As the San Francisco Centre mall faces closing stores and a $626 million foreclosure auction, another mall in the southern part of the city is seeing increasing foot traffic.
Stonestown Galleria saw a 25.9 percent increase in visitor activity from 2019 to 2024, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing data from analytics firm Placer.ai. During that same period, foot traffic at San Francisco Centre fell 63.3 percent.
So far this year, the difference between the two shopping centers is even more pronounced. From January to May, foot traffic at San Francisco Centre dropped 68 percent from the same span in 2019; at Stonestown Galleria, it was 33.9 percent from the same months in 2019. The Centre’s 2024 foot traffic was between 25 and 40 percent lower than the year prior.
San Francisco Centre has struggled to keep both customers and tenants in recent years. In 2023, Nordstrom shuttered its San Francisco stores, including its anchor location in the SoMa shopping center. In January, Bloomingdale’s similarly announced the departure of its flagship. In recent months, retailers like Zara and Steve Madden have headed for the exits, and the mall is 70 to 80 percent vacant, according to the San Francisco Examiner; it was 96 percent occupied in 2016.
Today, the Centre, now owned by Trident Pacific Real Estate Group, holds less than two dozen non-restaurant stores, with the largest being H&M with a 25,000-square-foot lease expiring in January. At its peak, there were 97 stores at the mall.
At Stonestown Galleria, located next to San Francisco State University, anchor tenants like Regal Cinemas, Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe’s and Target complement new Asian restaurants and other experiential entertainment options like arcade Round 1 and forthcoming virtual reality venue LivePlay Collective by Fever.
The Galleria, owned and managed by Brookfield Properties, has been able to adapt by turning retail spaces into multiple restaurants or bringing street-accessible stores into the indoor mall. To boot, H&M is returning its old space in the mall after moving out in 2021.
“Forget the fact it’s an indoor mall,” Carole Caplan, associate vice president of retail at Brookfield, told the Business Times. “Let’s get creative and do everything you would find because we’re the only game in town right now.”
Read more
