By Ariana Bindman Oct 9, 2023 (SFGate.com)
FILE: The Mission District in San Francisco.peeterv/Getty Images
San Francisco’s Mission District feels like it’s straddling two different worlds.
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For years, this small, vibrant Latino enclave has been home to many immigrant families, artists and longtime residents — but in the past decade, the eclectic neighborhood has also been a home base for tech titans and wealthy residents like Mark Zuckerberg. For every old-school Victorian home and grimy, longtime dive bar, it seems that there are just as many brand-new loft spaces and trendy restaurants packed with moneyed office workers. And despite surviving a previous “onslaught” of gentrification, now, it appears that the neighborhood is bracing itself for yet another tech movement: the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry.
Derek Daniels, a regional research director at Colliers International, a multibillion-dollar investment management company, said the Mission neighborhood is jokingly referred to as “Area AI,” an homage to Area 51. “Most of it is concentrated in that area,” he told SFGATE.
“All the talk has been ‘tech is shrinking’ — but the AI segment is a segment that’s seeing significant growth in funding,” Daniels added.
Even though San Francisco is hemorrhaging tech companies left and right, a map Colliers shared with SFGATE shows that this industry is slowly, quietly taking hold in one of San Francisco’s most diverse neighborhoods. Adept AI, for instance, which was founded in 2022, has offices just a 15-minute walk from 16th Street BART Station. OpenAI, arguably the most prominent artificial intelligence company, is around the corner on Florida Street, and companies like Zoox, Ideo and Embark Trucks are all clustered in the same gray region of the Mission District.
“OpenAI has somewhat of a queen bee phenomenon,” says John Jensen, Colliers’ executive vice president.
“As someone who has lived and worked in the Mission since 2016, I found it to be the ideal location for a startup like ours,” Sonia Kastner, Pano AI’s CEO and co-founder, told SFGATE.
Aside from offering mixed-use office space and easy highway access, the neighborhood provides a “vibrant urban setting” for the company’s local employees and makes it easy for customers, investors and policymakers to visit headquarters, she said.
Soran Mofti, a manager at Remoov, a company in the area that declutters and resells secondhand furniture, can attest that tech’s landscape is changing based on the number of clear-outs he’s been assigned.
Many startups have told him that they’re going remote or moving to other neighborhoods — namely, the Mission.
Most employees in the industry work, live and play in the neighborhood, said Jensen, and Mofti agrees that the area’s proximity to bars and restaurants is what makes it so alluring compared to downtown.
Jensen predicts that the prices for office space will go up, but he believes this demand will ultimately benefit the community’s residents and small businesses. Unlike downtown San Francisco, the Mission has a wealth of foot traffic, contributing to the area’s vibrancy — tech’s presence, he says, will only bolster it even more. “Success breeds success,” he said.
But Mofti is concerned that these encroaching companies will displace businesses in the working class enclave, which has long been home to furniture warehouses and brick-and-mortar design shops.
“If this trend continues in the Mission, then it’s going to be a little bit problematic for the traditional furniture businesses that have traditionally been in this neighborhood,” he said.
Major investment companies, however, believe otherwise.
“Every day, we’re seeing groups that are evaluating expansion in this area. And it’s a good thing,” Jensen continued. “… San Francisco needs positivity, and these groups can provide that.”
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Ariana Bindman is the news features reporter at SFGATE. To submit tips, comments or cat videos, please reach out to her at ariana.bindman@sfgate.com.
