All bidders rejected for Fillmore Street revamp
The hole in the heart of lower Fillmore Street won’t be filled anytime soon.
A city committee charged with selecting a buyer for the long- vacant Yoshi’s nightclub at the Fillmore Heritage Center has rejected all the candidates who had hoped to buy the space, the centerpiece of a revitalization project meant to pump new life into an area decimated by redevelopment in the 1960s.
Joaquín Torres, deputy director at the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said the proposals didn’t meet the standard the community and the city had sought.
“Ultimately, the final proposals didn’t realize the cultural and economic potential of the Fillmore Heritage Center and its significance to the community and commercial corridor,” Torres said. “It’s now time to roll up our sleeves, go back to the drawing board and bring something beneficial and impactful to the lower Fillmore neighborhood.”
The decision not to move forward with the sale comes nine months after Torres’ agency solicited offers for the
50,000- square- foot commercial component of the Fillmore Heritage Center at 1330 Fillmore St., just south of Geary Boulevard.
The building includes the empty Yoshi’s space, a closed art gallery, a 160car parking garage and the 6,300- square- foot 1300 on Fillmore restaurant, which recently closed. The complex also includes 80 condominiums, but all the commercial space is now vacant.
The city had set a $ 6.5 million minimum bid for the space, although the appraised value is $ 11 million. San Francisco has a legal obligation to recoup some of the money it spent on the $ 80 million Heritage Center project, 35 percent of which was financed with public funds. The city also has a $ 5.5 million loan with the federal government that is due in 2027 but can be prepaid this year. In addition, the land was donated to the developer by the city’s former redevelopment agency.
Two proposals were serious enough that the committee asked for more details. Both involved variations on a market hall and food business incubator, along with entertainment. But the committee rejected one proposal, and financing for the second fell through.
Several other proposals were weak enough that the selection panel didn’t seek additional information from the sponsors.
The Rev. Amos Brown, the pastor at Third Baptist Church on McAllister Street who headed the selection committee, said none of the groups proposing to buy the space offered enough in the way of opportunities and benefits to Fillmore residents.
“They did not fulfill the vision that the city has established,” Brown said. “We are committed to doing the right, fair and just thing, and that is to provide benefits for a community that has been underserved and gravely disappointed by decades of public policy in the city.” The nine- member committee, chosen by the city, included five community members and representatives from city agencies.
The request for proposals came a decade after the Fillmore Heritage Center opened with the hope of rekindling at least a bit of the African American cultural spark that made the Fillmore the Harlem of the West in the 1940s and 1950s. The area, famous for jazz clubs such as Jimbo’s Bop City, lost most of its Victorian homes — many owned by African American families — when Geary Boulevard was widened into an expressway and new housing blocks were built to replace the old Victorians, which the city considered derelict at the time.
Board of Supervisors President London Breed, who grew up in the Western Addition, said proposals for the Yoshi’s space were underwhelming and several groups that had expressed interest didn’t follow through.
Breed said she would like to be able to hand the complex over to a communitybased nonprofit, but that would not be legal under state laws governing disposal of sites once owned by redevelopment agencies, which ceased to exist when Gov. Jerry Brown eliminated them statewide several years ago in a budget compromise.
“It’s frustrating, but it’s not like we can sell it for a dollar or give it away and have the city subsidize it,” Breed said. “It’s not possible and would also be irresponsible.”
Fillmore residents have made it clear they want African American ownership, arts and culture uses, jobs for local residents and public access to the space at a reasonable cost, she said.
Even as the city was informing bidders Thursday that their proposals were not acceptable, the nonprofit New Community Leadership Foundation held a rally announcing it is creating an oversight board to “monitor the sale of the property and protect the rights of the stakeholders whom the Fillmore Heritage Center was intended to serve.”
“Let us have the say- so on where the money goes this time, let us say who owns the building and what they can do with it this time,” said Daniel Landry, a longtime resident of the Fillmore’s Martin Luther King-Marcus Garvey Co- op. The group has no legal standing in the disposition of the center or its commercial spaces.
The Rev. Erris Edgerly of the Fillmore community group Brothers for Change said the fact that Yoshi’s, an Oakland jazz venue, was so heavily subsidized by the former redevelopment agency and then shuttered the business anyway left a bad impression among Fillmore residents.
“Yoshi’s was supposed to bring back what was the Fillmore,” Edgerly said. “The city allows you to come in, get millions of dollars, and just walk away with no accountability.”
The Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development will spend the next few months deciding whether to issue a new request for proposals or take some other approach to selling the space.