguez was from San Francisco.