Allies of Mayor Daniel Lurie on Tuesday announced the formation of the San Francisco Downtown Development Corp., a private nonprofit group that aims to raise money from wealthy individuals to revitalize the city’s beleaguered central business district.
It sports a bold-faced list of philanthropists and civic leaders for its initial board members, including Bob Fisher, a scion of the Gap retail fortune; Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard; and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen.
The new group is the second entity to emerge under Lurie’s “open for business” campaign to repair a downtown area smacked down by the pandemic’s shift to remote work and chronic public safety challenges that have scared off shoppers, tourists, and conventioneers. The other new civic group, Partnership for San Francisco, is a collection of high-powered CEOs and other corporate leaders who intend to work with City Hall on policies supported by the business community. The Standard reported the existence of both outfits three weeks ago.
The Downtown Development Corp. intends to raise an unspecified amount of money it can quickly deploy for projects like planting trees, lending money for small-merchant capital projects, and providing bridge loans to retailers and others who want to open businesses downtown.
Its chief organizer and board chair, David Stiepleman, said in an interview that speed is of the essence in securing and deploying the money needed to get the project off the ground. While future efforts will require new legislation and other measures, “this is the ‘Let’s move now’ initiative,” he said.
He said the group plans to quickly establish a fund that could be used, for example, to secure heaters for outdoor seating at restaurants or provide loans for downtown office or retail tenants that might not otherwise have the creditworthiness to qualify.
Stiepleman, co-president of the investment firm Sixth Street, which recently purchased a stake in the San Francisco Giants, said the new group’s goal is to coordinate and centralize some of the activities being performed by a collection of community business districts in and around downtown. Such groups act as hyper-local taxing authorities, while the Downtown Development Corp. will solicit tax-deductible donations.
Lurie, like his predecessor London Breed, has championed the re-emergence of downtown as critical to the city’s success. Stiepleman said downtown comprises 4% of the city’s land mass and “45-ish percent of its tax revenue, which should be higher.”
The question facing the new group is whether it will be able to attract donors who haven’t previously given money to philanthropic causes in San Francisco. Fisher, as chair of the board of trustees of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, represents a link to establishment arts benefactors. Larsen has donated generously to public safety causes and was an outspoken backer of Breed.
Whitman, a onetime Republican candidate for governor of California, recently stepped down as U.S. ambassador to Kenya. In a statement through a spokesman, she said: “I believe San Francisco is a sleeping giant that’s in the process of reawakening in a big way. I’m excited to play a part in this comeback story.”
The other members of the new entity’s board offer clues to where it will reach for funding and the coalitions it plans to build while deciding what to finance. They are Sam Cobbs, CEO of Tipping Point Community, the anti-poverty organization Lurie founded that has relationships with the philanthropists who fund it; Rebecca Foster, CEO of the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, which also is involved with an initiative to raise money for interim housing for homeless people; and Olga Miranda, president of the Service Employees International Union Local 87, which represents many of the janitors who work in downtown office buildings.
Stiepleman, who, along with Larsen, is also a member of Partnership for San Francisco, said the Downtown Development Corp. has not yet begun fundraising. He declined to name a target for how much it seeks to raise. However, he said initial conversations with donors have been encouraging.
“They are saying, ‘How can I help, and when can I write a check?’” Stiepleman said.
The answer to the latter question, at least, is clear: now.