The San Francisco University Project

Downtown San Francisco is Dying

It does not have to be this way

A Struggling Downtown

Downtown San Francisco used to be the beating heart of the Golden City. It was the center of innovation, with the headquarters of every major technology company and new startups alike vying for square footage. Beyond that — it was the place for retail. The centerpiece was Market Street, the Main Street of the West Coast.

Then the Pandemic came. Downtown was never centered around housing (the entire Financial District has practically no housing). People came to downtown for work. All of a sudden though, work was shifted online, and with it went the only reason for people to be in downtown. Unlike other downtowns, like NYC, where housing and work were intermingled, when the jobs left, no one was left behind. The population of downtown went from tens of thousands to practically no one, overnight.

All of the retail stores and restaurants in the area that relied on the workers (especially high-end retail that relied on technology and finance employees), the kinds of places that made downtown lively and energetic, found themselves without customers. And so — many of them closed. They boarded up, never to return.

When the first restaurants and retail places closed, downtown became a little bit less enticing. With each closure, there was one less reason to visit downtown. And that reduced the number of people coming in, which hurt the economy even more, which caused more closures, onward and onward.

A vicious cycle. A doom loop.

Without the large crowds on the streets, urban disorder and petty crime rose. People began avoiding the streets for their own safety, even during the day (to say nothing of night). Lacking the pull of restaurants and retail, downtown now faced the push of disorder and fear.

You walk down Market Street now, the heart of our beautiful City, its soul, the first impression visitors have as they step off the BART trains from SFO and OAK, and you pass storefront after storefront of boarded-up empty buildings with “For Lease” signs in the windows. It is a ghost town of retail and office vacancies, selling at firesale prices but with no buyers — because no one has a clue how to fix it.

It does not have to be this way.

How Do We Get Back?

What does downtown need?

People. It is missing people, which is because there is no reason for large numbers of people to be in downtown.

Remote work appears here to stay — and perhaps it should, as many workers have found it materially improves their lives and productivity. Technology, out of all fields, is uniquely primed to shift remote, and there does not appear to be a feasible policy path to draconian return-to-office mandates on the City level. While some level of in-person work seems likely to return, there appears to be a permanent reduction in the amount of time spent in-person at the office. We cannot go back to the way we were.

Building housing downtown is one important solution, especially via office-to-residential conversions (which are unfortunately remarkably difficult to achieve, partially for complex plumbing reasons in buildings not built for each detached unit to have its own plumbing and heating). But building sufficient housing will require thousands of individual actions from hundreds of developers and real estate holders, not to mention political will and approval. It will happen (hopefully) in time. But not for the foreseeable future. It is the project of decades.

What does the future hold for downtown’s non-housing amenities? What about hotels? It seems every month a downtown hotel goes on the market or into receivership. What about convention spaces? The Moscone Convention Center is trying to adapt to a world with dramatically less conventions. What about museums? The Contemporary Jewish Museum just entered an indefinite hiatus caused by the lack of foot traffic.

What about the San Francisco malls and large retailers? The market for such businesses was already struggling across the country — America is not a country that does as much physical shopping as it used to, especially in indoor malls. The pandemic only exacerbated that decline.

Westfield gave up the San Francisco Centre mall. It is operating with a fraction of the businesses it used to, as a shell of its former glory, encumbered by hundreds of millions in debt. The Centre is going into an open auction. The Metreon, similarly facing a radical decline in stores, is also on the market. Macy’s is leaving the City, abandoning its massive building in Union Square. These buildings cannot be readily converted to housing or office space. And every retail company large enough to occupy these spaces has already left the City. In other words — no business can use these buildings. They are doomed to die a slow death.

If only there was a policy where we could place 10,000 people right into the heart of downtown, rooting them there with a hook that also draws in people from across the country and provides an incentive to bring the technology companies back to their offices.

Luckily — there is.

A San Francisco Solution

The solution is a new academic institution, San Francisco University, centered on Market Street, running from the Ferry Building to City Hall.

Imagine that. Imagine walking down Market Street, the first impression you get when you step off the train. What would you see?

You would see thousands of young, energetic students rushing from dorms to classrooms to research laboratories to startups to lecture halls to libraries to debates, carrying groceries from the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market or new furniture from IKEA. A large pedestrian population rooted in downtown, 24/7. Thousands, dropped in one place by one project.

The vacant retail lining Market would not be vacant for long. In its place would be cafes and restaurants, outdoor dining popping out into the sidewalks, catering to the car-free population that strolls up and down the street every day. Along with the cafes and restaurants would come arcades and bars (for the older students), bookstores, clothing stores, stationary shops, pop-up art museums and creative spaces, and so much more. We know this because that is the impact colleges have on the local community everywhere they are placed.

Spend time in the parts of town that have colleges (Harvard Square, Telegraph Avenue, University Avenue in Palo Alto, Washington Square Park in NYC, etc.). They are full of life — often the most vibrant and exciting parts of town. As you walk through these areas, you pass street fairs, students flyering for their clubs / startups / projects / events, public lectures and debates, and people just hanging out and enjoying the day. That was the dream of car-free Market Street. A street that is used. This is how we get there.

Thousands of students on one street, a guaranteed high foot-traffic population, not only brings business to the closing shops. They make downtown a nicer place to visit, and put more eyes on the street (not to mention campus security) to make it safer. That reduces the push factors from downtown, while adding a pull factor. More people will want to open businesses downtown. More people will want to live downtown. More people will be happy returning to in-person work, as the area is so much nicer. Even announcing this project will cause a rush of people investing in the vacant real-estate before the values come swinging back.

A virtuous cycle of growth. A boom loop.

And if you are a technology company, you suddenly have a whole new reason to come back to downtown, or to open up shop there: access to an immobile body of potential workers, minutes door-to-door from their homes to the office — the students, eager for internships and experience. The same goes for proximity to faculty and research labs, and the potential for lucrative joint ventures between the university and private industry, exactly as happens in every other university town. Not to mention the students themselves may very well be job creators, with startups filling the vacant office space (backed by a university in-house accelerator).

The Convention halls would be filled again with academic conferences. For the first time, academics would have a reason to go to the City, instead of Palo Alto or Berkeley. Our middle position would make the new university the center of an academic superhighway in the Bay.

San Francisco has always been the City Building the Future. The City of Innovation. The City at the Forefront of Scientific Advancement.

Now, when you step off that train, your first impression of the City… the fact that the City is the center of innovation would be immediately apparent. It would be all around you. A downtown built around the expansion of human knowledge. A city main street that is itself a university. Your first impression of San Francisco would be a place filled with the best and brightest, certain of the possibility of a better future and their ability to craft it, walking the Golden City. A city built around education. The city San Francisco always was.

“Imagine that! Students, professors, researchers, and employees walking from dorm room to classroom, from startup to conference space, from the Ferry Building to City Hall.”

— Former Mayor of San Francisco London Breed, speaking on the UCSF project

This can be the future.

Do not take our word for it — take the word of the City itself! This was proposed by former Mayor London Breed, and supported by the City Supervisors. Their plan was to do this publicly, via the UC system or an established HBCU. The City passed legislation to encourage it. They identified the specific buildings. They asked the state, and state government was similarly supportive. They asked the UC Regents — and got a no. They are focused on UC Merced for the foreseeable future.

This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea. This is an idea formally endorsed by the City and County of San Francisco — just something they are unable to do themselves.

The idea of doing this project through the government is dead in the water. It will not happen.

But we do not need them. We can do this ourselves.

In the Face of Apathy,

We Act

San Francisco is the City that private industry built.

We have more wealth flowing here than almost anywhere in the world. The world’s greatest VC and Angel funding firms are located here. The tech giants are here. And the people here love our City (we are the City that will drop hundreds of millions in private donations to build new parks and beautification programs). We all want it to be better. This is a project we can do ourselves.

We can build this university privately.

How?

The Vision

A selective STEM university in downtown San Francisco, drawing thousands of ambitious students, undertaking cutting-edge research, powering innovation and economic growth, enriching downtown's cultural and intellectual landscape, serving as a hub for technological advancement and social progress, and above all:

Filling the City streets with life again!

About the University

Meet the Team

Ethan Morales

Founder
Harvard Law School ‘25
UC Berkeley ‘22 (Political Science)
Matthew Chakov

Harvard Law School ‘25
Cornell University ‘20 (Industrial and Labor Relations)
Ayleeta Tsvetnitskaya

Harvard Law School ‘25
University of Toronto ‘22 (Mathematics)
President of the Harvard Tax Law Association
Akash Mahajan

UC Berkeley ‘25, BS in Business Administration (Haas School of Business)

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Alex Kristoffersen

UC Berkeley ‘23, MS in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (EECS)
UC Berkeley ‘22 (EECS)
Hayden Davis

Harvard Law School ‘25
Emory University ‘21 (Political Science)
Georgia Innocence Project, Board of Directors
Matthew Kristoffersen

Harvard Law School ‘27
Yale University ‘22 (History)