Chamber backs coffee shop, co-working space
The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is putting its money where its mouth is.
Two years after successfully advocating for the city to relax zoning in order to allow office uses for downtown ground floor spaces, the chamber is part of a group taking advantage of the more permissive codes to open a 3,500square-foot storefront at 220 Montgomery St.
The new space will include a Red Bay Coffee shop, co-working space and the headquarters for Yes SF, a business coalition dedicated to revitalizing the city’s downtown while also working to “make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.”
“I think we want to lead by example, whenever we can,” said chamber President and CEO Rodney Fong.
The space is being designed by Gensler, which has its corporate headquarters above the coffee shop in the 220 Montgomery St. building. The chamber is across the street in the Russ Building at 235 Montgomery. In addition to the chamber, Yes SF was formed by Salesforce, Citi, Deloitte, the World Economic Forum and other companies.
Gensler Managing Principal Scott Dunlap, who sits on the chamber’s board of directors, said the location was a natural one. The space was previously occupied by the Italian coffee chain Illy, which closed a year ago.
“There is a lot of foot traffic so the location was prime in terms of the buzz it can generate on a busy street corner,” Dunlap said.
The building, owned by the Swig Co., is the first to take advantage of Mayor London Breed’s downtown recovery legislation, which passed last June. The legislation made it so that a conditional use authorization, or CU, is no longer required to have ground floor office space in downtown neighborhoods. It typically takes six months to a year to apply for and receive a CU.
The legislation, cosponsored by Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, also waived regulatory barriers for officeto-housing conversions and expanded allowable areas for life sciences, light manufacturing, food and beverage processing and formula retail. It also allowed for a wide variety of uses on upper floors in the Union Square area, which had previously only allowed for large single-tenant retail tenants.
Breed said she was “glad to see the chamber putting these reforms to great use already, and I hope more will follow to bring more energy to downtown.”
“The future of downtown
isn’t going to look the same as it did before the pandemic,” she said.
Dunlap said Red Bay would be able to reuse much of the Illy build-out, while a glass wall would separate the coffee shop from the co-working area and Yes SF space. “We are using the very good and solid bones that are there,” he said.
The Yes SF graphics — International Orange, like
the Golden Gate Bridge — would be visible to all who walk by, Dunlap said.
“From the street, even if you are not going inside to get a coffee, you will be able to see there is something going on about the revitalization of San Francisco,” he said.
Fong said the idea of the group taking over a storefront dates back to before the pandemic, but it became more pressing as San Francisco has struggled to bring shoppers, workers and tourists back to downtown.
“It set a pilot example of what we imagine the downtown will be in the future, which is vastly different from what it is now,” Fong said.
Dunlap added, “If we can take former uses and tweak and invent, that is what is going to drive the recovery. We are doing it at a micro scale. Imagine if it were to be multiplied at a city scale. That’s the kind of thinking the city needs right now.”