San Francisco’s Biggest Mall is Dead and Will Take Years to Replace

Last week San Francisco Centre, the city’s largest mall, lost another half-dozen food places in its food court. This followed the closure of 8 other stores in recent months.

The mall’s basement food court is riddled with more vacancies after the closure of Jamba Juice; sandwich shop Izzy & Wooks; Mija Cochinita taco shop; Mai Savory Hot Dogs; Fires of Brazil barbecue; and Blondie’s Pizza, the Chronicle confirmed Thursday…

Kitchen equipment was gone from all the food stands, and only a handful of restaurants remained. Foot traffic was anemic, with many areas seeing more yellow-suited security guards and store workers than shoppers. Well over half of the mall, which spans 1.5 million square feet of retail and offices, is vacant…

At least eight other retailers have shuttered in the past few months, including Sunglass Hut, a Razer electronics store and clothing store Oak + Fort.

At this point, it’s clear to everyone, including the remaining tenants that the mall is going to close for good any month now.

[Sam] Argueta, 66, has owned a shoe repair shop at San Francisco Centre for about a decade. Before the mall’s customer base evaporated during the pandemic, Argueta usually had five other people working in his store, Shoe Wiz. Now, it’s just him most days…

“We’re waiting to see what’s going to happen with the mall — eventually, (it’s) going to close,” Argueta said. “I know the end is coming one of these months.”

Whatever comes next isn’t clear. An architecture firm created some drawings of the space transformed into a mixed-used outdoor area but that would mean demolishing most of the current building and starting over, a plan which could take years and be prohibitively expensive.

Angela Wu, a principal at 10 Design, said the sketches were intended to start a conversation about possible redevelopment. She showed some images a few months ago at a panel discussion hosted by the urban think tank SPUR…

Wu also acknowledged that development projects of all kinds are proving nearly impossible to finance in San Francisco now due to a combination of factors such as high building costs. 

Other suggestions, which were floated two years ago by the city’s former mayor, have included turning the space into a soccer stadium. But again, the cost and time to build it would be significant.

Several architecture and retail experts interviewed by the Chronicle agreed that demolishing most of the mall to replace it with a stadium or another new use would be prohibitively expensive. But that doesn’t mean the space can’t be redeveloped.

Ultimately, the article notes that lots of cities have dealt with failing malls in the past 30 years. What makes San Francisco different is how fast the collapse happened. There are many factors for this including the one that seems to get only grudging acknowledgment from the city.

Mark Steiner, founding moderator of a Reddit forum that follows dead malls, said he couldn’t think of any other shopping center that died quite as fast as San Francisco Centre. 

“Even in cities that have been hit hard economically, the retail usually hangs on longer than this,” Steiner wrote to the Chronicle in a message. “For a property this size in a major market? This is pretty unprecedented in my experience.”…

As the mall emptied out, some of the tenants who stayed privately reported increasing concern about shoplifting and violent incidents from homeless people who wandered inside, the Chronicle previously reported. American Eagle sued Westfield in 2023, complaining of neglect and safety problems, then closed its San Francisco Centre location the following year.

Other cities have vacant malls but most of those don’t also have an army of homeless criminals and shoplifters looking to take down any retailer in sight. And of course those problems aren’t limited to the mall. Dozens of retailers and grocery stores have closed up and left the city in the past few years while the city did little to nothing about the rampant crime, drug use and disorder on the streets. Now they are paying the price for that neglect. The city, unlike the mall, can recover, but it’s probably going to take years.