Mayor London Breed has asked local schools and colleges to fill the growing number of empty offices in Downtown San Francisco. A key contender: the University of California.
The mayor has appealed to the public sector to help the city bounce back by moving government employees into vacant privately owned offices – and turn the newly emptied publicly owned offices into housing, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
San Francisco has asked the University of California Regents to ponder a new Downtown campus to help fill the city’s empty cubicles.
Breed has also fired off letters with a similar request to the San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Matt Wayne, City College of San Francisco Chancellor John Al-Amin and City Administrator Carmen Chu, whose office supplies services through the city’s real estate division.
She asked school and city administrators to size up their office portfolios and office needs in the next 30 days with a goal to move government workers into thousands of privately owned empty offices Downtown.
In turn, by emptying publicly owned properties of workers and shifting them to privately owned offices, the city could somehow address its critical housing shortage. A redevelopment plan was not disclosed.
“San Francisco has a need for more land for housing, and the city and these agencies have land all over San Francisco,” Breed’s office said in a statement.
Since the pandemic and the era of remote work, at least one in three city offices stand empty, with reduced demand leading to lower rents.
Breed’s proposal to fill empty offices with either a UC campus or school district and City College workers harkens to a similar plan to turn the beleaguered Westfield Centre shopping mall into a soccer stadium.
The analysis requested by the mayor requires SFUSD, City College and the Administrator’s Office to outline their office footprints, including leases and buildings owned by the agencies in Greater Downtown.
Each agency was also asked to explain how many workers and which departments occupy those offices, “with notes on hybrid work patterns and public services spaces for each.” And each was asked how the city could “best support San Francisco’s economic recovery with near-term investments, consolidations, and/or adjustments in our office real estate portfolio.”
It’s not clear whether the city’s landlords would receive public support to lease private offices. Jeff Cretan, spokesman for the mayor, said that the requested assessments are a “first step” in identifying opportunities for renewal.
— Dana Bartholomew
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