Where Have All The Storefronts Gone?

In a March 4th editorial, the Washington Post Opinion Page displayed a headline which read, "To revitalize downtowns, cities need to stop making this big mistake." It essentially said that cities with hollowed out downtowns, like San Francisco, may not find a willing partner with developers who repurpose office buildings to apartments. All downtowns were (and still are, really) affected by the pandemic, and it costs a lot to repurpose an office building to a residential one. However, many cities with diversified economies have been able to rebound to some degree.

Cities like San Francisco, which doubled-down on Big Tech being the primary industry in the 21st century, have taken longer to recover. Even one-industry towns like Las Vegas saw the writing on the wall and began to slowly diversify their economy. But San Francisco doubled-down on Big Tech, even while the industry is emptying out San Francisco’s tech community. In the beginning of 2020, the office vacancy rate was around 4%, yet in a December 27th. 2022 San Francisco Chronicle article, those numbers shot up, "The preliminary numbers compiled by analysts at the firm CBRE show a vacancy rate for 2022 of around 27%."

Now we have hundreds of street-level, empty storefronts. Not only in tourist destinations like Union Square, but in the Financial

District and residential neighborhoods. Now the question is, what do we do with them?

Empty retail space on Market Street

If you are commercial property owner in a tourist-destination like Union Square or Fisherman’s Wharf, you have two options: One. Do nothing, hold on to the hope it will be 2019 again, and the tourists will line up outside. While paying taxes and insurance on your shuttered property. Or Two. Realize that those snow-globe/T-Shirt vendors are not coming back and now you have to think outside-the-box to keep those spaces filled.

One pie-in-the-sky idea is really the most practical one, but the least likely to make a profit (and thus pushed to the back burner by landlords), is to partner with the city. The idea is this: The city says to commercial property owners, you can wait for the tourists to come back, and fill your shops with businesses catering to them in who-knows-how-many-years. Or, you can partner with us now and open those spaces to local artists and craftsmen who have been displaced by the Tech Boom, letting them use those spaces at a greatly reduced rent.

Everyone wins. The commercial property owners get a revenue stream, though not as good as before the pandemic. But hey, it’s still money. Artists and craftsmen get to have a retail business to sell their works in a space they could never come close to affording, instead of a rickety card table on the street. Tourists get an opportunity to purchase locally-made trinkets and baubles made in San Francisco.

Instead of buying a Golden Gate Bridge magnet or coffee mug manufactured in China, wouldn’t it be nice to purchase the same thing, lovingly crafted individually, from a local San Francisco artist.

Imagine that.