The Ground Floor Collective
What if Market Street had a dedicated entity forcurating place?
The Ground Floor Collective is a catalytic platform for place —curating storefronts and public space together to build momentum on Market Street. Through a master lease of the ground floors of multiple properties across disparate property owners, it brings new life to underused spaces with a carefully considered mix of tenants and street-level programming — making Market Street a place to be, not just a place to pass through.
The Value Proposition:
Strength in Numbers. A single entity stewarding the curation of storefronts and experiences de-risks each individual tenant, from small businesses to established names, as they can each leverage their mutual co-location and complementary public realm activations.
Safety in Numbers. Increased foot traffic – that's not strictly dependent on office occupancy – increases both public safety and the perception of public safety.
Higher Rents, Lower Vacancy. As foot traffic increases, property owners along and nearMarket Street benefit with higher rents and lower vacancy above the ground floor.
Leveraging Location. New, cohesive destinations along Market help round out the tourist and visitor experience along the city’s most iconic corridor,not to mention its central transit spine, giving another reason to linger and support the local economy.
North-South Connections. Improved vibrancy and vitality connecting north-of-Market and south-of-Market districts and neighborhoods
Amplifying San Francisco’s Wins
The Ground Floor Collective takes the idea behind Vacant to Vibrant – filling vacant storefronts – and scales it up by multiple blocks. This endeavor is envisioned as a self-sustaining operation. Startup capital may come from a mix of private philanthropy, corporate sponsorships, and grants, and would fund first-generation tenant improvements and select public-realm improvements and activations. Any revenues after operating costs are met can fund a tenant-improvement reserve for new tenants after turnover.
While Vacant to Vibrant operates opportunistically on available spaces, Ground Floor Collective focuses on a contiguous block of spaces and leverages it’s scale to shift from pop-up to permanent. It adds a holistic view of ground-floor programming — including what’s happening on the street — to create a comprehensive platform for place management and neighborhood-level economic development.
Inspiration Beyond the Bay
Ace Hotel
In the early 2000s, Tungsten Properties strategically wooed buzzy, boutique brands to a small radius around its new Ace Hotel locations in New York and LA, leading New York Magazine to dub Ace Hotel the “hot-neighborhood-starter-kit.”
Love, Bleecker
Following increasing vacancy and falling foot traffic on Bleecker Street, Brookfield Properties bought up seven storefronts and partnered with Skylight to cultivate businesses aligned with the street’s history and character. Skylight’s CEO Stephanie Blake: “It matters who’s next door to you and how you plan to interact with the neighborhood itself.”
Renew Newcastle
A nonprofit initiative in Newcastle, Australia, that calls itself a “permanent structure for temporary things” master-leased multiple vacant storefronts and curated a mix of local artists, designers, galleries, co-working spaces, and cafes, often at zero rents (above operating costs) in order to turn around a desolate stretch of town. Foot traffic tripled over the course of two years, and vacancy dropped dramatically.
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