San Francisco neighborhoods diverge
Sales‑tax figures indicate Mission Bay’s retail recovery is outpacing SoMa, suggesting foot traffic and local spending are returning unevenly across the city. That neighborhood split implies demand is clustering in districts where office, life sciences, housing and amenities reinforce one another. (missionlocal.org)
San Francisco’s retail comeback is no longer a citywide story. In the latest neighborhood sales-tax data, South of Market fell from about $18.5 million in 2019 to $9.37 million in 2025, while Mission Bay rose from about $4.37 million to $5.26 million over the same stretch. (missionlocal.org, data.sfgov.org) Those two neighborhoods sit next to each other, but they run on different daily rhythms. South of Market still depends heavily on office workers showing up, while Mission Bay has built a steadier mix of hospitals, labs, housing, parks, and retail. (missionlocal.org, onesanfrancisco.org) South of Market was one of the places hit hardest when remote work emptied downtown San Francisco in 2020. A March 26, 2026 report said the neighborhood’s office vacancy rate was 47.4 percent, which means nearly half its office space was still sitting empty. (therealdeal.com) That emptiness shows up at street level. Mission Local reported that restaurant owners in South of Market are still short on walk-in customers, and fewer workers on the sidewalks has made weak foot traffic feel self-reinforcing block by block. (missionlocal.org) Mission Bay was built for a different kind of recovery. San Francisco’s capital plan says the neighborhood spans 303 acres and was designed around housing, commercial space, a University of California San Francisco research campus, a medical center, retail, open space, and a hotel. (onesanfrancisco.org) The University of California San Francisco campus there is not small. The university says its Mission Bay site includes roughly 3.91 million square feet of building space, and the neighborhood’s master developer says the broader district includes 6,000 homes and 5 million square feet of commercial space. (realestate.ucsf.edu, catellus.com) That matters because a hospital shift change is not the same as a Tuesday office commute. Hospitals, labs, and nearby apartments keep producing breakfast, lunch, dinner, and weekend customers even when white-collar office attendance stays uneven. (ucsfhealth.org, missionlocal.org) Mission Bay also has newer neighborhood anchors that South of Market lacks in many blocks. The district includes more than 49 acres of parks and open space, plus retail clustered around large institutions instead of depending mainly on passersby from office towers. (mbaydevelopment.com, onesanfrancisco.org) San Francisco has seen this split before at a broader scale. Earlier citywide reporting on sales-tax data found that some neighborhood corridors were recovering faster than the downtown core, even while District 6, which includes downtown, South of Market, and Mission Bay, still lagged 2019 totals. (abc7news.com, abc7news.com) So the new picture is not “San Francisco is back” or “San Francisco is stuck.” It is that one neighborhood built around a single engine, office work, is still waiting for that engine to restart, while the neighborhood next door has several engines running at once. (missionlocal.org, therealdeal.com, onesanfrancisco.org)
