Scientists say nobody has seen a black hole with the naked eye, but I take issue with that. Smack in the middle of downtown is the San Francisco Centre, a block-length building that functions as a gravity sink for dismal photos and negative headlines.
If the doom loop has an event horizon, this is it.
But instead of mourning, I’d like to offer a modest proposal: We San Franciscans should just buy the mall ourselves.
The most recent appraisal tags the property’s value at around $260 million. That means every person in the city would have to pitch in just north of $300. That’s less than a latte per person per week, or only 1.6% of our $15.9 billion city budget — or, to put it another way, about a quarter of OpenAI’s monthly revenue. Not a bad investment to finally get the monkey off our back.
Why act now? Because the Centre’s decline is dragging down everything around it. As one real estate broker put it, the downtown retail market is a barbell, with Union Square on one end and the San Francisco Centre on the other. When one side is dead weight, it makes reviving the other side extra difficult. San Francisco won’t truly be back — despite the increasingly good vibes — until this blight at the center of the city is addressed.
Nordstrom’s 2023 exit after 35 years at the mall kicked off the worst kind of domino effect and gave every surrounding retailer a convenient excuse to join in. After that started the decline, this year’s closure of Bloomingdale’s “marked the pulling of the plug,” as my colleague Kevin V. Nguyen wrote.
Help was almost on the way. Loan documents say that as recently as January, brokers were in negotiations to fill some of the mall’s mass vacancies, but those deals essentially ended once the property lost both of its anchor tenants. Much of the recent coverage has been tracking the mall’s extended hospice stay: a closed Zara here, a shuttered Jamba Juice there. The city even tried enticing nonprofits and local businesses to move in, to little avail.
Because real estate is a strangely archaic industry, an in-person public auction for the property was scheduled for Thursday near the courthouse steps in Civic Center. But the sale was postponed again — for the seventh time. The lenders can’t agree on what to do with the $556 million mortgage, and to make matters more complex, part of the mall sits on land owned by the San Francisco Unified School District, which leased it to the mall operators through 2043.
Even vultures don’t want this much spoiled meat. And the longer the mall is dormant, the less revivable it becomes. That’s why a city-based crowdfunding campaign is the best and most sensible option. Forget the complexities around real estate debt. What we, the citizens, can offer is cold, hard cash. What’s more, with the property’s value in freefall, we might be able to put in a successful lowball bid and use the rest of our $260 million nest egg for sprucing the place up.
For a place that has the highest concentration of billionaires per capita in the world — and also perhaps the highest concentration of complainers — it could be a moment to finally put our money where our mouths are.
It would definitely be the biggest GoFundMe in history, and one with few precedents. But, hey, we’re the people who invented denim jeans, cable cars, and a festival that culminates in igniting a towering wooden effigy. Each of those probably felt outlandish at the time of conception.
And what might we do with the mall once we own it? In Memphis, a failed mall became a civic center, while in Los Angeles, my alma mater UCLA is converting the former Westside Pavilion to a research center.
The ideas for San Francisco Centre 2.0 have been less inspired. More retail? Good luck. An educational center? Boring. Lab space? Architecturally impossible. A soccer stadium. Sure, in Barcelona. Pickleball courts? Sigh. Legoland? Finally, a great idea!
The city is so desperate that officials have even contacted Meow Wolf, the punk-art collective that creates interactive installations like Las Vegas’ Omega Mart, to see if it would take a stab at the mall. So far, Meow Wolf has politely declined.
But with a shared ownership model, we wouldn’t need an art collective savior; we could just vote on what we want this prime piece of real estate to be. This might be the one time a DAO would actually make sense. Thanks in advance for your contribution, crypto bros!
Some suggestions for what the mall could become: the world’s largest Dave & Buster’s, a huge downtown parking lot we could all use for free — or maybe knock it down and build another park.
Because when has turning a large strip of land in San Francisco into a public park ever been a problem?
Like it or not, the black hole is here, so maybe it’s time we leap into it.