Remote work emptied downtowns for years after the pandemic. Companies cut office space because it was the cheaper choice at the time. In San Francisco, office visits in September 2026 were up 12.2 percent year-over-year on AI leasing, but still 33.8 percent below September 2019, according to Placer.ai. Weekday retail corridor traffic Monday through Thursday remains 16–17 percent below 2019 levels nationwide. Weekends are close to recovered.

Airbnb nearly died in the same period. Revenue fell 67 percent in the second quarter of 2020. Full-year revenue landed around $3.3–3.4 billion, down roughly 30 percent from $4.8 billion in 2019. The IPO looked finished.

It recovered by the summer of 2020 on a different kind of travel: short domestic trips by car, longer stays for remote work, and stays outside big cities. In 2021, revenue reached about $5.9 billion and gross booking value was already above 2019. The product—whole homes, flexible locations, longer stays—fit the new pattern better than hotels did.

Many of those longer stays sat in residential units that hosts bought or converted during the same years cities lost their weekday crowds. That is one reason some downtowns still feel thinner than the numbers from 2019. There is no clean public dataset that shows how many ordinary apartments were actually pulled into short-term rental stock, or how much that raised rents for the people who still live in the affected buildings. Office vacancy in San Francisco remains in the high 20s percent range in 2026, well above pre-pandemic levels, even as leasing has picked up.

The companies that emptied the offices are now discovering remote work is not free. Knowledge transfer and output suffer past a point. Some are pulling people back. AI leasing has helped a few markets. It has not restored the old 9-to-5 density. Weekday foot traffic remains structurally lower.

Airbnb adapted faster than the cities did. The platform survived because the demand that emptied the offices created a new use for the housing stock. The cities are still waiting for the offices to fill again.