AT&T Closing Flagship in Downtown San Francisco

The list of major brands announcing their departure from downtown San Francisco keeps growing as the city continues to cast a wide net for innovative solutions that will bring people back to the ghost town in the heart of the city.

Last week, AT&T announced it will close its flagship store in downtown San Francisco on August 1. The telecom giant said retail employees impacted by the closure of the 1 Powell Street store would be offered jobs at other AT&T outlets in the city, SF Gate reported.

The outlet is located in a landmark building in what used to be a prime downtown retail location: directly behind the Power Street BART station. The historic eight-story landmark was built in 1921 as the replacement headquarters for Bank of America after the 1906 earthquake.

“Consumer shopping habits continue to change, and we’re changing with them. That means serving customers where they are through the right mix of retail stores, digital channels and our phone-based care team,” AT&T said, in a statement.

Last month, Nordstrom—citing safety concerns in the crime-ridden downtown—said it was vacating its 300K SF downtown store in the mall. T-Mobile recently closed its flagship store in Union Square; Old Navy also closed a flagship outlet downtown.

Following Nordstrom’s decision, mall giant Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW) announced last week that it is handing the city’s largest shopping mall back to lenders. URW stopped making payments on a $558M CMBS loan on the 1.2M SF Westfield San Francisco Centre. Following the news that Westfield was abandoning the San Francisco Centre, Cinemark closed its downtown San Francisco movie theater.

Earlier this month, Park Hotels & Resorts said it would stop making payments toward a $725M mortgage on two of the largest hotels in downtown San Francisco, the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and adjacent Parc 55 hotels, which combined have more than 3,000 rooms.

Meanwhile, the city is initiating another program it hopes will generate some innovative ideas for drawing people back to the ghost town in downtown.

A group of local business leaders has kicked off a program called Yes San Francisco, or Yes SF. Deloitte, Salesforce, Citi and the World Economic Forum are leading what the organizers are calling the Urban Sustainability Challenge.

The Yes SF program is soliciting ideas from entrepreneurs to make San Francisco a more sustainable city. Organizers, which include the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce Foundation, are hoping to find innovations for a wide range of issues, from improving urban food production to “better use of downtown real estate,” according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times.

The city also is getting ready to pick the winners of the non-profit program it launched in April called Vacant to Vibrant—a series of hip new “pop-up” stores the city is hoping will make downtown the “it” spot to hang out.

The program, which is managed by the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development with a budget of $710K, is part of Mayor London Breed’s downtown recovery plan.

Pop-up grants range will range from $3,000 to $8,000. The city will pick the winners this month for what will be the first of three phases that will feature 10 to 15 pop-ups opening in each phase.