San Jose ‘ghost town’ trip
A widely liked post described San Jose as feeling like a ‘ghost town’ during a recent road trip, using post‑apocalyptic imagery and drawing 2,551 likes as people compared travel‑time impressions. The anecdote circulated in a thread of niche road‑trip commentary this weekend. (x.com)
A weekend travel post that cast San Jose as a “ghost town” landed in a city with a real post-pandemic downtown debate, but the broader numbers are more mixed than the anecdote. (x.com, sanjose.org) San Jose is California’s third-largest city, with 997,368 residents in the Census Bureau’s July 1, 2024 estimate, and its downtown has spent the last several years trying to pull workers, visitors and residents back after remote work hollowed out office districts. (census.gov, kqed.org) By one widely cited recovery measure, downtown San Jose had restored 90 percent of its 2019 foot traffic and came close to 100 percent in December 2024, according to Team San José’s 2024-2025 annual report. The same report tied that rebound to conventions, events and joint marketing with the city, San José State University and the downtown association. (sanjose.org) That does not mean downtown is full every day. KQED reported in February 2026 that San Jose’s recovery had outpaced San Francisco and Oakland, while office-heavy weekday patterns still remained a central test for the city. (kqed.org, therealdeal.com) Office vacancies are still a big part of the picture. Cushman & Wakefield said the broader Silicon Valley office vacancy rate was 18.8 percent in the first quarter of 2026, while separate reporting this month said downtown San Jose ended 2025 at about 30 percent vacancy. (cushmanwakefield.com, therealdeal.com) City leaders are responding by trying to turn some empty offices into housing. The Mercury News reported on April 6 that officials broke ground on a housing conversion at the 14-story Bank of Italy building, the first project to move ahead under San Jose’s office-to-housing program. (mercurynews.com) Downtown San Jose also has a different rhythm than older, denser downtowns. The San Jose Downtown Association says it tracks foot traffic, events, housing and business activity monthly, and local reporting last year put the downtown residential population at roughly 23,000 even as jobs remained below pre-2020 levels. (sjdowntown.com, briefly.co) So a driver passing through at the wrong hour can still see long quiet blocks and half-empty office towers. But the city being described online is also one where visitor counts, convention business and street activity have rebounded sharply from the pandemic low. (nbcbayarea.com, sanjose.org)
