San Francisco’s mayor Thursday proposed remaking the city’s struggling downtown by tearing down abandoned retail space, including the city’s Westfield mall, and building new structures to reshape the struggling city. “We can’t completely rely on retail in downtown restricting what happens in downtown anymore,” Mayor London Breed told Bloomberg’s Technology Summit in San Francisco on Thursday.
The mall operator cited the “challenging operating conditions in downtown San Francisco, which have led to declines in sales, occupancy and foot traffic.” Westfield’s exit followed another major company’s pullback from the city: Park Hotels and Resorts, the investment firm that owns Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels, also ceased payments to its lender in June.