There’s a tool in Adobe apps—Transform > Skew—that lets you pull one side of a shape or image off its original axis. It doesn’t distort everything, but the angles change just enough to shift your perspective. It still looks like what it is… but a little off. A little… not how it used to be.
That Photoshop effect came to mind tonight as I was leaving the Giants game at Oracle Park, driving past Adobe’s new-ish headquarters near Potrero. Just a couple of hours earlier, a friend and I were walking through SoMa/Yerba Buena/South Beach (it all blurs and runs together) around 5pm, grabbing a bite before first pitch, and I had one of those layered, déjà vu feelings. I’ve been down here plenty for real estate—open houses, showings, walkthroughs—but walking it on foot, aimlessly, and not just to get from A to B? That felt like a first in a long while.
Back in the day –
The last time I really knew this neighborhood was when Jonathan lived at One Rincon Hill. And honestly, I was probably a halftime resident at that point. I remember running errands with him, going to the little shops, the salons, grabbing groceries. The ground-floor retail was mostly full back then—cafés, wine bars, actual functioning businesses.
Some of the legacy spots are gone: the old McDonald’s, the San Francisco Tennis Club, the Flower Mart. Other closures—HD Buttercup, The Creamery—have lingered, their replacements never quite arriving. The plans for sleek buildings, ground-floor retail, an extension of the Financial District with a laid-back vibe. That plan didn’t fully survive the Pandemic.
Even now, many of the towers that went up are only partially full. Retail spaces remain empty. The energy here is… isn’t quite anticipation and it isn’t quite resignation but something in between like an anxious waiting.
Of course this is going to show up in real estate.
Today we closed on a two-level condo at The Palms, 555 4th Street—a development that once symbolized the neighborhood’s next chapter. My brokerage, Vanguard Properties, was instrumental in its development, design and marketing; it was a bit of Miami here in San Francisco. There are actually palm trees in the courtyard. There was supposed to be a round driveway but the city just allowed that. It was the first buzzworthy named building in the area and help kickstart the real estate boom here.
Like I was saying, we closed on a two level two bed two bath penthouse unit (The ones with gas stoves ) with two car parking and an independent storage room. This is crème de la crème. Our buyers were able to buy for just over $1 million. In its heyday around 2018 or even 2019, it might’ve sold for much more –$1.4million to $1.6 million pretty easily.
But The Palms got hit with the unlucky stick. In front, the MUNI underground extension tore up the street for years and now there is a MUNI stop there which goes towards Mission Bay and UCSF‘s dominion and up toward Chinatown. This unit’s side of the building – the north side – had spectacular skyline views up until about last year. This is when the new luxury High rent building – called The Quincy – rose from a giant hole on Bryant Street so that most of the all nine floors of The Palms’ north side now lack any view whatsoever other than the people across the way in their luxury rental building.
