A combination antique shop, printmaker, and event venue in San Francisco is expected to be auctioned off next year.
The business, known as BoxSF and owned by Mark Sackett, is hosted in a building that currently has a broken window and its address, 1069 Howard St., is next door to a drug sobering center. Sackett told the San Francisco Chronicle he purchased the building at $1.575 million in 2004, but now cannot be refinanced because as many as 30 lenders have refused to help the existing $2.5 million mortgage.
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Sackett expects the building will be sold “at a massive loss” due to six lenders telling him they “are not making commercial real estate loans in San Francisco due to the state of the city.”
“[San Francisco city officials] don’t even return my calls,” Sackett said. “They care about bike lanes, nonprofits, safe injection sites. … They have just ignored small business . . . I’m just done with San Francisco and the bullsh** here. It’s out of control.”
“Mark and I share a lot of the same priorities, and I truly wish we could be making more progress sooner to turn things around in SoMa,” Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a district representative, also told the outlet. “I’m optimistic that the neighborhood is beginning to see some progress. But for too many businesses, like Mark’s, we’re just not recovering fast enough.”
This comes some weeks after the San Francisco Bay Project, meant to create 15,000 new units, among them condos, multifamily, and affordable units across four neighborhoods in the area, was discontinued by Google and Australian developer Lendlease. Google would have occupied and worked in some of the offices in the project. Construction was slated to begin in 2026 and finish in 2038.
In August, Lendlease paused another San Francisco-based project called Hayes Point, which was also a “47-story mixed-use, live-work-play project,” according to its website. It was initially scheduled to be finished in 2027, but this was the estimated date before the pause.
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San Francisco’s real estate market has suffered, with the latest example being when the apartment complex for NEMA San Francisco‘s commercial mortgage-backed securities loan decreased for the second time. While the 2018 value was $543.6 million, the current loan is down 48% to $279 million.
Inbound moves to San Francisco have stagnated in the last couple of years, with a rate of 49.5%. In 2019, the rate was 54%, per the National Association of Realtors. California’s inbound moves did not outpace its outbound ones, as the state lost 0.3% of its population in 2022.
