When Bader Shakarna heard of the effort to rebrand the location of his 3-month-old Mediterranean restaurant, Jay’s Grill, from Mid-Market to Lower Hayes, he raised his eyebrows and chuckled. “Really? We’re in the middle of Market Street,” he said. “That’s funny.”
His grill is kitty-corner from the former Twitter building at 1355 Market St., which has become the locus of the controversial rebrand. Real estate firm JLL, which is leasing the property, came up with the neighborhood name as a marketing scheme for prospective tenants. The firm just signed the building’s first tenant — the AI startup Motive — since X fled downtown last year.
It’s easy to see why real estate types felt the need for a new moniker meant to associate the area with Hayes Valley. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Mid-Market became a dead zone and has struggled to rebuild its reputation, while Hayes Valley earned the nickname “Cerebral Valley,” thanks to a flood of young AI workers moving there to live, work, and (very rarely) play.
“We love rebranding a submarket,” said Chris Roeder, executive managing director at JLL. Mid-Market’s “tough” reputation due to “how it’s been portrayed with crime and violence” fails to capture the character of 1355 Market St., he said, while Hayes Valley proper lacks office space. A rechristening marries the needs of each neighborhood.
“Hayes has great shopping — boutiques and restaurants — while the Mid-Market area has offices and residential,” Roeder said. “It makes sense to integrate the two markets and make the lines between them more fluid.”
Others trying to fill vacancies in the area are also fans. Newmark Pacific broker Ben Lazzareschi called the change “exciting” and “positive,” while Joy Macdonald, general manager of the yawning retail space on the ground floor of the former Twitter building, said she appreciates the “better brand.”
“From a leasing standpoint, it helps, absolutely — people are a little bit afraid of ‘Mid-Market,’” Macdonald said. Since the retail space’s anchor, a luxury grocer called The Market, departed in February, blaming mounting financial losses, she’s been hustling to bring in tenants. (A juice and treat shop, The Lemon Street, is coming.) She hopes the fresh neighborhood name will lead to tours: “I’m totally supportive of whatever is going to help solve the problem of vacancy.”
But small business owners and neighborhood stakeholders reacted to the rebrand with skepticism, indignation, or plain bewilderment.
“What’s wrong with Mid-Market?” asked Joy Ou, a developer who built the Serif condominiums and Timbri Hotel across the street from Ikea in 2022. “This is the spine of the city. It should be what it is. We should try to make it better rather than make it something it’s not.”
Jeannie Kim, who owns Sam’s American Eatery at 1220 Market St., which will mark its 20th anniversary next June, questioned a name change that doesn’t address deeper issues, such as inadequate policing and poor lighting. She’d hate to see energy that could be funneled into actual change get swept up in an advertising exercise, she said, recalling a not-so-distant time when Hayes Valley too had a tough reputation. In that case, she noted, it didn’t take a rebrand to shift the narrative.
“I take pride in Mid-Market, and all our culture and arts institutions,” she said. “It’s something to be celebrated and not to be embarrassed about and changed.”
Worse, she can imagine a hot, new identity having a negative impact on attracting the restaurants and shops the corridor desperately needs: ”Maybe people will pay more for office space, and it will increase the rental costs for small businesses.”
Julian Prince Dash, owner of Holy Stitch at 1059 Market St., put his disdain for the new name bluntly: “What the fuck new redlining is that?”
He sees any attempt to carve up the neighborhood as a way to sanitize one section’s image at the expense of another. (His denim workshop at 1059 Market St. wouldn’t fall within the bounds of Lower Hayes.) The city has a history of rebranding neighborhoods to keep up with gentrification; some names have stuck, while others, like the East Cut, have fizzled.
“If you’ve been around the city, then you know these invisible red lines and the power that they can have, and the coalitions and money pots that they can create or evaporate overnight,” he said. “My innate sense is that it’s a bunch of bullshit.”
Mid-Market is already changing
Long before Hayes Valley started wooing AI firms, the late Mayor Ed Lee sold a vision that involved transforming Mid-Market into a destination for tech companies and their workers. His payroll tax break attracted the likes of Twitter, Uber, Zendesk, Spotify, and WeWork to open offices along the Market Street corridor.
Housing developers responded in kind by building thousands of units at properties such as NEMA, Trinity Place, the Prism, and Serif.
Then the pandemic wiped away nearly all of that positive momentum. As office workers receded, the neighborhood’s street problems became more stark, hampering how prospective tenants or visitors perceived Mid-Market.
More than 47% of the neighborhood’s office inventory is vacant today, according to real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, compared with a 34% vacancy rate for the city as a whole.
Developer Chris Foley, who owned The Market, thinks San Francisco should roll out another Lee-style sweetener to bring tenants back to the area. That, he said, would have a bigger impact than any name change: “Sure, [Motive] just leased 40,000 square feet, but there’s a gazillion square feet vacant there.”
But within the down cycle, there are sparks of new life. A once-vacant office tower at 995 Market St. is now a “vertical village” for techies after a group of German entrepreneurs purchased it for an 80% discount. Likewise, the Community Arts Stabilization Trust and KALW Public Media partnered to buy the distressed Warfield building for $7.3 million, and the former Zendesk headquarters at 989 Market St. was reopened to temporarily house Y Combinator’s latest summer batch, since the previous tenants left their furniture behind.
Even though the fall of Mid-Market is tracked alongside Twitter’s departure, many stakeholders argue that the closure of the Hotel Whitcomb — once a draw for tourists, theater audiences, and political events — dealt the area a blow, worsened when it briefly served as a homeless shelter during the pandemic. The owner, RFR Holdings, has kept the Whitcomb closed, although it has an eye toward a sale.
For now, small business tenants at 1355 Market are desperate for an increase in foot traffic.
Ina Lee, owner of Korean restaurant Matko, laughed at the audaciousness of the rebrand when she first heard it — “It’s kind of confusing and doesn’t really translate to me,” she said — but is happy to embrace it if it can bring more corporate tenants to the building. This year, her sales have been on par with the peak-pandemic crash, or even worse.
“When people hear ‘Hayes,’ they say, ‘Oh, nice!’ I understand the intention, and I really hope it works,” she said. “We really need people coming back to work here.”