Downtown San Francisco mall beleaguered by crime and stores shuttering is set to close for good next week

A once-beloved mall in San Francisco will shut its doors for good after a neighbourhood spike in crime led to a dramatic decline in foot traffic and a spiral of store closures.

The San Francisco Center, which is located near the city’s Union Square, will close its doors on Monday, January 26, according to an employee of the last remaining retail outlet. The center’s entrance to the Bay Area Rapid Transit has already been sealed to the public.

“SF Centre’s General Manager advised BART they were going to close the entrance from the Powell Station concourse level to their mall,” Alicia Trost, BART’s chief communications officer, said in a statement shared with The San Francisco Chronicle.

“Depending on the property’s future use, any new ownership may wish to reopen the entrance. At that point BART would entertain a new license agreement for reopening the entrance.”

The center, which covers 1.5 million square feet, was San Francisco’s biggest shopping mall and was previously known as the Westfield Mall. Over the years, it has seen generations of customers walk through its doors.

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“I get really sad thinking that nobody comes here anymore,” former customer Ashley Fumore told KRON4. “My friends and I would always just come here and meet up. We [would] go in there just window shopping.”

“My heart was really, really sad when I saw [it] was leaving. Just really physically hurt. So many, many happy memories and people have loved this store,” added another shopper, Liz Ann Keys.

However, despite its proud history, in recent years it has seen a surge in crime, which was exacerbated by factors including the Covid-19 pandemic.

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According to an analysis by the San Francisco Standard in September last year, despite an overall drop in crime in San Francisco, the city’s southern district, where the center is located, experienced a jump of 92 percent in crime year-on-year.

Larceny-theft reports made to the San Francisco Police Department’s Southern District, made between January and August, almost doubled during the same period in 2024, going from 955 incidents to 1,876.

Citywide reports during that time fell about 23 percent, from 14,423 to 11,201, the Standard reported, adding that the surge in the southern district was driven by nonviolent thefts.

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As a result, businesses in the mall have been declining steadily, with The Chronicle noting that restaurant chains including Panda Express and Shake Shack were among the first to disappear.

In late 2025, fewer than 20 businesses remained in the center – which has capacity for around 200 stores.

The future of the center is uncertain, though the building was acquired by a group of financial heavyweights, including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, last year. The banks bid $134 million to formally take control of the mall.