How San Francisco’s Westfield turned into a ghost mall: The dying center where 75 PERCENT of units are empty and more stores are closing – as shoppers describe ‘dodgy’ area overrun with homeless who left them ‘scared’

The mall’s cavernous, marble-floored atrium is eerily quiet. There isn’t a single customer in sight and a litany of abandoned shops lie mostly empty, save for a few remaining cardboard boxes or faded signs that serve as reminders of their former residents.

This isn’t a scene from a post-apocalyptic TV show. And it’s not some so-called ‘dead mall’ in some forgotten corner of America.

This is the palatial San Francisco Center on a Friday afternoon in mid-January, when just a few years ago the luxurious complex would have been packed with shoppers enjoying the post-Christmas sales.

Today, this former retail gem in the heart of one of America’s most iconic cities is literally a shell of its former self.

Businesses have left in droves – five this month alone have closed or announced their intention to do so – and occupancy rates are at a paltry 25 percent. Visitor numbers have fallen by half since last year and as shops and customers have left, the homeless have moved in and drug use and crime have increased.

“Five years ago this place was booming,” Tara Button, who was shopping with her daughter to celebrate her college admissions, told DailyMail.com.

Button, a 49-year-old business owner who lives an hour’s drive away in San Jose, last visited the center in 2019. But when they saw the tired shell it has become, she and her daughter said they cut their visit short — with no plans to return again.

“It’s a bit of a shock, it’s very sad,” Button said, before her daughter described the “dodgy” downtown streets they had to walk through to get to the mall. “We were scared, which bothers me,” Button added.

DailyMail.com’s visit on January 19 was related to the closure of several stores in the mall. Adidas left a week early, Aldo closed on the 21st, J. Crew closed the day after, and Lucky Brand’s last day is Monday, January 29th.

Since Covid, there have been at least 100 more departures from the shopping center and the surrounding area.

Nordstrom’s closure in August was perhaps the most damaging. The retailer once occupied 100,000 feet of San Francisco Center over five floors, making it the largest Nordstrom in America.

Two months earlier, in June, Westfield announced it would relinquish ownership of the shopping center that once bore his name and transfer the property to the lender. A sharp statement blamed the “deteriorating situation in downtown San Francisco” and “unsafe conditions for customers, retailers and employees.”

The rapid decline has caused the San Francisco Center to lose $1 billion in value since 2016 and the 1.45 million-square-foot mall is now worth just $290 million.

Employees of the closing stores expressed sadness, but not surprise, as they explained how declining foot traffic and rising crime made the departure inevitable. There were 5.6 million visits to the mall in 2022, up from 9.7 million in 2019, and staff say the decline only continued last year.

“Traffic from last year to this year is down by half,” said Mariana Lopez, 20, an Aldo store clerk, as she manned the vacant store. Among the displays of high-heeled shoes and leather bags were signs notifying customers of the impending closure.

“And we don’t have any guards in Aldo, so it’s easy to get robbed,” said Lopez, who works while studying. Thefts would occur about twice a week, she said, adding that her cell phone was once stolen while she was helping a customer.

During the conversation, a few young women came into the store and browsed for a few minutes before leaving empty-handed. Another customer came by, but only to return an unwanted purchase.

“It’s sad,” said Lopez, who will be transferred to Aldo’s store in the city’s Stonestown Galleria. ‘When I came here I was in high school. There was more traffic and you saw more customers coming in and you were able to build a relationship.

‘It’s not that safe. The manager has been working here for fifteen years, he almost cried when he got the message.’

At Madewell, where the storefront was also decorated with “see you soon” signs, an employee complained about the “snowball effect” of declining foot traffic and increasing homelessness and crime.

‘When there are empty spaces and shops, people who live on the street come in. It’s like a snowball effect. Compared to last year, our foot traffic is down 50 percent,” said the worker, who asked not to be named.

‘The office spaces (in the city) are empty and that is a problem. There are thousands of people who no longer come here every day.’

The employee is referring to the horribly high office vacancy rate in San Francisco, which stood at 35.9 percent in December. That situation has been exacerbated by the departure of several major companies, including accounting giant KPMG, which announced earlier this month that it will leave its $400 million downtown building of the same name.

The Madewell store executive said the team learned six weeks ago that the retailer would not renew its lease in the San Francisco Center.

“When the area started feeling unsafe for people, people don’t want to shop here anymore,” the worker added. “We had a lot of people come in here who were living on the streets and having a mental health crisis, and that shouldn’t work, but we did a lot.”

It is to the credit of the mall’s management that the presence of security guards appears to have increased in recent months.

But it’s too little too late for the mall, where the chronic lack of customers has created the strange reality that there are often as many security guards as shoppers.

Outside the entrance to Bloomingdale’s, which is now the mall’s largest tenant after Nordstrom’s exit, two police officers — hired by the store as part of the police department’s 10-B program, which allows businesses to hire off-duty officers — stand guard. hire for overtime. .

The officers said it had been a quiet service for them. Maybe the deterrent worked. Or maybe even the petty thieves can’t cope with the lethargic atmosphere hanging over this dying shopping center.