Twitter may be allowing all its employees to work from home forever, but it doesn't have any plans to reduce its office footprint, the company told Bisnow Thursday.
The company at the vanguard of the revitalization of San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood will likely have fewer employees in the neighborhood once its offices reopen.
Twitter's corporate headquarters consists of about 800K SF at 1355 Market St., or about half of its total 1.6M SF global office footprint. The entire Mid-Market neighborhood had a hair under 2.5M SF of office inventory as of Q1, according to JLL. San Francisco city officials have made keeping Twitter’s presence in the neighborhood a priority.
It was unclear as of press time when Twitter’s lease on Market Street expires. Real estate investment company Shorenstein, which owns 1355 Market St., declined to comment.
On Tuesday, Twitter confirmed it will allow all employees who want to work from home full time to do so permanently, becoming the latest global company to embrace remote work during the coronavirus pandemic.
At the beginning of March, the San Francisco-based social media platform made headlines as one of the first companies to have its 5,000 employees work from home in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
"We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home, given our emphasis on decentralization and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere," the company wrote in a blog post announcing its updated policy.
"The past few months have proven we can make that work. So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home, and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen," it reads. "Opening offices will be our decision, when and if our employees come back, will be theirs."
Buzzfeed first reported Twitter's updated remote work policy, which now includes suspending business travel and starting a gradual reopening of offices in September at the earliest.
Twitter, which has called S.F. home since its founding, opened its headquarters at 1355 Market St. in 2011 when the city coaxed it to the Mid-Market neighborhood with a payroll tax exemption colloquially known as the "Twitter Tax Break."
Starting that same year, companies that located offices in the struggling neighborhood received an exemption on the city's 1.5% payroll tax. The incentive expired last year, saving businesses that used it a combined $70.1M over its lifetime, Bloomberg reported.
Though several other marquee companies, including Uber and Dolby Laboratories, followed, office developments in Mid-Market met with various success rates, particularly as crime, open-air drug use, and unsanitary street conditions have persisted in the area.