The streets aren’t paved with gold, but they’re clean, edged in plantings and dotted with retailers.
At new commercial developments, often outside cities’ longtime commercial cores, such details have lured office tenants by offering the perks of downtown without the strife and grime that still plagues some major hubs after Covid’s upheaval. Brand-new buildings stack high-end office space above outposts of sought-after restaurants and shops. Investment in landscaping and events is obvious. Would you rather work here, the shiny new “downtowns” seem to say to the consultants and lawyers, or in a building in the heart of “real” downtown, where storefronts might be empty and streets deserted or filthy?
The question isn’t a thought exercise: Hundreds of millions of square feet of commercial leases will expire in the next few years, and as their occupants decide where to go next, many are looking to a handful of these new neighborhoods. They include Fulton Market in Chicago, Century City in Los Angeles, Uptown in Dallas, Santana Row and Mission Rock in the Bay Area and Hudson Yards in New York City.
Developers planned or opened some of these areas before the pandemic, and today they are in a prime position to benefit from the cycle of malaise — without workers, retailers couldn’t stay open, but without retailers, workers didn’t want to be downtown — that transformed some downtowns. Even though business improvement districts clean the streets, city initiatives support small businesses and owners rent out first-floor spaces at free or reduced rent, bringing back the overall energy is not easy.
These challenges disappear at new developments. Sometimes owned by a single entity or a small group of partners, the areas can curate a package for tenants that goes beyond the cubicle, hiring private security and street cleaners, recruiting exactly the right retailers and restaurants and even paying for their build-outs. To make their new neighborhoods feel authentic, rather than like some cleaned-up suburban simulacrum of downtown, they have tacked on pharmacies, delis and dive bars in addition to glamorous amenities.
With the office market still weak in most places, the new competition could set a model for operating that “old” downtowns could follow. Or, their lustre might just wean more tenants from downtowns, further hollowing out traditional city centers.
Reporters in five of The Real Deal’s markets analyzed new or rehabilitated commercial developments and how they are fitting into their regions.
—Emily Landes
Spruced-up San Francisco
It’s not easy to get neighborhood support for a massive new development in notoriously NIMBY San Francisco. But Jack Bair, San Francisco Giants’ chief development officer, said that when it came time to vote on turning a former Giants parking lot into the Mission Rock mixed-use development, the 2015 measure won by a larger margin in the greater Mission Bay neighborhood than in the city at large.
“There was a perception that Mission Bay needed a little bit more oomph in terms of social spaces and activity, and so they very much viewed Mission Rock as something that would make their neighborhood better,” he said.
Before Mission Rock, Mission Bay was an industrial area best known for its huge hospital campuses for Kaiser Permanente and the University of California-San Francisco. A few stops from downtown on the T line and situated along the city’s southeastern waterfront, it was one of few in the city that could reliably attract biotech and life science tenants in the early 2020s. But it was not exactly a hot spot for trendy restaurants and retail.
The development, created in a partnership of the Giants, Tishman Speyer and the San Francisco Port and featuring a new waterfront park, has brought in some of San Francisco’s well-regarded restaurants and cafés: Flour + Water, Arsicault and the team behind Che Fico have signed leases in the first four-building phase of the project. The developers also brought in national chains with local appeal like Sweetgreen and Blue Bottle, no easy feat given the poor reputation the city has had — and has been trying to shed — since the pandemic.
“We talked to some national retailers that, just San Francisco alone, they didn’t want to touch,” Bair said. “But folks that are knowledgeable about this marketplace see this as a very favorable location, so we’ve done pretty well.”
The development team was even “able to be a little bit more picky” about whom they brought in to fill the ground floors, because they were “willing to structure pretty creative deals,” according to Maggie Kadin, Tishman’s regional director for Northern California. That meant “heavy investments” in build-outs to compete against second-generation space in more established neighborhoods, with some deals structured as percentage rent and some requiring help getting through the permitting process.
“We really want our retailers to be our partners and we want them to be successful. We don’t want to overburden them,” Kadin said.
The strategy seems to be working. In addition to Visa, which pre-leased an entire 13-story building in the development in 2019 and moved in last summer, the Golden State Warriors reportedly took 70,000 square feet last fall in Mission Rock’s other office tower, still known as Building B, and Coinbase secured 150,000 square feet this spring. The new lease marks the crypto company’s return to San Francisco after shuttering its North Financial District office in 2021 as part of a remote-first approach.
Down in San Jose, Federal Realty Investment Trust has also found that its focused approach to retail is leading to success on the office front and helping to bring in the companies that once took big spaces downtown.
During the pandemic, downtown San Jose’s economy was hit by the problems of remote work and the abrupt closure of San Jose State University; with more than 35,000 students on a nearly 90-acre campus, it is the largest university in a California downtown. The students are back and, like San Francisco, San Jose has also been working to revitalize its downtown, especially with the Super Bowl and several World Cup matches shining a spotlight on the city next year. Still, it is among the slowest retail markets in the country, and its downtown in particular has been beset by vacancy signs. (There are retail-focused redevelopments, by Jay Paul and Hines, which are both in the planning stages.)
But a few miles west of downtown San Jose, the eight-story One Santana West office project is nearing full occupancy. Planned as a single-tenant, 375,000-square-foot building adjacent to Federal’s 42-acre mixed-use Santana Row community, the developer had to pivot the project to subdivided space, according to Scot Vallee, Federal’s senior vice president of regional development. Federal also signed a lease on an entire Santana Row office building with NetApp in 2021.
Accounting giant PwC is moving its Silicon Valley headquarters from a downtown San Jose tower to 141,000 square feet on the top three floors of One Santana West — a big get for the developer.
“I think they felt they were on an island, and here they’re part of a community,” Vallee said of the move.
“We talked to some national retailers that, just San Francisco alone, they didn’t want to touch. But folks that are knowledgeable about this marketplace see [Mission Rock] as a very favorable location, so we’ve done pretty well.”
Fintech company Acrisure and cloud data platform Couchbase are among the other new tenants in the building, which Vallee said would likely be fully leased before the end of the summer.
The retail, restaurants and housing in Santana Row are a big draw for new office tenants and also help sell the community to the upscale retailers it has pinpointed, Jeff Kreshek of Federal Realty pointed out. That includes French women’s clothing boutique Sézane, the Collective home furnishings and Vuori athleticwear, plus new concepts from restaurateurs that already have Santana Row offerings and wanted to expand.
“The retail feeds the residential, that feeds the office, that feeds the retail and it becomes this ecosystem that everything benefits from the other uses,” he said, adding that the developer sometimes makes “put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is deals” to persuade emerging East Coast brands to think beyond the obvious first choices of San Francisco and Los Angeles when coming West.
“We might have to help them prove out that this is a place they can be successful,” he said.
Even the streets here are owned by Federal, and it takes care of everything from landscaping and street cleaning to organizing makers; fairs, farmers markets and holiday block parties. Those positive community vibes can be difficult to create in a downtown, “when you’ve got 50 different owners and a city who’s got other priorities,” he said.
“You’ve got whatever’s in the ground floor of your building and then you start to get out on the street and it could be a good experience, could be a bad experience,” he said. “Here, the entire thing is curated, and that’s a huge selling point.”
—Emily Landes
Fulton favors the bold
Fulton Market was originally a meatpacking district. By the 2010s, an early wave of warehouse conversions led the old guard of food processors to cross paths with a new generation of tech workers by day and bar hoppers by night.
Then, the pandemic fast-tracked the neighborhood’s metamorphosis.
As interest shifted away from the Loop’s colossal skyscrapers, developers became even more interested in transforming warehouses into loft-style offices. Now, most of the food-related business that happens here is done by office workers at the corporate headquarters of companies like McDonald’s and snack food maker Mondelez International.
The buzzy neighborhood feels worlds away from the Loop but is located only about half a mile west of it. Covering less than a square mile, it is bound by the Metra commuter rail tracks to the north and Washington Boulevard to the South. Development first began near its eastern edge along I-90 and is spreading to its western edge at Ogden Avenue.
Local restaurants and national retailers like Allbirds and Lululemon now line the main throughways of Randolph Street and Fulton Street. Sterling Bay, an early visionary of the neighborhood, began work on one of the only office buildings to break ground in the country in 2022.
The developer completed construction on the building at 360 North Green Street in 2024 and it was 90 percent leased upon opening.
And that building’s success is not an anomaly. Fulton Market’s office vacancy rate was 15 percent in the first quarter of 2025, well below the overall downtown rate of 26 percent, commercial real estate services firm Bradford Allen found.
Now, a multifamily push is shepherding in the latest wave of development in Fulton Market. More residents in the area are creating the “live, work, play” environment that real estate players like to brag about to lenders, investors and prospective tenants.
In 2021, Chicago City Council relaxed zoning restrictions in the area that were originally intended to protect industrial jobs and keep residential development out. With the go-ahead to build apartments north of the main thoroughfare of Lake Street, several projects took off.
On one corner, Fulton Market Cos’ Alex Najem is planning two multifamily projects totalling over 1,000 units.
“We’re going to own Fulton Market,” Najem said at a recent TRD panel. “We allowed other people to go do their dabbling in the Sun Belt states during Covid … I know the politics here. I know the zoning. I just know the market … There’s tons of people here and lots to do here.”
Meanwhile, the Loop is struggling to shed its more buttoned-up reputation, and even its most established office tenants are readying their exits.
Law firm Greenberg Traurig relocated from the Loop to Fulton Market and, notably, did not downsize. It took a 90,000-square-foot space at Sterling Bay’s 360 North Green. When global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright eyed an expansion into Chicago, it chose 1045 West Fulton Market Street.
Still, Fulton Market’s wins don’t seem to be completely cannibalizing the Loop. On its northern and eastern ends, which are bordered by amenities like the River Walk and Millennium Park, some momentum is picking up.
Last year, Prime Group and Capri Investments broke ground on their redevelopment of the Thompson Center, a former state government building that Google plans to take over as its Midwest headquarters. Google paid the development venture $156 million for the initial work on the project.
But on the southern end of the Loop, by Chicago’s iconic Board of Trade Building, landlords are struggling to attract tenants. Even an apartment building that was an early adopter of the office-to-residential conversion model is facing foreclosure.
“Maybe the city needs to act even more boldly in the Loop than in Fulton Market and close LaSalle Street permanently and turn it into a park,” longtime Fulton Market investor Phil Denny said. “As surreal as that would seem, I think it would go a long way toward convincing residents that there’s a commitment to doing something that’s big and different.”
— Emma Whalen
Suits in Century City
The office building at 2000 Avenue of the Stars has two important amenities: a coffee shop and a wine bar. Such amenities have been enough to set it apart from the competition, Downtown Los Angeles.
In much of L.A., pandemic closures weren’t the only culprit for deterioration in office neighborhoods. There were also wildfires and uncertainty stemming from the president’s tariff and trade policies. DTLA’s homelessness problems have swelled. Though the area is culturally rich and has some Class A office space, it also became the center of June protests against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
“Business people were tired of leaving their beautiful high-rise building, walking outside and being inundated with homelessness,” LA Realty Partner principal Gary Weiss said.
Century City has few of those problems. Office tenants find safe, clean blocks and fancy buildings with even fancier amenities — the coffee, the wine and the Westfield Mall. Plus, it’s easier to commute from Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Bel Air to Century City, so some of the head honchos prefer it. The calm here bears little resemblance to the L.A. seen on television or in newspapers.
Century City was once a back lot owned by 20th Century Fox. When the production company found itself near bankruptcy, it sold the land to developer William Zeckendorf but stuck around. Fox Future pole banners line the street, representing Fox Studios’ master plan that would increase the entertainment company’s existing footprint substantially.
Out of all West L.A. submarkets, Century City offices have the lowest vacancy rate and command the highest rent, at 12.8 percent and $6.93 per square foot, according to a CBRE report. Downtown offices, on the other hand, have a 33.6 percent vacancy rate and ask $3.69 per square foot.
Armanino, an accounting and businesses consulting firm, last year inked a full-floor lease at Irvine Company’s 2121 Avenue of the Stars, a trophy office tower in Century City, leaving an outdated office off Wilshire Boulevard.
The company chose Century City not only because of the safety and amenities, but also because it’s turned into a real business hub. “We’re moving away from downtowns,” Gilly Malmquist, who oversees Armanino’s real estate footprint, said. “People don’t want to go to those offices,” she added. “We want our people in our offices.”
Clients like being in Century City, and that makes it easier to hold events, Malmquist said.
The others in the “hub” Malmquist noted include Savills, which signed a lease for a trophy office complex at 1900 Avenue of the Stars, moving some of its operation away from what was once Brookfield’s 777 Tower in DTLA during the summer.
There were crates in Savills Los Angeles President Josh Gorin’s DTLA office as he answered questions about the move. Century City is the center of commerce for West Los Angeles, Gorin said; the amenities and proximity to retail are enviable. Many offices and buildings there are institutionally owned, which means they have more money to spend — a plus for maintenance and street life.
“Business people were tired of leaving their beautiful high-rise building, walking outside and being inundated with homelessness.”
For a long time, Savills had an office in DTLA and one in West L.A., but that may not always be the case anymore. “There’s a vibe when you’re walking around that Downtown [L.A.] doesn’t really have right now,” he said.
Paul Weiss opened a Los Angeles office at 2029 Century Park East, in one of two towers. Eric Wedel, a partner and head of that office, mentioned private equity clients nearby and amenities like a golf simulator, helped prompt the move. (A New Yorker, he said the simulator is helping him adjust to California, where everyone golfs.) The Century City allure is in the details: Office floors are mid-century-modern design, and conference rooms have movie names.
Century City also has new office development.
“[Developers] see Century City as not only a place that’s happening now, but going to continue to happen for decades,” Weiss said. JMB Realty is building a 37-story office tower called Century City Center, designed by Johnson Fain, which is almost completely pre-leased.
It doesn’t make much sense to develop new in DTLA where offices are distressed and selling at discount, Kidder Mathews broker George Russell said. In early June, Brookfield offloaded a DTLA office building for less than the debt tied to the property and less than its purchase price two decades ago. That kind of distress is nowhere to be found in Century City.
— Alena Botros
Finance finds Dallas’ Uptown
In Dallas, Uptown is about the closest you can get to feeling like you’re in an East Coast city. This liveability has made it the go-to submarket for office tenants and the place where the city’s growing finance industry calls home.
Technically, “Uptown” refers to the tiny neighborhood north of downtown bound by U.S. Route 75, State Highway 366 and Turtle Creek. Colloquially, it’s the pie slice fanning north from the central business district that includes some of Dallas’ most sought-after neighborhoods, like Turtle Creek, Knox-Henderson, Victory Park and, of course, the one square-mile nucleus — official Uptown.
Crescent Real Estate dropped an anchor here in 1986 with the development of the Crescent, a 10-acre mixed-use development that became the center of the neighborhood. Uptown itself was officially founded in the ’90s by a group of Jane Jacobs-reading urbanists, transit geeks and restaurateurs intent on providing a break in the car-dominated metropolis.
Their project was the city’s first and best attempt at a walkable neighborhood. Today, it’s a hub of city life, and it even has a trolley.
“It feels more like a big-city downtown than our sad downtown does at night,” Larry Lavine, the Dallasite founder of Chili’s, said. Lavine once owned Uptown restaurant Strong’s Everyday Tavern.
As it became dotted with luxury mixed-use developments, like Harwood District and the Quad, the area started to embody the flight-to-quality office trend. Companies with Dallas offices have been abandoning their aging downtown digs for flashy Uptown towers since the 2012 opening of Klyde Warren Park, which connects downtown and Uptown. They’re drawn to its walkability, abundant restaurants and bars and direct access to the Katy Trail — a rare natural gem in the concrete jungle of North Texas.
“If you live in that little pie, it’s a great life,” said Harrison Polsky, an agent with Douglas Elliman who moved to Dallas from New York 20 years ago.
A decade later, it’s one of the city’s most successful office submarkets. Dallas-Fort Worth’s overall market vacancy sticks stubbornly at 25.3 percent, as its glut of office buildings from the ’80s and ’90s falls into obsolescence. Meanwhile, Uptown is faring a little better with a vacancy rate of 22.5 percent, said Partners Real Estate’s Steve Triolet.
The darling submarket shines even brighter when it comes to rental rates. The average asking rate in DFW is $31.30 per square foot, while Uptown office space is fetching an average of $56.31 per square foot, Triolet said. Even though the region’s office pipeline has contracted, the neighborhood accounts for 66 percent of upcoming office space.
Uptown’s rising star caught the attention of financial services firms looking to make Dallas their Southern home to the extent that the neighborhood has become the de facto headquarters of “Y’all Street,” Texas’ Wall Street.
Hunt Realty is partnering with Perot’s Hillwood to build a $500 million campus for Goldman Sachs. KDC and Pacific Elm Properties are building a 30-story tower that will house Bank of America. Granite Properties’ $173 million office tower recently signed Deloitte for four floors. These three developments are going up within a 150-acre patch.
By 2030, thousands of bankers will make that patch their stomping grounds. It may not have FiDi staples like Fraunces Tavern, but after a steak and a bleu cheese olive-stuffed martini at Al Biernat’s, who cares?
Al Biernat’s, the white-tablecloth steakhouse nestled in Oak Lawn, is the haunt for the city’s bigwigs in finance, real estate and oil and gas, Polsky said. It’s not in Manhattan, but this place sees its fair share of high-rollers.
“I just left there with a guy that’s worth probably a couple billion dollars,” Polsky said on a Wednesday afternoon in June.
He loves the old-school feel and the classic hospitality. He finds it’s hard to come by that kind of service these days and grumbles about the substitutions policy at Carbone.
Al Biernat’s is just a 20-minute walk from the site of the Knox Street development, a project from MSD Partners, Trammell Crow Company, the Retail Connection and Highland Park Village Associates that’s expected to redefine luxury living in Dallas city limits.
Polsky believes the development could turn Knox-Henderson into Dallas’ version of the Meatpacking District or the West Village — a place near work for Y’all Streeters to live.
The centerpiece of the project is a 140-key Auberge Resorts Collection, featuring 48 luxury condos. These lux units will get delivered around the same time as Rosewood Residences Turtle Creek and together are setting out to prove Dallasites’ appetite for luxury vertical living.
Taking the Katy Trail, you could walk between the two in 40 minutes, almost like going from the Upper East Side to Midtown East, but, Polsky warned, “It’s 110 degrees right now, so I don’t think you want to.”
— Jess Hardin
Hudson Yards: from “superblock” to neighborhood
When commercial broker Matthew Barlow came down to New York with his wife from Connecticut, he knew where he wanted to stay. Instead of the cacophony of Times Square or trendier streets downtown, the couple stayed in Hudson Yards.
“Just to enjoy the restaurants, to enjoy the hotel and to enjoy the neighborhood,” said Barlow, who is a broker for Savills. “They’ve built something really special there.”
Since construction began in 2012, Hudson Yards has turned from a rail site owned by the MTA to the largest private real estate development in the country.
It’s drawn major office leases, including Deloitte, Meta, KKR and BlackRock. What pulled tenants in was the promise of “new” — trophy office space with that just-built shine. But in recent years, Hudson Yards has also settled into itself, building an environment that, if you squint, can pass as almost natural. And, rather than siphoning economic activity from other parts of Manhattan, as was once feared, the neighborhood has grown alongside other hot commercial centers.
At this point, even its detractors agree that Hudson Yards was a major feat for a city that just doesn’t build like it used to. New York issued $3 billion in bonds for infrastructure on the western side of Manhattan, including an extension of the No. 7 train. When construction costs and interest rates were low, firms leased office space in the new towers for under $80 per square foot, Barlow said.
Still, during the pandemic, the future of the new development looked murky. Could a new business district survive in a remote work future?
But what happened instead benefitted the new neighborhood. Companies, desperate to get employees back into their desks, sought out brighter and more amenitized office space, with floor-to-ceiling windows and no unsightly columns. The office space is now 100 percent leased.
“There have been some deals north of $200 per foot in a neighborhood that people once considered to be secondary,” Barlow said.
The market is so tight in the area that some firms are preemptively leasing additional space to save for later, according to Ben Friedland, who brokers leases for financial firms at CBRE.
“It’s super clean, it’s super nice,” he said. “It’s so pristine that in some ways it doesn’t seem real.”
But it can be difficult to build a planned neighborhood that people actually want to spend time in. When Hudson Yards opened, the retail environment skewed high-end, sometimes inaccessibly so. Restaurants like Estiatorio Milos offered $42 ceviche, but Starbucks was nowhere to be found.
However, things have changed. Related brought in options that are friendlier to the wallets of middle-class office drones, including Los Tacos No. 1, Russ & Daughters and Whole Foods Market (and yes, Starbucks). Outside of dining there is now daycare, a gym and other businesses that serve desk workers.
Philippe Visser, president of office development at Related, calls the project a “campus” or “ecosystem,” but one the developer has tried to integrate into the broader city.
From earliest days, Related’s Steve Ross had emphasized the area’s proximity to in-demand neighborhoods, and the blending seems to be picking up. At NoHo Hospitality’s Locanda Verde, an upmarket Italian restaurant co-owned by Robert De Niro, the lunch crowd is all business, said Luke Ostrom, managing partner at NoHo. But dinner and weekend brunch is a different story, pulling diners from nearby Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, as well as tourists.
The neighborhood’s critics — who saw the project’s tax incentives as a giveaway to “Big Real Estate” or a billionaire’s playground — have begun to eat their words. Brad Lander, the city comptroller who pooh-pooh’d the public financing scheme, said in 2023 that he misjudged it, as returns were greater than he expected.
And although leasing brokers concede that Hudson Yards’s success has pulled activity westward, the rest of the city market is not doing so poorly, with the divide between Class A and older buildings wider than anything geographical. Park Avenue near Grand Central is still “red hot,” as many brokers said. Younger buildings near the World Trade Center are filling up. And Vornado’s Penn District development on Eighth Avenue is likely “drafting off” the successes of Hudson Yards, said Joseph Messina, a broker for JLL.
The neighborhood is not done growing. Related broke ground on 70 Hudson Yards this spring, and is working with the city on plans for a second phase over the western rail yard, including thousands of residential units but no longer a casino, once the driver of expansion plans.
— Lilah Burke