Sep. 5, 2023 Updated: Sep. 6, 2023 9:36 a.m. (SFChronicle.com)
San Francisco Supervisor Ahsha Safaí wants the city to cut red tape and get rid of certain fees to encourage universities to build campuses in languishing downtown neighborhoods.
Safaí is the latest San Francisco leader to suggest college students could be the solution to empty streets, storefronts and office space in the city’s downtown core, arguing that turning hotels into dorms, offices into classrooms, and building urban village campuses will revitalize the struggling Financial District and South of Market neighborhoods.
The “special use district” Safaí is proposing would allow buildings to change their primary use to allow for college campuses to crop up downtown a la New York University or Boston’s many downtown colleges. The legislation is also modeled on UC College of the Law San Francisco’s academic village concept.
The district would encompass much of the Financial District area from Fifth Street up to Beale Street, and Market to Brannan streets. The idea is to encourage one or more universities to develop “institutional and student housing uses” within those boundaries to create “clustered campuses.”
The schools would be allowed to use existing vacant space for housing and classroom use, and they’ll be exempt from certain streetscape, pedestrian improvements and off-street parking requirements. Safaí is also proposing waiving development impact fees.
But even if public and private universities were interested in pursuing downtown campuses, experts say it could take many years, maybe even a decade, before potentially tens of thousands of students enlivened the business district. Other programs to boost downtown are also in the works, including a plan to streamline office-to-housing conversion and boost pop-up retail, among many other proposals and plans.
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Still, Safaí says the point is to get the city to not be “reliant on professional services or one industry in particular” to deal with the vacancies in the Financial District.
With this plan, “You’re creating the opportunity for jobs, for people spending money and an opportunity for educational institutions to attract more people to come and thrive in San Francisco,” Safaí said. “All world-class cities have universities located in their downtown. Students not only like to study … they like to live and thrive and spend money.”
Safaí added he wants to identify city-owned sites “or sites that might be donated to the city” to create one location for these universities to go.
But the supervisor isn’t the only one floating the idea of bringing universities downtown.
Most recently, Mayor London Breed and City Attorney David Chiu have joined in, cosigning a letter to the state Board of Regents testing interest in the idea of another University of California campus.
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“Bringing students into the heart of San Francisco affords a set of remarkable opportunities,” the letter said. The move would give droves of young people access to “a vibrant and world class metropolitan center, and could also serve to alleviate some of your critical student housing shortfalls at both UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.”
Colleges downtown wouldn’t be a novel idea for San Francisco, which already hosts the University of the Pacific, part of San Francisco City College and UC College of the Law San Francisco, the downtown law school formerly known as UC Hastings.
California schools aren’t the only potential future candidates for the area, any university wanting to capitalize on the growing artificial intelligence sector or San Francisco’s historic place within Silicon Valley could consider a satellite campus downtown.
Jump-starting a college downtown could be a relatively painless process: A state university would have the advantage of streamlined bureaucratic rules, and as a state entity the university could conduct and approve its own environmental reviews, bypassing the city’s onerous permitting process and approval from the Board of Supervisors.
Reach Aldo Toledo: Aldo.Toledo@sfchronicle.com
Written By Aldo Toledo
Adalberto “Aldo” Toledo is a city hall reporter with The San Francisco Chronicle covering the mayor and Board of Supervisors. He is a Venezuelan American from a family of longtime journalists.
Before joining the Chronicle in 2023, he reported on Peninsula governments and breaking news for the San Jose Mercury News. He also has bylines in the Dallas Morning News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Champaign, Illinois News-Gazette.
Raised in Texas, he studied journalism with a print news focus at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism, where he worked as News Editor for the North Texas Daily student newspaper.
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