Is it reimagining or repurposing?

Updated: Oct 27 Blog 5

Some hotels may have reopened, but take a walk in the tourist destinations of San Francisco (Union Square, Fisherman’s Wharf, etc.) and you will see more empty storefronts than occupied. It is not just the popular neighborhoods for visitors, but all over the city - especially the Financial District and SOMA. These quarters were the nadir for the tech boom of the last decade. A time when tens of thousands of 20-somethings, who mostly had a work history at the student center on America’s college campuses, now found themselves with Bay Area tech jobs making 150K a year.

As they flooded the city, replacing tenets who had lived in the area for decades (often at the hands of crooked landlords who evicted them illegally), businesses began catering to them. Your neighborhood grocery store and laundromat, was soon replaced by a Pilates studio and juice bar. On some SOMA streets you could throw a stick and hit twelve of them.

Then came the pandemic, and the exodus of tech workers. And with that, the businesses that catered to them. Big Tech figured out that they could continue their profit-stream with many of their minions working from home, which thus negated the need for millions of square feet of commercial office space.

With the tech-bros playing Call Of Duty at home between assignments, instead of at a SOMA office, what about the storefronts on the ground level?

If you are a commercial property owner, do you hold out that the world of 2019 you based your investments on, will come back? Or do you cut your losses, and put anything in that space?

Do you leave your property empty until that magical fantasy of the tech-workers returning in droves materializes. Or do you face the splash-of-cold-water-reality, that those gastropubs and whisky bar-patrons are not coming back, and adopt the belief that any revenue is better than none?

Do you adopt the Broken Windows theory of fighting blight, or do you just let your windows get broken and take a loss?

In a September 15th article in the San Francisco Examiner, Robbie Silver, the executive director of the Downtown SF Partnership said, “When a space, or a downtown is more populated and activated, there is less blight.”

There are now signs that these street-level storefront owners are beginning to open up to new ideas. One such concept being floated around, is the city taking over their leases and moving local artists and craftsmen into those spaces. The T-Shirt shop may be gone, but imagine that space with a local painter selling his art? Everyone wins: The artist gets a space to work and sell his creations to tourists, the commercial property owner gets some revenue, and the city gets one less empty storefront on a busy thoroughfare.

Another idea for fighting these ghost town-tendencies is to repurpose existing storefronts into a pop-up event space for limited exhibitions.

Formerly an H&M store, now a pop-up event space for limited exhibitions.

For years, the Armani Emporium store in San Francisco’s Union Square district had one business after another rotating passed its doors, and never for more than a few months it seemed. The Lego-inspired Art Of The Brick exhibition found it was an ideal venue, and called it home for many years until it moved to another city.

Imagine a San Francisco where you can stroll past a Dolce & Gabbana store next to an artists’ studio selling San Francisco-inspired art? Wouldn’t that be nice.