San Francisco’s Union Square: How the recovery is progressing a year after new zoning rules went into effect

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — ABC7 has been following the dramatic number of store closures in San Francisco’s Union Square. To make the rebuild easier and faster, the city changed the area’s zoning laws almost a year ago — but is that change helping to build a better Bay Area?

We consider ourselves a progressive city, but San Francisco had already started the downward trend of the Union Square economy years before the pandemic. And instead of recovering like other cities, San Francisco moved at a snail’s pace.

Union Square used to be the Bay Area’s shopping mecca. Always the place to go, where protesters found their voices, bands played, mayors held wine festivals and another used it to launch his campaign — not to mention the president of the United States was in the square.

The 1980s were the unofficial golden age of Union Square, with city planners doing everything they could to prevent new office buildings from moving there.

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As a result, office space remained limited to that side of Kearny, essentially preventing them from entering Union Square.

“As a city, we really wanted to protect Union Square because it is a global endeavor,” explained Marisa Rodriguez, CEO of Union Square Alliance.

But everyone knows that a business district needs to grow to thrive, and it took decades for the city to finally realize that.

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“The idea that a flagship store has to have two stores, or maybe even three, is way outdated,” said Larisa Ortiz, a former New York City planning commissioner who was asked to help understand what’s keeping Union Square from succeeding.

“We found that some of the zoning laws were really a little outdated. There were older laws from times that are no longer in effect,” added Ortiz, who now works for Streetsense Consulting.

So in the past, the old zoning laws stipulated that the owner of a property with three floors of rentable space could only rent that space to one company.

“You needed three levels of retail or whatever. So why not get rid of that and instead create flexibility and say what do you want to do? I just want this on the first floor, or maybe something else on the second floor, or maybe something else on the third floor, or I just want the first floor. Perfect, let’s do that for you,” Rodriguez said.

Both Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Aaron Peskin have floated the idea of ​​changing the zoning regulations that the Board of Supervisors approved a year ago.

“We’re hearing, which we didn’t hear last year, that touring is picking up, people are interested, they’re sniffing around, they want to know what they can do here and they’re obviously closing deals. It could be a year, two years from closing to opening, right? It takes time,” Rodriguez said.

So we don’t really know how many companies have benefited from the code changes. We know they work.

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Take New York’s Wall Street, the financial district. In the wake of the mass exodus after 9/11, the city allowed a radical shift from office space to residential and new businesses, which has led to the neighborhood’s current boom.

Part of the Union Square revitalization will depend on voter approval of a bond, with some of that going toward the Powell Street Improvement plan. Powell Street, with its cable cars, has long been a gateway to Union Square.

“I really think with the right focus, the right attention, the right investment, Union Square could be back in a year and a half. We’ll see,” Rodriguez promised.

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