Posted on 01/29/2024 9:29:04 AM PST by george76
The San Francisco Center, once a thriving mall home to the largest Nordstrom in America, is a shell of its former self after a string of high-profile departures..
Staff and shoppers in the mall, where five more stores closed in January .. crime and falling foot traffic is ruining the palatial building..
The mall lost $1 billion in value last year
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The mall's cavernous, marble-floored atrium is eerily quiet. There's not a single shopper in sight and a litany of abandoned stores lay mostly empty, but for a few leftover cardboard boxes or fading signs which serve as a reminder of the former occupants.
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a few years ago the luxurious complex would have been heaving with shoppers ...
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Businesses have left in droves ... occupancy is at a measly 25 percent ... the homeless have moved in and drug-taking and crime have risen.
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'Five years ago, this place was thriving,' Tara Button .. she and her daughter cut their visit short – with no plans to return again.
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Nordstrom's closure .. once occupied 350,000 feet of the San Francisco Center across five floors – making it the largest Nordstrom in America.
Two months earlier in June, Westfield announced it would give up ownership of the mall, which once bore its name, and turn over the property to its lender. A cutting statement blamed the 'deteriorating situation in downtown San Francisco' and 'unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees'.
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falling foot traffic and rising crime made the departures inevitable.
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San Francisco's dismally high office vacancy rate, which was 35.9 percent in December. That situation is compounded by the departure of several large companies, including accounting giant KPMG
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
To be fair, this doom and gloom description applies to most malls in America.
But because this is in San Francisco, there is an extra helping of schadenfreude to be applied.
Suck it losers.
Often after the sun sets, the abandon stores/mall become a no man/woman area until mid morning the next day.
Perfect places to store illegals.
Isn’t it amazing how quickly and easily, and thoroughly, Marxist radicals can destroy a civilization?
Let the bums and illegals fight over it
>>The mall’s cavernous, marble-floored atrium is eerily quiet.
I’ve never understood why one would want to buy clothing in a store with marble floors.
The overhead of marble floors must be built into the price of the clothing.
Clothing should be bought online or in economically built and operated real estate.
I lived in the Bay Area from ‘71 to ‘89. It was a pleasant place to live and work up to the late 70s, early 80s. But the on-going disintegration was becoming more apparent by the day.
Give out free stuff and advertise and the freeloaders will come.
Ive seen quite a few articles claim that this mall or that one was closed due to internet/Amazon but that isnt true and they accidentally touch on it in this article.
I remember discussing this problem and the likelihood of the spread to other areas in one of my earliest posts around here(’98) because our oldest and biggest mall was already having problems before any of those things really existed.
By around 92-94ish the mall in question had lost nearly all its traffic. I think this situation may have started in a somewhat unique place but it hurried along what became the inevitable across the country.
The mall was relatively close to the largest mental health hospital in the northern half of the state which quickly became one of the only ones as most counties began shutting theirs down. The patients were bussed in from counties all over but obviously all these people couldnt have an appointment at the same time so the busses stopped at the mall and dumped them all off.
They all started hanging out by the...lets call it a food court, and begging, sometimes rather aggressively. There was still some traffic to the mall but no paying customer bothered to go down to that end of the mall. Somewhere along the line the local kid gangs realized that some of these semi-abandoned people were easy to con and many of those that werent easy were interested in the purchase of various things they couldnt find in their more controlled environments back home.
This mall didnt have any parking lots. Since it was downtown all the parking was in attached ramps. The ramps turned into hangouts for all the little gangsters. Vehicles were being robbed and visitors harassed. That was the end of any visits by older women or younger women with children. Stores that catered to them pulled out and stood empty. Soon neither older guys nor younger women wanted to deal with it either and the stores that still had something for them pulled out too. A few young office working males going in to buy a burger at lunch just isnt what it takes to keep a mall afloat.
Its the crime. Its the ne’er-do-wells. Those things are encouraged by liberals. You cant crack down on crime because then youre a racist or targeting the disabled. This is what started the collapse of the American mall long before any real money was being made online.
Most, but not all.If there is a reasonably low percentage of "minorities" in the area, malls are still doing OK.There is one reasonably close to me that is always packed. You do not want to see what happens when a bus line is extended to an otherwise nice area. Ferals will quickly destroy any such oasis as fast as they can. America would be a better place if we'd only picked our own cotton, as the base of the problem is blacks. Central Americans (i.e., wetbacks) will ultimately have the same effect, and the current government is doing what it can to make sure that particular cancer is spread far and wide.
You build it and they will come
Disabled light rail train leads to headaches for Denver commuters..(RTD) has made changes to the E and H light rail schedules while a train remains disabled on the tracks, since at least early Friday.
I got out of Indianapolis 20 years ago.
The USA is the third most Populus countries on Earth.
If we were to add ONE BILLION more citizens, it would STILL be the third most populous!
No, this WAS!
Blessed is the nation whose god is the Lord.
Boosters of cities talk about how they have orchestras, live theater, museums, and Thai restaurants. These are among the reasons residents and visitors alike are said to enjoy the cities.
But if one runs a gauntlet of danger to get to the museum or the Thai restaurant, some may well decide its not worth it.
You’d be fortunate if the whiffs stopped at urine.
Nancy Pelosi’s district where she has made hundreds of millions of dollars and her policies have ruined San Francisco and endangered millions of people. Yet, the demoncrats will still vote for her. Disgraceful
Westfield SF was an expansion and renovation of the flagship of a store called The Emporium, founded in 1896. They preserved the building’s facade and 102-foot dome. Probably the most glorious retail space I’ve ever seen. The forthcoming collapse of this enterprise is a perfect metaphor for the suicide of the SF
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