Mayor Breed suggests turning Westfield mall into a soccer stadium
Could Westfield San Francisco Centre become a soccer stadium? A lab? An office?
Those are some of Mayor London Breed’s ideas, thrown out during an interview at the Bloomberg Technology Summit this week, as she pushes visions to reimagine a downtown struggling with office vacancies and closing stores. While not discussing specific plans, Breed’s comments were among the more wide-ranging she’s made about how the city could be reimagined in the future.
The Chronicle broke the news earlier this month that Westfield mall was giving up its space on Market Street downtown after Nordstrom’s announced it was closing its flagship store there. The fate of the property is uncertain, as it is now in the hands of Westfield’s lender.
City lovers and critics alike seized upon the news as evidence that San Francisco is further entering a “doom loop” that will make it harder to economically recover from the pandemic. Downtown has been hit hard by a slow return of workers to offices, lack of activity and spending, and a deterioration of street conditions. Other high-profile properties have defaulted, including several of the city’s biggest hotels.
But Breed pushed back against the doom and gloom narrative, arguing that how people shop has changed and the city can use the opportunity to re-envision a new downtown.
“A Westfield mall could become something completely different than what it currently is,” she said. “We could even tear down the whole building and build a whole new soccer stadium. We can create lab space. We can look at it as a new company in some other capacity.”
It’s not clear how feasible or appealing any of those options are for Westfield’s owner — but Breed wants them to think big. Notably, the city does not own Westfield and does not control its fate. Also, the property may not be big enough to house a major sports stadium. And San Francisco doesn’t have a professional soccer team, while San Jose does.
Real estate experts previously told The Chronicle that aging office buildings downtown might not be ideal candidates to convert into modern labs and would face stiff competition from biotech hub South San Francisco.
Still, San Francisco is trying to make it easier to repurpose buildings and make them more appealing for businesses to set up shop by proposing tax incentives and changing zoning laws.
Breed and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin recently worked together to pass legislation that makes it easier for property owners to convert office buildings into housing and relaxes use of retail spaces in Union Square as the city grapples with a 31% office vacancy rate after the move to remote work in the tech-heavy metropolis.
“We can’t completely rely on retail in downtown and restricting what’s happening in downtown anymore,” Breed said Thursday. “What we have done is open the door to do more than just retail. San Francisco has never had to work for tourists, for visitors, for people who want to shop here, so there have been a lot of limits placed on what people can do in certain pockets of the city.”
“Let’s look at what’s possible rather than dwelling on the stories of another store that there are a lot of people who may not even shop in those places,” she continued.
Breed pointed out when Westfield announced it was pulling out of San Francisco this month that retail has been struggling and Westfield is looking to withdraw from the U.S. market.
While malls, stores and downtowns in general have faced economic challenges in recent years, emails between businesses and city officials reveal Westfield mall raised alarms about shoplifting and assaults. The city attempted to address these concerns by improving crime reporting mechanisms and posting police officers at the mall, although it proved not to be enough to keep Westfield.
Breed acknowledged challenges with safety and cleanliness in the Tenderloin and SoMa in her interview Thursday, but pushed back against Bloomberg California Chief Karen Breslau’s assessment that San Francisco was not clean and safe.
Breed said she visits other neighborhoods, even some that used to struggle with unsafe street conditions, that are completely different.
“To imply that the city as a whole is unsafe and unclean is unfair,” she said — and the crowd burst into applause.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
