27 minute read
The Future of Downtown
KEVIN TRUONG: I’m a staff writer at the San Francisco Standard, which is a relatively new online news source. My focus at the Standard is on the recovery of San Francisco’s economy in the postpandemic [era]. So today’s topic is of particular importance to me.
There is perhaps no more important topic to San Francisco’s future than this. Quite frankly, we’re at a critical juncture for downtown San Francisco. There were hopes this fall would be a turning point where employees would come back and streets would be filled as they once were. That hasn’t happened. While things have certainly improved from the near-apocalyptic emptiness of the early days of the pandemic, today many buildings remain quiet on most days, and human traffic on sidewalks and streets is still limited. Some people have returned to offices, but hybrid work is becoming the norm. Recently, Mayor London Breed recognized that her push to have employees return to the office has had limited impact and began to voice the need for new solutions to turn around and enliven downtown.
That’s what we’re here to discuss. Let’s be clear: We need a vibrant downtown and vibrant neighborhoods. It’s not an either-or. A vibrant downtown helps the city overall, including the payments in property taxes, which help fund the city’s government and services. And it’s clear we have reached a pivot point. We need new solutions and approaches to bring back downtown San Francisco.
Robbie, I’d like to start with you. You are the head of the Downtown S.F. Partnership. Tell us a little about your organization and give us a little scenesetter for what we’re going to be discussing today. ROBBIE SILVER: Sure. For those who don’t know, the city has 18 what we call community benefit districts. We were formed in January 2020, two
WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO
return San Francisco’s downtown to its vibrant pre-pandemic state? From the November 1, 2022, program “The Future of Downtown San Francisco.” LAURA CRESCIMANO, Co-Founder and Principal, Sitelab WADE ROSE, President, Advance SF ROBBIE SILVER, Executive Director, San Francisco Downtown Community Benefit District (Downtown SF Partnership) KATE SOFIS, Executive Director, Office of Economic and Workforce Development KEVIN TRUONG, Reporter, San Francisco Standard—Moderator
PHOTO BY ZETONG LI / UNSPLASH
THE FUTURE OF OF DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO
THE FUTURE DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO
months exactly before the pandemic hit. We serve the financial district and Jackson Square neighborhoods. It’s about 43 square blocks. Seventy-five percent of my budget actually goes straight to our cleaning and safety. We cover most of the downtown economic core, which has just been completely devastated economically based on the pandemic.
We need to re-imagine downtown. This is a pivotal moment [when] we can actually make a difference and do something about it. Through our work with our board of directors, we decided that we needed to do something in the public realm as a start. Why not do something that we can control, which is what happens on our alleys, on our back streets?
There’s so much layered history in downtown San Francisco. The waterfront used to come right up to Montgomery, you know, back in the day. There’s buried ships underneath the financial district. That’s a story that we can play out in the public realm in pilots that we’ve done so far to date.
Battery Street was closed to vehicular traffic in 2020 as part of Better Market Street. Obviously, we didn’t want this to be representative of a new public space in downtown San Francisco. We worked directly with the city and commissioned local Mission based artist Claudio Talavera-Ballón to paint a 1,900-square-foot mural right on the street. It took five weeks to complete; we now have new landscaping and we activate this on Tuesdays and Thursdays for lunch time.
Another pilot that we did very successfully last year that we’re bringing back this year is called Let’s Glow, S.F.. It became the largest holiday projection mapping event in the United States, where we projection-mapped light shows on four downtown properties for 10 nights in December. This was a test case for us, because we wanted to find out if we gave people a reason to come downtown, would they and would they come after 5 p.m.?
Well, 40,000 people did. We sent out a survey and had a QR code after each light show and we asked if you came downtown, did you go shopping? Did you go out to eat? Did you go out for cocktails? And we calculated about a $2.2 million economic impact. So we’re very excited to bring back Let’s Glow this year, December 2nd through the 11th, which will be on One Bush [Street], the [Pacific] Stock Exchange, the corner of Commercial and Leidesdorff, and the historic Hobart Building.
But we knew doing pilots wasn’t enough. We needed to have a strategic plan in front of us to guide us. What could we do in the public realm to make downtown San Francisco reimagined and more meaningful not only to the workforce, but how do we market and create a new destination to our own downtown or to our own San Francisco residents and folks throughout the Bay Area?
This is why we brought on Laura Crescimano, principal of Sitelab, to come up with a very comprehensive 150-page “Public Realm Action Plan,” which is on our website, downtownsf.org. LAURA CRESCIMANO: Site Lab Urban Studio [is] a studio of about 20 urban designers, architects, landscape architects based in San Francisco, and we work across a scale of projects. We work on large-scale plans like the Fifth and Mission Project, which just opened its first phase in a public park at Fifth and Mission, to work for Google on going from a traditional office park to a mixed-use neighborhood environment, and particularly on public grounds and how we bring together all of the parts that make cities places we want to be and that we know and love. So we were personally invested, I would say, in engaging with Robbie and his team on downtown and what the future is here downtown.
I think we’ve all seen the ways in which neighborhoods have thrived, and we’ve seen a return to the neighborhood; and at the same time, downtown has a different role. It is a center of gravity. All roads lead to downtown. It’s a job center where we have capacity for over 200,000 jobs. And it also is a historic hub with all these layers of history. So there’s these bones here that we want to think about; what is its next life? It’s been through actually many lives in San Francisco. We all know the impact of the pandemic, that the trips to downtown have gone down. We’ve seen them creeping back up, particularly for work, although in a different format than maybe we saw before.
But downtown also used to serve for tourism and as a social destination and as shopping destination. Those trips have also taken a hit. So we’ve been thinking about what does it mean to think about this next era of downtown?
We did a lot of research and we had a survey to the public with nearly 900 responses as well as on-the-ground observations and internet surveys and other research. One of
the interesting things to us was to ask people what they would want to see, what would make them come back to downtown or return to downtown more. Clearly we know that there are sentiments both real and perhaps perceived about cleanliness and safety. But interestingly, we put on the list the resolution of COVID. Would that be the thing that would make you come to work more? And it was nearly last on the list. In fact, people wanted to see more like a kind of liveliness to downtown, more green, more restaurants, more gathering places, more art, more of that greater social purpose to downtown.
I should note that this is not the answer to all things for downtown or for the city of San Francisco. We are coming at it from one perspective, which is the public realm, to start to plant seeds really for a different way of looking at our city and our downtown. So how can downtown be more of a social destination? And that social destination is for workers to have more reasons to come down to the office. It’s a choice to come to the office now for many workers—not all, but for many—but also families, that test case of, Would you come at night? What are the reasons to come at night or stay after work or come on a weekend? . . . There are no public parks in this district. There are privately owned public spaces, plazas, and 30 percent of the land is streets and alleys. In particular there is this great alley fabric. So we are looking at how do we reconsider that? Part of this plan is to say we need to move from one-offs to campaigns. How do we get more people together and think of this really as a public and private endeavor that we do together, from improving those public [and] privately owned public spaces to just literally planting more trees, having more green to make this more compelling to walk down the street?
We also did quite a bit of work on saying where would we have the most impact? We identified a series of locations and . . . places where we see a combination of a lot of the ingredients that could be great hubs, great moments in downtown—whether it’s [because] they have active restaurants, they have public spaces, they have kind of cool historic buildings. They also have potentially already planned projects by the city. So how do we bring that all together for impact? And in this example, commercial night staff, this is where we’re starting actually. We’re moving from that broader plan to our first pilot from that plan action area, commercial and night staff.
The historic coastline of San Francisco did run through this area [of land along the San Francisco waterfront], and [there are] buried ships. So there’s a really interesting story here, as well as restaurants and current life. And we’re hoping to see even more future life with San Francisco vendors and artists. [There is an] alleyway and historic building there that we think is just calling out for a kind of art and reconception. We are doing this as a coordinated effort with the downtown, as a partnership, as well as the city and the mayor’s office in terms of being a pilot. So essentially, this is not a one-off. This is actually setting up a model so that this can then be this idea of activity. Hubs can be catalyzed around the downtown to start to seed from the ground up with local business owners. That kind of energy in the public realm might compel people to rethink downtown and to come, whether it is for work or to bring your family on a weekend and evening. TRUONG: Thank you so much, Laura. And I’m going to bring up Kate. Maybe you can just talk a little bit about your reactions or your thoughts on this “Public Realm Action Plan” and what it could really do to transform some of these areas we’re talking about here. KATE SOFIS: I’m head of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, which in normal times focuses on helping businesses who are here grow, helping people secure employment. So in the context of all of that work and our response in the last few years to COVID, it is really an amazing moment in time where we will continue to do all of that. But we really have come together with community, with our mayor to deeply understand both the crisis but also the opportunity we have right now to literally fill our vacancies in our economic core with new kinds of businesses, new kinds of activities. And of course, all of that sits within the public realm. I think from where we are, and our mayor shares his vision, we wholeheartedly agree that it is this moment in time that we actually have to refill our economic core with what we maybe thought was kind of missing.
I can speak to my own personal narrative. I’ve been in the city now for almost 30 years. My teenage kids were born and raised here. We still live here. And one of the things that
drew me and so many people I know to San Francisco was our creative culture. This place where you could come from, a city like Buffalo, New York, where I grew up, where there wasn’t a lot of economic opportunity, where my parents, who were symphony musicians, were struggling economically to make it work. And then here was San Francisco, this beacon of tolerance, this place where you could come and try new things, whether it’s new things in technology or new things in the arts. So I think it is a critical moment, but also an exciting moment where we can seize the opportunity to create new kinds of experiences in our economic core.
There’s both sort of the landscaping and the hardscaping, but there’s also the programing. So a lot of what our office is doing in partnership with the Downtown Partnership is looking at how we can take some city investment to help more arts organizations have opportunities to either have pop-up performances or installations or live music, or even how we can look at retail vacancies, restaurant vacancies as well on the ground floor. And again, as we are trying to have more dining experiences and more artistic experiences, how we can both have short-term pop-up programing as well as look for longer-term tenants in those spaces.
I do want to say when I speak about and use the words economic core—and this is something we’ve been sort of trying to find the right language—when we in the city are looking at our recovery, we really have looked at a number of, let’s call them zones that make up these parts of our city, the greater downtown, if you will, that have historically had so many of our jobs and our destination retail. So we think of it including the Financial District, but we are also looking at . . . South of Market and Union Square and down to Mission Bay, how these three areas really work together.
So as I respond to questions, I’m really always going to be thinking about downtown proper, but also how it relates to these areas immediately around it. TRUONG: I want to bring up our final guest, Wade Rose from Advance S.F. Wade, maybe you can give a little bit of background on Advance S.F. itself and what role you’re trying to play in the revival of what we’re talking about in the downtown core. WADE ROSE: Advance San Francisco grew out of an organization that’s been around for maybe 40 years, which represents the interests of the larger employers in San Francisco. A few years ago, there was internal discussion about whether the typical way of representing interests of the business community, which primarily concerned tax policy and regulatory issues, was sufficient to really represent the interest of the business community. The determination was that it wasn’t and that we needed to, as a community, be concerned about the broad width of issues in San Francisco. So we changed and in January rolled out Advance San Francisco. It’s chaired by Larry Baer and Lloyd Dean. Larry, of course, is head of the Giants; Lloyd is head of Dignity Health, which is a 140-hospital company, which [has been] headquartered here in San Francisco since 1856.
What we are interested in is essentially the quality of life in San Francisco, because it has so much to do about the ability of businesses and for the economy to prosper here in the city. So we have three main concerns. One is safe and clean streets—[that] goes to crime and street behavior. We are concerned about the affordability issues in San Francisco, because it is literally the most expensive city in the country to live and work in. And we are very concerned about economic viability, which is the issue which all of us are working together on, and has to do with the viability of the business district at the moment, but [also] the viability of business overall in San Francisco. So we are engaged with Kate and others, Robbie especially, on working on these issues to essentially repopulate the downtown area, because we’ve lost approximately roughly 300,000 people per day [downtown] less than what we were experiencing in 2019. That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of transactions which support middle income jobs. The ramifications of that population leaving San Francisco literally in a month—90 percent of all office workers left in March 2020—is gigantic and huge.
So that’s one of the reasons we’re all here talking about how do we build a new future for the city. TRUONG: I want to touch on the “Public Realm Action Plan,” a 150-page report. You talk about turning downtown into more of a pedestrian-friendly zone. You mentioned some aspects that make it already pedestrian friendly. The fact that it’s one of the flatter neighborhoods in the city, for example.
But you also note that what is necessary to do that is a lot of temporary but potentially permanent street closures. Now that we have both the public and private here on stage, what are you doing to kind of cut the red tape, streamline that process? I mean, we’re already starting to see some of the issues that are coming when shared spaces are having to move into this permanent phase.
So how are we going to try to balance those concerns and make it easier to make some of these actual pilots happen? SILVER: In our plan, we actually call it street
“People wanted to see more liveliness to downtown, more green, more restaurants, more gathering places, more art.” —LAURA CRESCIMANO
openings, because we’re opening the street to pedestrians and visitors and workers alike. And we are very thankful that the city stepped up during the pandemic and actually brought out Shared Spaces. I think as community groups, we [had] been waiting for a permit process like Shared Spaces, and it just provides a great foundation for any nonprofit, any community group to close down a street, to have an activation, a festival, a block party.
As an active user of Shared Spaces, it’s just been wonderful for us to use. As Laura mentioned, 36 percent of our downtown is our streets, and I think that just leaves a huge opportunity to identify which streets, which alleys, which areas in the economic core we can actually turn over to pedestrian activity. The public realm plan is a wide scope, and we’re looking at all kinds of activation, anything from new seating and greenery and art to other festivals and block parties. We’re also looking at vacant spaces. The vacancy rate here in San Francisco is continuing to be an issue and climbing.
So the Public Realm Plan does address how do we re-energize the ground floor and also use the streets in front of those ground floor spaces as sort of a co-activation space? SOFIS: I might be able to just jump in from the public side of the house. I think Shared Spaces is actually a great example of what is possible if the city is both being very focused on cutting through red tape on behalf of the private sector, but also importantly, if we’re doing it in partnership with the private sector.
In fact, people have said to me who haven’t been to San Francisco in a while—and we are actually starting to see a decent uptick in the return of tourism, still not where we want to be, but we’re at 70, 80 percent, which is a lot better actually than where we have been lingering in the 40 to 50 percent range with return-to-office—but what people say is having all of these shared spaces for outdoor dining, while it was a response to a crisis, turns out now that we have completely challenged the idea that San Francisco is not an outdoor city; and that’s a wonderful thing. That crisis forced the city to have to work much more quickly and collaboratively across departments.
Shared Spaces, again, as one example, we have a cross-departmental team that has been in partnership working with the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, our CBDs, even as we make those spaces permanent. These cross-departmental teams, which include the Department of Public Works, the fire department, my office, etc., I think has been a really important teachable moment for the city. And that is really the same principle that we are now trying to apply to other kinds of activations. Very much around how do we stand up now a very similar approach for temporary activations, whether it’s a pop-up inside an actual built environment like a retail space or it’s a pop-up arts installation, like Let’s Glow.
We were just talking about a—I love how you’re saying a street— CRESCIMANO: Opening. SOFIS: A street invitation. [Laughter.] We have piloted other things like first year free citywide [which waves certain fees for new small ground-floor commercial businesses]. We have Prop H, which has allowed us to expedite permitting for small businesses across the city. So I think we’re really going to be trying to take those learnings and apply them directly now into the economic core. TRUONG: I want to touch on something with you. These sorts of activations really benefit from wide-ranging corporate and philanthropic support. But the activity we’re seeing from a lot of business leaders is not necessarily really staking a claim, it’s leaving the city and often with the proverbial middle finger on the way out. Can you speak from the corporate perspective on how you’re trying to get these people to really stake a claim and invest in what the future of the city can be, when they were, in a lot of cases, the beneficiaries of this last boom? ROSE: There’s a larger group of companies and company leaders who are staying and want to see San Francisco built up than are leaving. And this plan here is exactly what we’re looking for. We’re looking for a set of activities which will grow the streets so that it is attractive not only to residents on the west side or tourists, but also employees.
The companies we’ve been dealing with are very supportive and actively seeking just this type of activity, because it helps them convince employees to come back, because there’s something to come back to. You have to treat employees as visitors, and the environment they step into outside of their office’s environment is as important as the office environment. So to the extent that we can redesign San Francisco so it’s not such a monocrop of offices, but it’s offices plus homes, plus parks, plus bars, plus clubs, plus museums, that is an environment which makes it much more easy for businesses to decide to remain here or come here, because that’s what will help them attract and employ employees. TRUONG: I want to touch on that, because a topic on the top of mind for a lot of the general public—and a couple of the questions that have already come up—is this idea of conversion. A lot of the focus has been on office-to-residential conversion, but I’m kind of curious, should we be broadening our definition of what a successful conversion is? You know, we look at all this empty office space and automatically think housing, but are there other sort of commercial uses that can be used in some of these empty spaces? ROSE: Let me just quickly grab on that, because we’ve all talked about this. Yes. And a big deal will be art, such as what we’re doing here in Leidesdorff. To the extent that we can expand San Francisco’s art experience will make it hugely attractive to people to engage in. San Francisco used to have an arts district. It was very well known, especially for its expressionism back in the ’50s and ’60s and into the ’70s. And we need to reinvigorate that in the downtown area. In fact, identify a place where it could be an arts district. But in order to do that, you need affordable studio space, right?
New York is starting to do that. Companies are making space available for free or a nominal dollar a year for artists to come in and utilize it. Very similar to what Oakland did. [It’s been] very successful. So the building up of the art community in San Francisco is very important to that. Just what you’re talking about, Kevin, just a much more
diversified reuse of the space. CRESCIMANO: I would add to that that I think in the same way that Wade spoke about drawing an employee or a worker back downtown, like the benefit is that these things that we’re talking about—art and culture and pedestrian-friendly streets—draw people. We are talking about appealing to the human experience and that applies to whether it’s adding housing and converting to housing or diversifying or entertainment, which I think is another conversation.
Because we have, particularly north of Market in the district, it is predominantly office, which actually makes it conducive to different kinds of entertainment and other uses, because you don’t have potentially that kind of conflict with residential or neighborhoods. So I think there are a lot of questions, and from our side, we’re trying to plant those seeds to say who kind of grabs on to see the opportunity here. SOFIS: I think the point you make, which is a really important one, that if entertainment as an example—and I personally do think that there’s great potential for more entertainment, more nighttime vibrancy, more music, but that runs right up against residential if you’re literally putting it in the same block. So in some ways, I see again with the broader core, the Financial District as a real opportunity to bring in some of these other uses that will do better because there isn’t the density of residential in the financial district proper.
I do want to sort of maybe provocatively say that we actually have built a lot of new residential immediately adjacent to the financial district in the South of Market Area, in Mission Bay. It’s very important to recognize that when we compare our downtown or our economic core to other major cities, whether we’re looking at L.A. or we’re looking at Manhattan, the scale is very different. We are a very compact place. So I would push back a bit on the notion that the highest and best use of many of our office buildings is conversion to residential. From what we are seeing and what we are having conversations [about] with building owners, I want to challenge that. There are many shades of gray of commercial use in the upper floors of these buildings. For some of the oldest buildings that are really going to prove themselves difficult to reimagine to the way that modern workers want to interact, we will and are actually looking at what I would call strategic conversions of some of those. But what we are also hearing is it’s not that people don’t want to come in to work anymore. It’s the experience when they come in to work both on the ground, but actually in their work environment, needs to justify them coming in.
So that means more spaces for collaboration, more team space, less cubicles and individual offices and also smaller companies. What we’re seeing is larger companies shrinking their footprint. They’re not all leaving, but they’re right-sizing to the amount of space they need. So we are looking at opportunities to help buildings reimagine space on the upper floors, make smaller spaces. We are also starting to see pricing come down in our economic core, which is a good thing in the sense it allows us to recruit more diverse kinds of businesses from different sectors and expanding the kinds of sectors that we are hosting here in our downtown is an important part of the work that our office is also undertaking.
The last thing I will say, right before I came to the city a year and a half ago, I had come from running another nonprofit called S.F. Made—it supports manufacturing envisioning upper floors of buildings. They can have artists, they can have manufacturing Actually, I usually wear my Shinola watch, which was built on the sixth floor of an office building, a former office building in Detroit. Educational uses; life science. Any of these things are possible actually on the upper floors of our office buildings, and our zoning is already very permissible in our downtown to allow any of these uses. TRUONG: I’m going to go to an audience question. In my intro, I talked a little bit about the us-against-them mentality that can arise when you talk about downtown versus the neighborhoods. But somebody in the audience posed the question, Is that an old way of thinking? Is centralization kind of the way of the past, particularly as these work patterns have changed and folks are doing more economic activity where they live? Is there a decentralized model or should we be thinking about spreading out that economic activity across the city rather than thinking about the downtown core as what it was in the era past? SILVER: I’ll jump in with that one and say yes, the narrative of downtown-versus-theneighborhood here in San Francisco needs to end. For us to be successful as one city moving forward together, we have to think of our downtown as your neighborhood too. Imagine your downtown neighborhood becoming your destination for arts and culture, your destination for nightlife and entertainment, your destination for dining.
We can do this together, in changing that narrative and perception. Concurrently with our “Public Realm Action Plan,” we’ve also, as an organization, rebranded. We used to be called the Downtown Community Benefit District. Now we’re called the Downtown Partnership, to really reflect the work that we do and how we do it together. But once Let’s Glow is over, you’ll start to see new signage in the public realm that actually drops financial district and FiDi from our naming conventions and just focuses on downtown and again telling that layered history. Moving away from being called the Financial District and FiDi—automatically you think 9-to-5, banks financial institutions, people on suits— but that’s not downtown San Francisco, and that’s not what I think your downtown San Francisco should be. ROSE: Yeah, I’d like to say that the idea of downtown being somehow not San Francisco is ridiculous. It’s the business district. Downtown has always been the heart of San Francisco. What happened recently is this tremendous boom of the digital economy kind of muffled that perspective or buffered it somehow. Now we have an opportunity to reengage.
