Mid-Market, San Francisco

The Mid-Market redevelopment area is centered on Market Street starting at Fifth Street, ending at Van Ness, and including a number of buildings down to Mission Street.[3] It effectively creates a sub-neighborhood of the Tenderloin, SoMa, and Civic Center neighborhoods for the purpose of redeveloping the area.[4]

Decimated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, the entire neighborhood was quickly rebuilt and for decades served as vibrant portion of the Market Street corridor.

Noted columnist Herb Caen referred to the neighborhood as 'le grand pissoir' because of the amount of public urination, defecation, and vagrancy due to a consolidation and expansion of homeless social services in the area, starting in the mid-1980s.[5]

Past initiatives such as sponsored street murals have had little effect in revitalizing the neighborhood and in 2011 the city government turned to tax incentives to encourage businesses to move to the area.[6][7]

The largest and most noteworthy of businesses to date has been Twitter, which moved into the old SF Furniture Mart building at Ninth and Market streets in 2012.[8] The move by Twitter was initially met with a great deal of controversy,[9] while other businesses such as Zendesk quietly took advantage of the tax break and moved to the area.[10] A number of arts groups, such as the Black Rock Arts Foundation, are working to move to Mid-Market.[11] In October 2013, Square moved its headquarters to the mid-Market area, followed by Uber and Dolby.[12]

Equally transformative, and often attributed to the new density of tech headquarters in Mid-Market, has been the concurrent increase of residential buildings, most notably high-rise apartments and condominium towers.