At 11:45 a.m. on a recent Friday, servers attended to two customers eating alone on the first floor of a two-story restaurant in South of Market.
The restaurant’s manager looked over the mostly empty tables and remembered when this would have been the lunchtime rush. Employees from the San Francisco Federal Building at Mission and Seventh streets nearby were the bread and butter of this 19-year-old restaurant.
“People would fill up the first and second floors,” he said. “Now, it’s mostly empty. Business is very slow.”
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, business has never returned to what it was — and his restaurant isn’t alone.
New sales-tax data shows a strong divide between South of Market small businesses and those in nearby Mission Bay. While South of Market remains far below its pre-pandemic levels, Mission Bay has recovered and grown.
SoMa’s sales-tax revenue fell from about $18.5 million to $9.37 million between 2019 and 2025 — a drop of some 49 percent, according to data from the San Francisco controller’s office. Mission Bay moved the other way, rising from about $4.37 million in 2019 to $5.26 million in 2025, an increase of more than 20 percent.
The contrast suggests the two districts are now on very different post-pandemic paths.
“South of Market is struggling,” said Henry Karnilowicz, president of the South of Market Business Association. The numbers match what he has been hearing from merchants and seeing on the ground for years.
SoMa restaurants were especially hard-hit during the pandemic, Karnilowicz said, and many are still struggling to attract walk-in customers. Businesses with a more established customer base, like bike shops and motorcycle repair shops, he said, have held up better.
The lack of foot traffic has started to feel self-perpetuating, he said. Office workers trickled away from the neighborhood as white-collar employees grew accustomed to working from home, and crime and poverty became more visible during the pandemic.
City data shows that, while the number of street tents in the neighborhood has doubled since last summer, it is still far below pandemic highs.
While citywide crime has fallen sharply, some SoMa business owners and residents have told Mission Local that disorder feels concentrated and highly visible in the neighborhood.
Data backs that up. SoMa’s crime rates in 2025 far exceeded those in the rest of San Francisco, more than double the rate in every other neighborhood, according to police data. The sharpest gaps were in assault and robbery, where SoMa’s rates were roughly four times higher.
During the pandemic, Karnilowicz said, businesses leaned on delivery apps and catering to stay afloat. But that did not necessarily bring people back into restaurants, or back onto the street.
Economic headwinds now linger in SoMa, according to Karnilowicz: Fewer office workers, less foot traffic, weaker spillover from nearby conventions and persistent public-safety concerns around crime and drug use.
Mission Bay is SoMa’s opposite. It’s newer, cleaner and more inviting, Karnilowicz said, with attractions like the Chase Center, newer parks and a built environment that encourages people to linger.
“Mission Bay,” he said, “is booming.”
Widening divide
Mission Bay is anchored by some of the city’s biggest employers — the University of California, San Francisco has a sprawling teaching, research and hospital campus there — along with a growing cluster of biotech and AI tenants, creating a steady flow of students, researchers, medical workers and office employees who help sustain nearby cafes and restaurants.
Land use may also explain some of the divergence between SoMa and Mission Bay.
A 2021 San Francisco Planning Department report found that SoMa has long had far less open space per person than the rest of the city, a legacy of its industrial past and decades of displacement without investment in parks.
Mission Bay was similarly built out of sprawling industrial tracts. Photographs from the 1990s, before UCSF began developing its campus, show the railroad yards and warehouses that dominated the area just a quarter-century ago.
But as Mission Bay was redeveloped over the last two decades, the master plan for the area prioritized open spaces, and businesses have benefitted from those amenities.
Planning documents show that Mission Bay was built around an extensive park system. The redevelopment plan envisioned roughly 49 acres of publicly accessible open space, including parks, plazas, open-space corridors and major waterfront destinations like Bayfront Park.
Mission Bay has also emerged as one of the homes for the AI boom.
According to a January report from brokerage firm CBRE, Mission Bay experienced one of the largest office occupancy gains in the city, driven by AI firms. OpenAI has expanded heavily near the Chase Center, including a major lease that the San Francisco Chronicle described as the city’s largest office lease of 2024.
Gladstone Institutes, a biotech company, recently leased 105,000 square feet on Owens Street in a major expansion centered on AI research.
Real estate publications tout Mission Bay as a hot market for AI leases.
Among the submarkets shown in the CBRE report, the three highest office vacancy rates were all in or around SoMa — Yerba Buena at 64.5 percent, South of Market West at 53.1 percent, and South of Market at 36.7 percent — compared with 21.8 percent in Mission Bay/China Basin.
Managers from San Francisco-based restaurant chains Proper Foods and Flour + Water, which both have outposts in Mission Bay, said office workers are sustaining their businesses.
“Business has been good over the last year. Our customers are mostly from nearby apartment buildings and Visa,” said Mikee Tocus of Flour + Water, referring to the credit-card company’s sleek new office, which sits in a development project called Mission Rock. “There’s lots of techies, too.”
Cavin The, manager of two Proper Foods outposts in Mission Bay, said business has been “consistent” from workers at Visa, UCSF and the Chase Center.
But SoMa still has its bright spots. Karnilowicz said some longstanding businesses continue to hold on, especially those with loyal customers. He also credited cleanup efforts on Howard Street, along with more visible attention from Mayor Daniel Lurie, as signs of possible progress.
For business owners like the SoMa restaurant manager, however, that has yet to translate into customers through the door.
“It will take time for people to come back to the neighborhood,” he said. “We are trying to survive.”
This article was updated with more information on South of Market vacancy rates.
I never go to Soma to walk around, window shop or dine.
The Fall of SOMA.
It was a perfectly horrible storm of Covid, already poor police service that only got worse because now they had better excuses for not doing their jobs, the ability for employees to work at home, and the Woke power structure in San Francisco.
SOMA will not even begin to truly recover from this for at least 10 years. More businesses will fail, more young people who CAN leave will, and without the tax money city services will fail even more and the criminals will continue to run free cuz the Woke ain’t going anywhere.
It’s a downward spiral that cannot be stopped.
Look at how badly we’ve treated our tourist industry. They WERE our cash cow. But WokeThink ruined that.
According to the Woke, our vilest criminals are presented as our most vulnerable? So they can freely break into people’s cars? And the Woke even gave it a cute nickname, bipping.
Trying to gloss over the pure moral ugliness of it, cuz, you know, optics…
I had the unfortunate experience of hearing a woman’s anguished scream when she came out her car to find that her back window was shattered and everything she had was gone. She couldn’t stop crying and couldn’t stop saying, “I was only in there for a minute.” This was Fisherman’s Wharf.
Not to mention robberies, burglaries, you name it, but it’s OK in our Dear old San Fran! You demand decent behavior and you’ll get a history lesson.
Now when good people from all over the PLANET consider San Francisco as a destination all they’ll see is what a dystopian hell-hole we’ve become and I know a LOT of that isn’t true but too much of it IS true.
If I have any advice for Mission Bay it’s this: Have ZERO tolerance for derelict behavior and as soon as you encounter it DO something about it.
Send out a clear message that the people of Mission Bay have chosen NOT to be victims. Enough is enough. I wish you all well.
SF had the opportunity to clean up SOMA when dot com companies started moving into the neighborhood in the late 90’s. You couldn’t walk down the block without someone complaining about gentrification. Fortunately, thanks to the the city’s phobia of throwing people committing crimes in jail, large parts of SOMA continue to wallow in crime and filth.
This is absolutely predictable. SOMA has the vast majority of our homeless/drug addict services. Mission Bay has virtually none.
RTO and fresh housing stock are good for San Francisco. Duh.