The pictures are enough to make a shopper wince and a store owner cry.
San Francisco Centre's new operators say they are committed to bringing back the half-empty mall, once the pride of Downtown, now a source of civic embarrassment and shame. But new data from location analytics company Unacast shows how foot traffic around the complex has fallen off a cliff.
The company uses GPS data gleaned from smartphones and mobile apps to estimate the number of people in a given area. In December 2019, the estimated number of visitors to the mall that month was 668,000, boosted by the holiday shopping season. In December 2023, the mall only drew 265,000 visitors, a decline of more than 60%.
The data around the mall tells one story. Photos of the mall before and after the recent falloff in business tell another. Both present portraits of a business district in crisis, with the one-time landmark of San Francisco shopping now a shadow of its formerly vibrant self.
The pandemic, which kept people sheltered inside for months and eventually kicked off a broad shift to hybrid work patterns, has hit Downtown San Francisco especially hard.
In its wake are an increasing number of vacant office buildings, a major decline in the daytime population of office workers and a significant drop in foot traffic that used to feed retailers and restaurants.
In the mall’s case, annual visitors dropped from 6.43 million people in 2019 to 2.24 million in 2021. Escalators, pathways and even entire floors where people previously congregated now feel mostly bare.
Unacast data showed foot traffic at 3.36 million people in 2022, with numbers holding steady at about that same level in 2023. But data for the second half of 2023 hints at the challenges facing the property.
In August, Nordstrom—an anchor tenant, along with Bloomingdale's—closed its doors, leaving more than 300,000 square feet vacant. The mall’s central spiral elevator now carries shoppers to five floors of shuttered retail space in an eerie echo of what used to exist.
Since then, Unacast’s data has tracked a continuing monthly decline in estimated visitors to the San Francisco Centre.
That coincides with what remaining tenants in the mall report and what our photographers captured while on recent visits to the San Francisco Centre. Brian Politron, the co-owner of luxury sneaker reseller Nectar Supply, previously told The Standard that Nordstrom’s departure left the mall “a ghost town.”
Before-and-after images of the mall during its peak holiday season and the current situation on a typical weekday cut a striking contrast that explains the decline in activity.
After the decision by Westfield and its partner Brookfield to stop making loan payments on the property, Trident Pacific Real Estate Group was appointed as the mall’s receiver in October. Essentially, the company is court-ordered to act as the property’s custodian with the authority to manage, reposition and potentially sell the property.
Last week, representatives from Trident Pacific and the property manager it hired, real estate firm JLL, had their first meeting with tenants where they tried to instill confidence they would continue operating the mall even in the face of a rash of recent closure announcements, including Adidas, J. Crew and Aldo.
But a picture, you might say, is worth a thousand promises.
