San Franciscos drug-addled Union Square gets a rebirth with $75m bet from rookie real estate investors
Just two years ago, downtown San Francisco’s commercial real estate was in a grim position.Retailers fled and empty storefronts had turned Union Square — once the city’s crown jewel — into a state of disrepair, with open-air drug markets, homeless zombies and crime pushing out customers.Downtown office real estate sales in 2024 slumped to $310-per-square-foot on average — almost two-thirds below the $861 average of 2018, according to CBRE.However, Union Square’s fortunes are now in the process of a dramatic reversal — thanks to good governance and private investment.Clothing brand Uniqlo, which had left Union Square in 2021, has signed a lease and is set to reopen later this year.Zara is set to expand to a four-story, 40,000-square-foot flagship store.
They will join a Nintendo store, which has commanded lines around the block, The RealReal, Aritzia, Pop Mart and AT&T.Kith has signed a lease and Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s are said to be eyeing space. In the middle of that remarkable turnaround is a nascent firm, Uris Acquisitions, helmed by Max Raskin, 36, and Ian Jacobs, 49. The pair began snapping up real estate just months after Mayor Daniel Lurie took office in Jan.
2025.Their conviction was that San Francisco wasn’t dead, but struggling — with problems they believed Lurie could rapidly fix.They began raising capital ahead of his campaign and have deployed almost all of it, $75 million, in just the last 15 months.“Forget blood in the streets,” Raskin joked — a reference to a popular investment maxim.
“We bought when there was feces in the street.”Jacobs is from a family of real estate investors, but had first focused on finance at Goldman Sachs, then later as a Warren Buffett analyst, picked after writing him a fan letter.Raskin worked as a journalist at Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley before landing at law school, then the Treasury Department.He has a good head for politics — and a belief that the greatest cities in the...