Because San Francisco needs it now. And because this is the only time a project like this could work.

We are proposing building a state-of-the-art university in the heart of a major city. For a whole host of reasons, that would not be achievable at any other moment —

1.) San Francisco has incredible amounts of retail and office space vacancy in downtown, buildings ready for conversion to academic use. These buildings are densely packed next to each other, instead of spread out throughout the City. It has never been cheaper to buy the real estate needed, and may never be again in any city. Similarly, there has never been this much real estate available on the market at the same time. And interest rates are dropping…

2.) The San Francisco Centre, the Metreon, and several other large retailers/malls are all for sale AT THE SAME TIME. These malls are perfect for academic buildings (large walkways to accommodate thousands, open-plan retail spaces to be made into classrooms), and cannot effectively be put to any other use. We can put together a pitch for these buildings now with less competition than ever before, and all of them are immediately adjacent to each other — forming the perfect core to an urban campus. Above all, at any other point in time, they simply would not be available to purchase.

3.) The academic market is incredibly constrained. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that “[g]etting into top colleges might get a whole lot harder in the next few years, as the number of prime college-age applicants in the U.S. is about to reach a generational peak.” Since universities are so capital-intensive, new ones do not always form to meet the demand. As a result, there are not enough spots in selective universities for all qualified applicants, forcing them to take spots at lower-ranked schools — thus allowing us to compete for students we might normally be able to grab. At the same time, production of qualified faculty members FAR exceeds the available slots at universities, forcing many would-be professors to shift into private industry. We can grab high-quality faculty AND students if we operate at this specific point in time.

4.) There is political will for a project like this. Mayor Lurie was just elected on a reformist platform, and his prior experience was in nonprofits dedicated to improving the City. Likewise, outgoing Mayor London Breed strongly supported the idea of a downtown SF campus, and sponsored legislation accordingly. So did Supervisor Safai. In other words — politicians (on the local AND state level) are desperate to fix downtown, and are open to a university as a solution specifically. That should make the project far easier, AND increases the likelihood that we will receive grants or other forms of public financial support.

Above all though, the City is in need. Downtown is struggling — now. This project could revitalize it. Why wait?

Yes, a university is real estate intensive.

But it has never been easier to make a university in the heart of the City!

San Francisco’s downtown is filled with vacant office and retail buildings. Depending on where you look, it hovers around ~37% for the City as a whole, and higher in the Financial District corridor. People holding office space in the City have no idea what to do with it — it seems like with remote work, there is going to be a permanent reduction in the demand for office space. As such, we can get substantial amounts of real estate for firesale prices (which also means that, in a worst case scenario, our investment is hedged with tangible real estate). With interest rate cuts coming down the pipeline, we get an amazing combination — never has it been cheaper to buy office space in downtown, and never has there been this much available on the market.

Office buildings are perfect for converting directly into academic buildings. Former conference rooms become classrooms and seminar spaces. Offices remain offices — but for professors and administrators.

And the density of vacancy means we do not have to spread our campus throughout the City. There is plenty of office space available directly adjacent to each other.

Of course, this is even without mentioning retail space, which is similarly easy to convert.

Perhaps most importantly — never before have there been so many shopping malls, in close proximity to each other, FOR SALE AT THE SAME TIME.

If you wanted to do a project like this, building a university in the heart of a City, at any other time, you probably could not do it. It would be too expensive, and not enough would be for sale.

Downtown San Francisco has several large indoor malls and retailers that were annihilated by COVID and changing conditions in downtown, not to mention the general trend away from malls and retail. These include the San Francisco Centre (now up for auction), the Metreon mall (now for sale), and the Macy’s (which Macy’s is vacating in the new year).

What happens to these buildings when the businesses leave? What can they be used for?

They cannot be readily converted to housing. Malls have substantial sweeping walkways for mass pedestrian use. That is wasted space in most housing complexes; the resulting structure would be insufficiently dense. And the segmented rooms that exist are large, open-plan retail spaces, typically without plumbing, which does not map easily into apartments or offices.

If you wanted to convert a building into residential apartments, you would first look at many, many vacant office buildings all around these malls, which are much readily converted into housing.

And no one is going to be converting these malls into office space — the City is filled with office space that is already vacant; there is no demand.

So, what is the future of these buildings? On one hand, they could continue this half-life of barely surviving at quarter vacancy, maybe hoping for a retail comeback, but more likely eventually closing and being left vacant. Or they could be demolished — which is what was proposed for the SF Centre, in order to replace it with a soccer stadium.

That is a sad outcome. These buildings are classic monuments to San Franciscan history. They used to be the center of pedestrian life in the City! Why let them waste away?

A university is the ONLY purpose to which these buildings can be put that uses them as they are.

Those large walkways? Needed for a student population in the thousands. Those large open-plan retail spaces? Perfect for classrooms! These buildings can be ready to go with very little renovation compared to other approaches (such as converting office space or building from scratch).

There are several buildings currently for sale that we would be targeting.

1. The San Francisco Centre

The centerpiece building would be the former Westfield mall, the San Francisco Centre.

The Centre is located right on Market Street (a pedestrian only street). If anywhere can claim to be the “heart” of San Francisco, it is here — indeed, it is often the first impression for visitors to the City from either airport. It’s right where the Powell street cable car turnaround is located, steps away from the Ferry Building, City Hall, Union Square, Financial District, Yerba Buena Gardens, multiple museums, the Moscone Convention Center, and more. All the major tech companies are mere blocks away.

It is built right on the Powell Street BART/MUNI station, and is the only building in San Francisco with an internal connection to the subway.

It’s also one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture on the West Coast.

The Centre is nine stories; 1,814,533 square feet. It has an underground food court perfect for a student cafeteria. It has hotels on all four corners (to be looked at for potential dorm spaces). It is designed to accommodate thousands of people at once with wide avenues and crowd control pathways. It has floors and floors of retail space for classrooms, as well as office space for administration (or dorms). There’s a Trader Joe’s on site, and a Whole Foods down the street (plus a gym).

The building is nearly fully vacant. Its valuation fell 75% from approximately $1.5 billion to $290 million (as of early 2024), and the free-fall shows no sign of stopping. It is currently valued at $221.7 million (SF Examiner). All the big stores have left. No large retailer exists that can take up the abandoned spaces. It was scheduled for auction in November 2024, but that was delayed until December 2024 because there were no bidders. No one wants it. No one knows what to do with it.

As a result, the Centre is filling the slots with lower-tier retail shops, to no avail. If you go today, you wander through a nearly empty wasteland of boarded-up shops and basically no foot traffic. The mall is not coming back. That model is dead, and without residential development (years down the line), nothing can bring it back. It is dying a slow death.

It does not have to be this way.

This property can be saved.

It can be bought for a price never again obtainable.

This particular building was already identified as perfect for a university — it was the keystone to the UCSF pitch, and former Mayor Breed also discussed its use in a potential HBCU expansion. Those plans are forever stalled, but the idea was brilliant, and the owners are aware of its potential.

2. The Macy’s

The Macy’s is located immediately on Union Square — a massive urban park ideal as a place for student gatherings as a de facto Quad (compare this to Washington Square Park near NYU). The Macy’s building has six stories of floor-to-ceiling glass: perfect for massive lecture halls overlooking the city. It is flanked by massive amounts of office space for classrooms or faculty offices.

The Macy’s is leaving. Nothing else can possibly fill that space — and the City has no ideas other than begging Macy’s not to leave. The loss of foot traffic has caused this area, once among the most vibrant parts of the City, to become desolate. The Macy’s loss will accelerate that.

It is a 5 minute walk from the SF Centre (through Powell street, lined by trees and traveled by cable cars). The combination creates a true urban campus.

3. The Metreon

The Metreon mall just went on the market in October 2024. Four stories, 312,592 square feet. Directly behind the Emporium Centre San Francisco, creating a unified campus. Directly connected to Yerba Buena Gardens, and across from the Moscone Convention center.

The two largest leaseholders currently are AMC and Target — ideally, these are retained, both for the funding purposes as well as civic vitality. Students are the perfect demographic for this kind of retail (movies and household shopping). Ideally this building is used for integrated student housing and classroom / organization space.

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These three buildings alone are sufficient for a campus, and they are unlikely to be used for any other purpose. They are each 5-10 minutes walk from each other, in a straight line, throughout the heart of the City, surrounded by every amenity we could need. They are perfect.

There are other buildings adjacent that are ideal as well! They are included in the About page.

While we hope that San Francisco will soon unlock rapid development of housing that will make this a non-issue, it is absolutely true that, as it currently stands, San Francisco has a very limited housing supply, and that supply constraint has led to very high rental prices. As such, providing student housing is an essential component of the university plan; it is untenable to force on the City an upward pressure on rents caused by the addition of a substantial student population without increasing housing stock, and it would be unfair to our students to demand that they face the San Francisco rental market in order to attend. If we cannot provide sufficient housing, the project simply cannot exist.

So to be explicit: the San Francisco University Project will build sufficient university housing for our entire student population, and this housing will be offered to all students (at minimum, for the first two years to start, expanding to all four with all deliberate speed).

Luckily, building student housing happens to be substantially easier than building normal housing.

First, consider all the vacant office space in downtown San Francisco. There’s a lot of discussion about converting that office space into residential apartments, but that is more difficult than it sounds. The big problem is plumbing and heating. Private apartments require individual plumbing lines for each apartment, and apartment-by-apartment heating. Offices are simply not built that way. There are typically two or so bathrooms per floor, and perhaps a kitchen, meaning that plumbing is not distributed properly for apartments. Thus, office buildings often have to be stripped to their bones in order to convert them into apartments. However, student dorms do not require that kind of retrofitting. Dorms frequently have a single floor bathroom and kitchen, and heating is managed by the building on a floor-by-floor basis. As such, it will be notably cheaper and easier to convert office space to dorm space. And the office space we would target is immediately adjacent to where we want to build the university, creating a cohesive campus environment (indeed, we are targeting office space for university space anyways, so to economize we might have buildings with mixed classroom and dorm space). The one thing SF is not wanting for is available office space being sold at firesale prices.

Second, downtown SF is filled with smaller hotels that have been struggling in the most recent economic downturn. Every month, a hotel goes on the market, or into receivership. It seems unlikely that the hotel market will return to max capacity, and to the extent hotel space is needed, there is enough competition in the market that hotel space will be available. But there are likely more hotels operating in SF than there is demand for those hotels. Several have already sold, and many more will in the coming years (including some for conversion into residential units). Hotels are perfect for dorm conversion. Dorms are single-room units filled with multiple beds; AKA, hotel rooms. We could purchase ailing hotels in downtown and convert them to dorms practically instantly, with little additional conversion costs and a very quick turnaround (ensuring that we are able to build housing stock in time for the launch of the university). All the hotels also happen to be concentrated in the downtown Financial District / Union Square area, exactly where we want to build the campus, ensuring proximity between students and their classes. Further, many of the buildings we want to target for university spaces have hotels attached already. For example, the San Francisco Emporium has FOUR smaller boutique hotels, one on each corner.

Finally, consider that building student housing is far easier than building traditional housing. Dorms allow for density that cannot exist on the residential market, as two or three people can be placed in a single room, often with a floor bathroom and kitchen. This increased density means we can fit more people per square footage than a residential building could, and at a lower cost per student.

Providing student housing ensures that our project will not stress the existing rental market in the City to the point of breaking, and prices for students will be affordable and subject to financial aid. However, it should also be noted that student housing is a potential space for adding to the revenue stream for the university, allowing it to keep up with operating expenses, and hence the relative ease in building student housing is also a major boon to the finances of the university.

Yes. San Francisco is an oddity in that it does not. This is an especially odd fact given that San Francisco is the center of global innovation in STEM fields, and historically been the home of major revolutions in art, culture, and politics.

Every major American city has a major, well-regarded research university within walking distance of its downtown core (typically within the city borders). In every case, these universities provide a hub of jobs, culture, innovation, and economic growth. In every case, students are a core central demographic of the downtown, providing a consistent population that populates the parks, streets, and stores.

San Francisco is the singular exception.

Los Angeles has USC (~49,500 total enrollment) in the heart of its downtown, and UCLA on its western side (~44,947) where a new downtown is developing around Westwood and Century City.

Chicago has the University of Chicago (~14,467).

New York has NYU (~51,123), and Columbia University (~36,649) about 15-20 minutes north of midtown by transit.

Boston has Boston University (~37,367), with MIT (~11,376) also within walking distance right across the bridge (or 1-2 stops on the MBTA) and Harvard (~22,947) about 20 minutes away by subway.

Washington D.C. has Georgetown (~20,984), George Washington (~25,613), American (~14,318), and Howard (~10,002) Universities.

Philadelphia has the University of Pennsylvania (~23,948).

The list goes on. San Francisco should not be the exception.

Yes! It does. But they all fall into completely different niches and serve different goals.

As a preliminary note, a San Francisco University is a good thing on its own, but this Project is also being pitched as a downtown revitalization effort. Creating a reason for 10,000+ people to be constantly rooted in downtown is an end on its own, and no existing university in San Francisco serves that function. As such, even if there was an equivalent university in the City, this Project still stands on its own as worth pursuing.

The most important universities of note are San Francisco State University and the University of San Francisco. Neither serve the function that our Project would.

The University of San Francisco (USF) is a private Jesuit college with a 71.2% acceptance rate. It is a liberal arts college that primarily focuses on non-STEM subjects. It is not in downtown (though it has a downtown graduate campus with about ~800 students).

San Francisco State University (SFSU) is a state-run school with a 94.2% acceptance rate. It serves the function of providing qualifications in an era where college degrees are increasingly necessary in the job market. It is in the periphery of San Francisco.

Neither university is a selective, STEM-focused research institution. As such, although both are universities, they are not competing in the same market. Further, neither are in downtown, thus neither serve the revitalization purpose.

As a note, SFSU is immediately adjacent to the Stonestown Mall, which is thriving in an era where retail across the City is struggling. This is a strong empirical example of the obvious reality that a student population improves retail business outcomes in the area adjacent to them.

There are a few other academic institutions in San Francisco which similarly do not compete in the same market as us: extension or graduate buildings for existing universities (UC Berkeley Extension, Wharton SF, UC Davis School of Management, SFSU/USF Downtown) that have small student populations and do not grant undergraduate degrees; Academy of Art University (art-focused); Golden Gate University (online-focused, primarily post-graduate with only 4 undergraduate degrees that are non-STEM, 83% acceptance rate, ~35% graduation rate), Minerva University (~200 students, almost entirely online), City of College of San Francisco (adult learning school, not a degree institution), University of the Pacific School of Dentistry, and UCSF Medical School / UC Law SF (excellent graduate schools, but not fields that we are planning to offer degrees anytime soon).

None are competition for our model — a selective, research-focused STEM university.

To the extent that San Francisco has major universities, they are Berkeley and Stanford. However, for our purposes, they do not serve as competition.

Our team has people who have studied at Berkeley and Stanford, and worked in Berkeley and Palo Alto. We are intimately familiar with the way these universities relate to San Francisco, and several of us commuted into San Francisco from these universities regularly for work.

Where the students live in Berkeley and Stanford are approximately an hour away from downtown San Francisco via public transit, typically involving at least one transfer.

For Berkeley, most students live around Telegraph Avenue, on the south side of campus. That is where nearly all the dorm buildings are located. Depending on where you are coming from, that’s a 15-25 minute walk to the nearest BART station (Downtown Berkeley), or about 10 minutes on the 51B which runs every 15 minutes (but is often late, and delayed as it cuts through the busiest foot-traffic region of southside Berkeley). From the BART station, you then have to take an approximately 30 minute train ride (the train comes every 20 minutes, so if you miss it you need to factor that in as well). On the other side, you then need to walk further to your office, or perhaps take a bus depending on where it is.

From Stanford, the first big problem is getting out of campus. Stanford runs shuttle buses as frequently as every 15-20 minutes and as infrequently as every 30-40 minutes, depending on the time and time of year. After your ride to the Caltrain station, you then need to take the Caltrain for approximately an hour. You arrive at the San Francisco Caltrain station, which is about a 30 minute walk from the Financial District. In the alternative, you can take the N or T on MUNI, which takes around 25 minutes (assuming no wait time).

In sum, it’s hard to intern in the City regularly when you study at Berkeley or Stanford. They are not in the City. As a result, it is exceedingly uncommon for students to work part-time in the City proper. Our comparative advantage is the ability to work in the City during the school year. And of course, if you attend SFU, you live in the City!

Further, the more basic point is that the tech industry is far larger than Berkeley and Stanford, and already takes in tens of thousands from graduating students across the country. The market is not dominated by these two schools. We are not competing with Berkeley and Stanford — we are competing with schools in the American Midwest, South, or East Coast, with qualified students who want to work in the Bay and would love to be closer, but settle for universities elsewhere. We are providing direct access to Silicon Valley — an intangible but incredibly valuable asset.

Separately, of course, neither Berkeley or Stanford serve the public function of revitalizing downtown.

Cities only prosper under conditions of academic density. That is why proximity to Stanford and Berkeley do not affect the viability of the project. For example, Boston has a far greater density of academic institutions (Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Brandeis, U Mass, BU, Tufts, etc., with Brown closer to Boston than Stanford is to SF) and that has only caused the economy of Boston to thrive (indeed, it is often cited as a causal factor as to why Boston achieved so much success compared to other cities). There is no evidence that in a major, innovative city like SF (or Boston), academic density is anything other than a major economic boost.

Markets like the technology industry rely on agglomeration effects — the accruing benefits of people and resources connected to the same field all being in the same place, crossing paths and easily cooperating.

We have only known a San Francisco without a university. Imagine the technological innovations resulting from an SF that is also a college town.

Now, inter-academia competition could be meaningful if we were in a small city. If you start somewhere like Merced, the main university (such as UC Merced) will also be the main pathway into the local labor force. If you primarily aim to place locally, then there may not be enough jobs for graduates.

However, the Bay Area market is far, FAR larger than our university produces (or Berkeley and Stanford). It absorbs talent from every university in the world. There are more than enough jobs to accommodate more graduates, and our graduates would benefit from early integration into the market (plus, we want them to be job creators as well!). If anything, we compete not with San Francisco area schools, but schools across the nation that feed into the Bay Area, where students might very well prefer to start already in the market.

Imagine a developer pitches a shopping plaza for a stretch a land, filled with shops, restaurants, little pedestrian walkways, and more. The developer believes that this project will bring life and economic vibrancy to a part of town that needs it. In response, someone suggests that it would be easier to just open a single restaurant, ideally from a chain.

And that is certainly technically true. It is easier to do a smaller project than a larger one. But it would not serve the same purpose. They are not direct replacements. So the important question is whether the larger project is viable. In our case, it is.

An extension school would be a graduate school — universities are not in the habit of dividing their undergraduate body up. Downtown San Francisco does have a few graduate extension schools — UC Berkeley has an extension, and so does Wharton. They are small facilities, usually a single building, with a few hundred students at a time. That does not serve the social purpose of revitalizing the region (neither does Mayor Breed’s proposed HBCU satellite campus, for that matter). It would certainly be nice to have! But it is a different project in kind.

However, as a fallback, we would be happy to facilitate such an extension. That is certainly better than nothing. Caltech might be a good school to target, lacking as it does an MBA program or any presence in Northern California. Stanford’s President mentioned wanting to expand access to Stanford, and it is a school already rooted in the Bay, so that could be a good option to. But these are different projects from what we have in mind.

Yes!

For using co-op and internship placements to rapidly grow the prestige and reputation of a university, look at Northeastern, which grew the university entirely around such a co-op program. Or look at the University of Waterloo, which places into the Bay Area well above its rankings, on par with Berkeley, because of an incredible co-op program.

As a city revitalization tactic, Supervisor Safai cited the experience of developing Arizona State University in downtown Phoenix as a model for his proposed public university fund based on a mix of private philanthropic contributions/donations and bond revenue.

“[T]he city of Phoenix[’s ...] downtown ... experience[d] a resurgence in 2006 following the creation of the Arizona State University campus. Rick Naimark, the university’s vice president of development, said that downtown Phoenix was “very challenged” for a roughly 10-year period, causing the city’s mayor and then ASU president to strategize around bringing students downtown in the early 2000s. “Voters agreed to invest some $233 million of property-tax-supported bonds that were part of a larger $800 million package into higher education. And as a result, the city built a campus for downtown and within 10 years of that of that vote, there were more than 10,000 students that we brought to the area,” said Naimark. “The downtown now has tons of residential high-rises, restaurants and bars, and people don’t just come and go — they live there.” It’s a model that was successfully adopted by Mesa, Ariz., and Naimark said that his team has been in conversations with Safai’s office regarding “replicating that model in San Francisco.””

— San Francisco Chronicle, May 23, 2024

The passed legislation referenced above provides no revenue for its approach, and there are no signs of progress. But the model of ASU’s downtown expansion is a good one — Arizona State University proves the utility of adding a campus into a troubled downtown. The location, and the school, are now thriving. Further, this is another example of the City endorsing such a project; in this case, actually calling for private funding!

Alternatively, look at Cornell Tech's creation in NYC.

It was a result of a 2008 economic development initiative that sought to bring more jobs to a struggling part of New York City, primarily via the mechanism of educating future job-creators and via construction / faculty / staffing. It was a brand new graduate campus and research center, focusing on technology and business, on Roosevelt Island, immediately next to Manhattan. There was a substantial role of private charitable donations in funding the creation of the campus.

This illustrates the role of a university like this in attracting and anchoring technology firms: “Since [opening], Cornell Tech has become one of the most visible symbols of New York City’s booming technology sector — and a major selling point in the bid to persuade Amazon to build a headquarters in Queens. ... The school’s graduates and researchers have parlayed their ideas, skills and ambition into more than 50 start-up companies that have raised a total of $60 million from investors and created about 200 jobs. ... So far, 534 of the school’s graduates — of whom, more than 60 percent remain in the city — have been hired by Google, Bloomberg, Microsoft and other technology companies.”

— “This Graduate School Helped Make New York Appealing to Amazon,” New York Times, December 17, 2018.