Flood Family Tries to Fill Namesake SF Building

The family who built the 12-story Flood Building in San Francisco 120 years ago is trying to fill its empty offices and storefronts. But how?

The triangle-shaped building, which has weathered two earthquakes and an attempt to raze it, is about a quarter vacant after the Gap vacated 45,000 square feet four years ago at 870 Market Street, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The fifth generation of its founder is working to fill the gap at the cable car turnaround at Powell and Market streets, near Union Square.

“Above all, I think of myself as a steward of the building, maintaining it and hopefully holding on for future generations,” Karin Flood, president of the Flood Corporation, who once served as the executive director of the Union Square Alliance, told the Chronicle. “It’s our legacy.”

The Flood Building, built in 1904 by James Leary Flood, the son of a Nevada silver king, has been a bastion of the neighborhood for longer than anyone can remember.

In 1999, the building was 99 percent leased, soon after a ground-up restoration. The office vacancy in San Francisco is now a record 37 percent.

Early in the pandemic, Gap closed its ground-floor flagship. Then two other ground-floor storefronts shuttered. Upstairs, where a waiting list of businesses once lined up to rent historic offices along marbled corridors, dozens of workplaces sit empty.

There are now 227 tenants, according to Flood, most of them either therapists or attorneys. Other occupants include Circus Bella, which leased an office in 2021 that’s 8 feet wide and 20 feet deep.

A floor down is the Market Street Railway, which led the effort three decades ago to return historic streetcars to the city.

The ground floor retail space remains empty except for Urban Outfitters at the Ellis Street corner — and there’s no way to predict when, or how, this might change, according to the Chronicle.

The challenge, for Flood and San Francisco, is the dearth of Downtown workers caused by the pandemic shift to remote work. And street crime.

Last year, an unidentified fashion chain from outside the state was on the brink of inking a large ground-floor lease. But when a security guard shot and killed a suspected shoplifter at a Walgreens up the street, its executives killed the deal.

For the Flood Building, there’s no shortage of would-be possibilities, according to the Chronicle.

Upstairs a spacious lightwell would be an easy fit for an office-to-housing conversion trumpeted as a way to bring residents back to Downtown’s commercial core. Downstairs food vendors or artisans could fill the empty storefronts.

But the century-old ground floor doesn’t have the venting or layout for food operations. As for turning offices into apartments, Flood and other family members won’t hear of it.

“We’d have to dip a long way [in occupancy] before we consider housing,” Flood told the newspaper.

“I do feel conditions on the street have improved in the past year. There are too many [neighborhood] assets to lose our prominence,” Flood added. “Maybe there will be more of a shift to food and entertainment, but there will still be room for retail and offices.”

— Dana Bartholomew