By Laura Waxmann, Staff WriterJuly 28, 2025 (SFChroncile.com)
San Francisco mayors have, for years, wanted to entice a prestigious university to build a downtown campus. Now, the city is in discussions with a private research school to make that dream real.Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco’s bid to attract a major university to its downtown core could be fulfilled as a prestigious private research school is in talks with the mayor’s office about expanding its presence into the heart of the city.
A spokesperson for Vanderbilt University confirmed to the Chronicle that it is considering broadening its school in Nashville, Tenn., to San Francisco and has been working with Mayor Daniel Lurie’s office on the effort.
“Vanderbilt is always exploring new opportunities to expand our impact and further our mission. We recognize the long-term global leadership of San Francisco and its ever-growing potential, defined by a vibrant culture, dynamic innovation ecosystem and the talent drawn to its leading technology companies and top-caliber arts and cultural institutions,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
“This powerful combination is why we are optimistically exploring the possibility of establishing a presence downtown, working closely with Mayor Daniel Lurie and his team.”
Vanderbilt, which is renowned for its engineering and medical programs, has a record of expansion, with hubs in New York City and West Palm Beach. The school of 13,000 students is also growing its main campus, the spokesperson said, adding that the effort in San Francisco would be “complementing” those growth initiatives.
“We aim to create unique student experiences, fuel pathbreaking research and foster close connections to the ideas and companies that will lead the next generation of the nation’s economy,” the spokesperson said, but declined to provide details, including whether new student housing could be involved in the deal.
Lurie’s office confirmed the talks with Vanderbilt.
“Our administration is working every day to create a clean, safe and thriving downtown — one that draws people, businesses and investments back to our city,” Lurie told the Chronicle. “As I said during my campaign, welcoming a world-class university like Vanderbilt to our city would bring new energy and foot traffic downtown, and we will continue working to make that happen.”
Lurie’s office declined to provide details, such as the type of the programming that a potential San Francisco campus would offer or which sites are in play. However, a source with insight into the discussions confirmed that Lurie has met twice with Vanderbilt’s leadership, and that Ned Segal, a former local business leader who is now the city’s chief of housing and economic development, has also met with them “several times.”
The insider also said that Lurie’s office has reached out to about half a dozen other universities, but that talks with Vanderbilt seem to be the “most promising.”
During a panel discussion with business leaders in April, Segal spoke about efforts to attract new investment to downtown — and teased the downtown university when asked about how he envisioned the area’s recovery to look like four years from now.
“When you come downtown, there will be people walking along the street at 9 p.m. They’ll be sitting outside in cafes … they’ll be of all ages, because some of them will be students with a university name across their shirts,” Segal said.
The mayor’s vision to infuse downtown with students from other parts of the country is not a novel idea. Lurie’s predecessor, London Breed, last May announced a call for proposals to bring a historically Black college and university (HBCU) satellite campus to the city’s core. The effort was part of Breed’s 30 by 30 initiative, which sought to bring 30,000 students and residents downtown by 2030.
The University of California also at one point considered expanding its presence into downtown San Francisco, in response to a plea Breed made to the UC Board of Regents in 2023 requesting that it consider opening a new campus. It is unclear whether that consideration is still active.
The arrival of a university, like Vanderbilt, could help San Francisco’s downtown, which is still recovering from pandemic effects that emptied offices and saw the closures of several major retailers and restaurants and a reduction in conferences that combined to reduce foot traffic and spending in the city’s economic core.
Commercial vacancy in San Francisco continues to hover at around 35%, leaving Vanderbilt with a buffet of real estate options. The city’s core has been much slower to recover than other markets, though rapid growth from nascent artificial intelligence startups — with ChatGPT maker OpenAI being the most prominent example — has begun to translate into new leases across the city.
Last month Vanderbilt announced plans for a new “innovation district” in Nashville complete with research space and offices for university-affiliates and nearby startups, parks, retail and housing, spanning several blocks on land it owns near its main campus. The district’s buildout is expected to take more than a decade to complete.
“It’s not so much an innovation center — where you drive to it and drive back home — but it is part of the fabric,” Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier told the Nashville Business Journal about the project last month. “Some of the more successful versions of this, it’s really where people want to live. … We want to make sure that we materially add to the housing stock in Nashville.”
San Francisco officials have considered the value of placing an AI-related research center downtown, where a growing number of startups are beginning to slowly chip away at the city’s vast inventory of unused offices.
In an interview with the Chronicle in April, San Francisco Chief Economist Ted Egan said such an effort could have a similar effect on downtown as the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp., the nation’s first for-profit computer industry research and development consortium, known as MCC, had on the city of Austin, Texas, in the 1980s.
MCC’s arrival gave what was then a sleepy college town new significance in the nation’s tech community.
“It was as a semiconductor industry research association that a lot of people credit with putting Austin on the map for semiconductor manufacturing and innovation. And it really balanced out the (tech) cluster in Austin, which had just been a bunch of isolated branch plants and big electronics companies, and got the university involved,” Egan said. “It’s always been a question: What can we really do between UC Berkeley, Stanford and UCSF to do research that follows a similar model and connects to the city’s and the region’s natural economic strengths?”
July 28, 2025
REPORTER
Laura Waxmann covers the business community with a focus on commercial real estate, development, retail and the future of San Francisco’s downtown. Prior to joining The Chronicle in 2023, she reported on San Francisco’s changing real estate and economic landscape in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic for the San Francisco Business Times.Waxmann was born and raised in Frankfurt, Germany, but has called San Francisco home since 2007. She’s reported on a variety of topics including housing, homelessness, education and local politics for the San Francisco Examiner, Mission Local and El Tecolote.
