Westfield Walks Away from Downtown San Francisco Mall Property
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This clearly shows there is demand but people prefer to go somewhere else. San Francisco is becoming worse day by day with crime and city maintenance. But mayor wants to somehow not show any link with this and conveniently says it is long coming.
Along Market in the other direction, "C-3-G" ("Downtown General") also includes apartment buildings, and there's a few that have opened in the past few years between 6th and 9th.
North of Market to the east you have more of the traditional financial district, but that's really quite a small area, and it's not where the mall is.
You also have to remember tourists, which have actually picked up pretty well post-pandemic. The red areas in around Union Square and in SoMa between 2nd and 5th contain a large fraction of the city's hotel rooms. That's not permanent residents, but it's still a lot of people.
1: https://statisticalatlas.com/county/California/San-Francisco...
Tourism *in San Francisco* has not recovered.
From <https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/two-s-f-s-largest-hot...>:
>Park Hotels said San Francisco’s convention-driven demand is expected to be 40% lower between 2023 and 2027 compared with the pre-pandemic average.
Nearly every night, mentally ill homeless people were screaming at the top of their lungs, making it extremely hard to get to sleep. This lasted until 3 and 4 AM.
On the few nights I ventured out after dark, there were people sprawled out all over the sidewalk, and you had to jump around or walk into the street to avoid them. There were lit fires on the bare sidewalk under the Westfield entrance.
It's surreal.
All that to say, this problem has existed for decades. It doesn't explain the recent drop in foot traffic which is largely caused by people no longer going to the office. Getting around in SF isn't the easiest thing to do and if you don't have to go downtown then you're probably not going to. This scenario is playing out in downtowns all across America.
How long are we going to blame Reagan? Democrats have supermajority in California since 2011-12 ballot reforms, and hypermajority in SF. It's not for a lack of funding neither as SF has spent billions[1] so far.
So blaming it on Reagan and funding is just lazy and dishonest.
[1] 1.45B per https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...
The first was in the 60's when JFK (whose sister had been savaged by the mental health institutions) signed legislation changing the requirements for commitment to be "posing a danger to oneself or others." This was a change from the metric of "mentally unfit to live independently in society."
The second was in the 80's when Reagan and the Democratic-majority congress defunded and shuttered many of the state-owned mental health facilities. This was a bi-partisan effort by the Republicans, who hated spending money, and the Democrats, who hated how poorly run the facilities were. Nobody has had a really good solution for mental health care in the US since those happened and, as the parent post points out, it is unfair to paint this as "Reagan defunded mental health care."
From a May 2023 article on the decline of the city <http://web.archive.org/web/20230510153958/https://www.curbed...>:
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
It turns out London Underground experimented with the idea in the early 1900s – https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/blog/spiral-escalator-engineering... – but it took until the 80s for Mitsubishi Electric to build and install them at scale.
Oh, and the second thing that stood out there was the restroom setup. A non-enclosed unisex restroom area with staff managing a line of people and urinals overlooked by said queue. Certainly one of the more interesting ones. I assume to prevent drug taking or people sleeping in there.
It's still a great city and will surely return but the question is where is the bottom?
https://abc7news.com/glitter-bomb-package-mark-rober-youtube...
We need to institutionalize (not jail) these people, with the goal of helping to heal them with the expectation that some people are broken beyond repair.
The city of San Francisco spends $70,000 annually per homeless person![0] The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available.
And no, weather is not the most important reason for why so many homeless come here. If it were, San Diego would have a worse homeless problem than San Francisco.
The most important difference is that the city of San Diego spends one third as much as San Francisco per homeless person. ($46.8 million in city spending[1] for an estimated 1900 homeless.[2])
San Francisco has an enormous homeless-industrial complex that uses every virtue-signaling, heart-tugging propaganda tool at its disposal to increase the flow of money thrown into its bottomless maw, despite no metric ever improving one bit whatsoever.
[0] <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...>
[1] <https://www.lajollalight.com/news/story/2023-04-15/san-diego...>
[2] <https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-07/downtown...> [3]
[3] The count is only of the homeless in downtown San Diego. While presumably most homeless San Diegans are there, just as there are very few San Franciscans living on the sidewalk in Pac Heights, the point is that a larger number would mean that much less spending per homeless person in the city as a whole, and that much more glaring a discrepancy between the two cities.
Couple that with a populace that votes like reality does not exist and has picked some of the worst candidates the country has ever seen and you get out of control crime, homeless on scale seen nowhere on earth(well maybe LA), and general dysfunction from all aspects of basic city services.
One of the reasons it has been particularly bad as of late is the exodus of tech which brought in fat revenues to the city coffers and also supported a huge range of side industries from restaurants to gyms to other essential services. Once tech left and its money along with it you get a dead hellscape with out of control crime and city services that are non-existent. The hollowing out of downtown will be just the beginning of a very rapid decline for SF, next to follow up are grocery stores, in about two years expect most of them to abandon the city as shoplifting and robbery makes them very un-profitable, I expect then you start seeing the city population take a giant hit and 20-30% of residents will be gone. By then bankruptcy will be very close and could happen even sooner.
1. FBI corruption charges in SF - https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/sanfrancisco/ne...
Don't forget Leland Yee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leland_Yee#Arrest_and_convicti...
> The mall, co-owned by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Brookfield Corp., has $558 million in outstanding mortgage debt. Management will be turned over to a receiver.
> Sales at the Westfield San Francisco Centre fell to $298 million last year from $455 million in 2019, while foot traffic dropped 43%, Morse said. Traffic and sales at other Westfield properties increased during the same period.
Now we see hotels are even questioning their existence there: https://www.wsj.com/articles/hotel-owners-start-to-write-off...
> Senate Bill 553, which was submitted by State Senator Dave Cortese, has been passed by the State Senate and will now progress to policy committees in the State Assembly. Cortese hopes the proposed law will prevent workplace violence and protect staff from being forced by their employers to step-in during robberies. But some store bosses are furious about the plans, with the California Retailers Association mocking the move as an open invitation for thieves "to come in and steal."
https://www.newsweek.com/store-retail-violence-robbery-theft...
Westfield Mall is an anchor for most of the shopping on Market Street. It's actually a bit of an anomaly if you think about the death of malls in the US.
Union Square has been emptying out over the past few years. It's not a small number of stores leaving, it's major anchor stores.
A new IKEA is supposed to be opened on Market. I wonder if they'll reconsider?
It's a shame; SF doesn't have any other retail hub, and every store that closes feels like a loss. The question will be to what extent can the damage be contained to downtown, and whether other neighborhoods can help make up for the decay of downtown.
I'd consider myself cautiously optimistic.
What's happening to SF is very similar to what has become of Portland. That, my friends, is not a downtown I would recommend anyone visit until something changes. Simply walking around any time of day it becomes immediately obvious that if you're walking downtown you're either a hapless tourist or homeless. Most of the locals seemingly drive into downtown, jump in and out of stores and restaurants that are still in business, then they drive back home. The suburbs and surrounding areas are gorgeous, but large sections of downtown are just ... terrible. (And often scary.)
Seattle was teetering on this fate, but Amazon forced their enormous workforce to come back to the office. And, it produced a lot of blowback from the employees. But, local employees went back.
What has that done? It has created a TON of downtown traffic. Not fun at all. But it has also injected the downtown core with (you guessed it) lots of people and money, keeping small businesses downtown alive in some areas. At least for now, Seattle seems to have dodged the ghost town blues that have befallen beautiful SF and Portland.
From a May 2023 article on the decline of the city <http://web.archive.org/web/20230510153958/https://www.curbed...>:
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
All of Rick Caruso's malls in LA are, to be sure, probably profitable but terrible in terms of urban planning
YMMV
I think you're mistaking "mall" for "strip mall".
At least in the US, the vast majority of "malls" include a massive belt of road around them for all the cars to get in & out, and a massive amount of parking, making walking and biking there or even transiting there unrealistic.
Sure, you could have an "urban mall" with no parking, and that would be nice & pedestrian. But that's not the Westfield Malls in LA.
Though, I'd imagine this would be illegal almost everywhere in the US due to parking minimums.
But it is what Westfield SF is.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Westfield+San+Francisco+Ce...
That's the comment I was responding to.
The Caruso malls are imposing, Mordor like fortresses that gives the middle finger to the communities around it. Once inside, people with money can enjoy whatever corporate chain stores that can afford Caruso's rent and the property manager's whims.
The problem in SF isn’t the mall, it’s the laissez-faire approach to crime and public order.