While retail theft is on the rise throughout the country, shopping malls, once bustling centers of commerce and community, are left to their own devices in a hostile environment. San Francisco Centre, an iconic mall near the city’s Union Square shopping district, has joined a long list of casualties in a retail landscape ravaged by crime and government inaction.
This property was in default for $625.6 million and was foreclosed this week, with the sale date being pushed to Dec. 17. What once was a lively shopping center anchored by the Nordstrom flagship store has been reduced to an empty shell by an exodus of tenants complaining of relentless crime coupled with not enough city authority support. Nordstrom left the property in 2023, as did other big retailers like American Eagle, which sued the mall’s ownership over its purported neglect and failure to address the crime problem.
This trend isn’t unique to San Francisco. Across the country, malls are closing their doors due to the unchecked rise of smash-and-grab robberies. Security issues have become so severe that many retailers no longer see operating in certain cities as viable. Without intervention from local governments to protect these spaces, malls are increasingly forced to shoulder the burden of security costs, which many cannot sustain.
In the case of San Francisco Centre, the property’s owner surrendered the mall to its lenders last year, unable to recover from economic losses and escalating crime. Since then, a receiver appointed by the court – Trident Pacific – has struggled to impose order. The company has hired security agents and deployed guard dogs at entrances, but the damage is done: major brands have fled, and the mall’s financial woes continue to mount.
And even worse is what municipal governments have done: nothing. Shopping malls like the San Francisco Centre provide job opportunities, generate substantial tax revenue, and are crucial anchors for a city’s economy. Yet, despite their importance, city governments often did little or nothing to address the crime wave that had taken over these places.
They’ve repeatedly asked for increased police presence, stricter prosecution of theft-related crimes, and motivation on the part of mall operators to invest in security. Those appeals, by and large, have fallen on deaf ears. And the shopping malls have been largely allowed to fester-their decline fed by a sense of lawlessness and abandonment that keeps shoppers and businesses away from them.
In fact, it has created a huge ripple effect. As there are fewer tenants, the vacancies mount and property values nosedive, affecting the surrounding communities that relied on the malls as important economic drivers. Take the case of San Francisco Centre, where even its rebranding as “Emporium Centre San Francisco” was put on hold.
Unless municipalities take concrete steps and decisive action to safeguard retail spaces against crime, the decline of shopping centers will continue to accelerate and further gut the cores of urban areas, leaving people without jobs, services, and places to gather in public. Unless city leaders rise up and play their part, they can literally watch the retail industry-and with it the rich communities it fosters-disappear altogether.
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