• KPMG is set to move out of its $400 million namesake building as the city’s ‘doom loop’ continues to batter its downtown region
• It comes as shoe store Alto also prepares to exit San Francisco Centre, the city’s biggest mall, next week
• Nearly 100 retailers in downtown San Francisco have closed since the start of the pandemic, a decline of more than 50 percent, according to a recent report 

Accounting firm KPMG is set to move out of its $400 million namesake building, another high-profile exit from San Francisco’s beleaguered downtown.

The consulting and accounting giant first leased space in the 25-story office tower when the building opened in 2002.  Its name hangs above the entry to the skyscraper where the company currently occupies more than 100,000 square feet. 

It comes as shoe store Alto prepares to exit San Francisco Centre, the city’s biggest mall, next week.

Businesses and residents have fled downtown San Francisco since the pandemic with groups blaming crime, homelessness and work-from-home keeping people from downtown. 

Nearly 100 retailers in downtown San Francisco have closed since the start of the pandemic, a decline of more than 50 percent, according to a recent report. 

KPMG is set to move out of its $400 million namesake building after two decades in downtown San Francisco Nordstrom have recently moved out of the city’s downtown contributing to a loss of footfall

KMPG, a large accounting and financial firm, originally took 90,000 square feet at 55 Second St. in a 10-year contract, marking the second-largest office deal of 2003.

It has since grown its footprint to span nearly one-third of the 380,000-square-foot building, leading to it being widely known as ‘The KPMG Building’.

The company is now considering ending its two-decade-long relationship with the building, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s the latest tenant looking to exit the downtown area. 

Now, another business is set to leave the area’s largest shopping center as Aldo moves its store from the San Francisco Centre. The mall lost Adidas last Saturday, as well as other recent losses including Hollister, Lego and J. Crew. 

The mall lost $910 million between 2016 and 2023, with half the rental space now empty, according to an appraisal published last month.

Its owners lost control of the 5-million-square-foot retail and office complex to lenders last year. 

The high-profile closures and exits suggest San Francisco’s ‘doom loop’ is far from over. A doom loop is where a city loses its tax base and can’t afford improvements needed to fix the situation to bring new businesses and residents back to an area. 

The city’s downtown has suffered from the proliferation of homeless encampments, open-air drugs markets and rampant theft. 

Hordes of brand names, including the likes of Whole Food and Nordstrom, that have recently moved out contributing to a loss of footfall that then drives out other businesses.

The city has also struggled for years with rampant fentanyl use and fatal overdoses. 

Nearly 100 retailers in downtown San Francisco have closed since the start of the COVID pandemic, a decline of more than 50 percent, according to a recent report The city’s downtown has suffered from the proliferation of homeless encampments, open-air drugs markets and rampant theft The city has also struggled for years with rampant fentanyl use and fatal overdoses

In the first five months of 2023, preliminary reports show there were 346 overdose deaths in the city – an increase of more than 40 percent from the same period in 2022.

Economists have warned the city is spiraling into an ‘urban doom loop’ – a vicious circle of interconnected trends and forces that send cities into economic and social ruin.

High theft has proved a problem in the area recently, with a Walgreens in the city center resolving to chaining their freezers to stop shoplifters.

Retail stalwart Old Navy announced they would be shuttering their flagship store in the area last month.

Anthropologie and Office Depot have also made the same decisions.

These stores joined the growing list of stores that have abandoned the coastal city, including H&M, Marshall’s, Gap and Banana Republic.

A disturbing recent report showed 95 retailers in downtown San Francisco have closed since the start of the COVID pandemic, a decline of more than 50 percent.

Out of 203 retailers open in 2019 in the city’s Union Square area, just 107 are still operating, a drop of 47 percent in just a few pandemic-ravaged years.

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The traditional Iñupiaq village of Teller sits on a long spit of land separating two bodies of water off Western Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. The bay of Port Clarence is west toward the Bering Sea, and Grantley Harbor is inland to the east. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

SEWARD PENINSULA, ALASKA — Ducks and swans flew overhead as Sylvester Ayek, 82, and his daughter Kimberly, 35, hauled rocks to anchor their small salmon net on the bank of a deep, tidal channel — 25 miles inland from the open Bering Sea coast. 

Nearby on that July day, Mary Jane Litchard, Ayek’s partner, picked wild celery and set out a lunch of past subsistence harvests: a blue-shelled seabird egg, dried beluga whale meat and red salmon dipped in seal oil.

Then, as they waited for fish to fill the net, the family motored Ayek’s skiff up the channel, known as the Tuksuk, spotting birds and seals and passing family fish camps where drying salmon hung on racks. Soon, the steep channel walls gave way to a huge, saltwater lake: the Imuruk Basin, flanked by the snow-dotted peaks of the Kigluaik Mountains. 

Ayek describes the basin as a “traditional hunting and gathering place” for the local Iñupiat, who have long sustained themselves on the area’s bounty of fish, berries and wildlife.

Sylvester Ayek, an Iñupiaq hunter, fisherman and sculptor, prepares to set his salmon net off the bank of the Tuksuk Channel on the Seward Peninsula. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

On a day trip fishing in the Tuksuk Channel, Mary Jane Litchard, 72, holds up a part of her family’s lunch: a hard-boiled murre egg. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

But despite a long Indigenous history, and a brief settler boom during the Gold Rush more than a century ago, a couple of weather-beaten cabins were the only obvious signs of human impact as Ayek’s boat idled — save for a set of tiny, beige specks at the foot of the mountains.

Those specks were a camp run by a Canadian exploration company, Graphite One. And they marked the prospective site of a mile-wide open pit mine that could reach deep below the tundra — into the largest known deposit of graphite in the U.S.

The mine could help power America’s electric vehicle revolution, and it’s drawing enthusiastic support from powerful government officials in both Alaska and Washington, D.C. That includes the Biden administration, which recently announced up to $37.5 million in subsidies for Graphite One through the U.S. Department of Defense. 

So far, the announcements from the project’s politically connected boosters have received far more attention than the several hundred Alaskans whose lives would be affected directly by Graphite One’s mine. 

While opinions in the nearby Alaska Native villages of Brevig Mission and Teller are mixed, there are significant pockets of opposition, particularly among the area’s tribal leaders. Many residents worry the project will harm the subsistence harvests that make life possible in a place where the nearest well-stocked grocery store is a two-hour drive away, in Nome.

Kimberly Ayek picks a salmon from her family’s net in the shallows of the Tuksuk Channel. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

“The further they go with the mine, our subsistence will just move further and further away from us,” Gilbert Tocktoo, president of Brevig Mission’s tribal government, said over a dinner of boiled salmon at his home. “And sooner or later, it’s going to become a question of: Do I want to live here anymore?”

Despite those concerns, Graphite One is gathering local support: Earlier this month, the board of the region’s Indigenous-owned, for-profit corporation unanimously endorsed the project. 

The Nome-based corporation, Bering Straits Native Corp., also agreed to invest $2 million in Graphite One, in return for commitments related to jobs and scholarships for shareholders.

The tensions surrounding Graphite One’s project underscore how the rush to bolster domestic manufacturing of electric vehicles threatens a new round of disruption to tribal communities and landscapes that have already borne huge costs from past mining booms.

Sylvester Ayek points toward the Kigluaik Mountains and the site of the Graphite One exploration project as his skiff bobs in the Imuruk Basin. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

Sylvester Ayek and his daughter Kimberly set their gillnet in the Tuksuk Channel. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

Across the American West, companies are vying to extract the minerals needed to power electric vehicles and other green technologies. Proposed mines for lithium, antimony and copper are chasing some of the same generous federal tax credits as Graphite One — and some are advancing in spite of objections from Indigenous people who have already seen their lands taken and resources diminished over more than a century of mining.

The Seward Peninsula’s history is a case in point: Thousands of non-Native prospectors came here during the Gold Rush, which began in 1898. The era brought devastating bouts of pandemic disease and displacement for the Iñupiat, and today, that history weighs on some as they consider how Graphite One could affect their lives. 

“A lot of people like to say that our culture is lost. But we didn’t just go out there and lose it: It was taken from us,” said Taluvaaq Qiñuġana, a 24-year-old Iñupiaq resident of Brevig Mission. A new mining project in her people’s traditional harvesting grounds, she said, “feels like continuous colonization.”

Taluvaaq Qiñuġana, pictured in her home village of Brevig Mission, is opposed to Graphite One’s proposed mining project. The open pit mine would be built in the area of her family’s traditional harvesting grounds. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

But other Indigenous residents of Brevig Mission and Teller say the villages would benefit from well-paying jobs that could come with the mine. Cash income could help people sustain their households in the two communities, where full-time work is otherwise scarce. 

Graphite One executives say one of their highest priorities, as they advance their project toward permitting and construction, is protecting village residents’ harvests of fish, wildlife and berries. They say they fully appreciate the essential nature of that food supply.

“This is very real to them,” said Mike Schaffner, Graphite One’s senior vice president of mining. “We completely understand that we can’t come in there and hurt the subsistence, and we can’t hurt how their lifestyle is.”

The Iñupiaq residents of the village of Brevig Mission depend on local harvests of fish, wildlife and berries. Some fear a planned graphite mine nearby could interfere with their way of life. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

U.S. produces no domestic graphite

Graphite is simply carbon — like a diamond but far softer, because of its different crystal structure. Graphite is used as a lubricant, in industrial steelmaking, for brake linings in automobiles and as pencil lead.

It’s also a key component of the high-powered lithium batteries that propel electric cars. 

Once mined and concentrated, graphite is processed into a powder that’s mixed with a binder, then rolled flat and curled into the hundreds of AA-battery-sized cylinders that make up the battery pack.

America hasn’t mined any graphite in decades, having been undercut by countries where it’s extracted at a lower cost.

China currently produces more than half of the world’s mined graphite and nearly all of the highly processed type needed for batteries. The country so dominates the supply chain that global prices typically rise each winter when cold temperatures force a single region, Heilongjiang, to shut down production, said Tony Alderson, an analyst at a price tracking firm called Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

Some forecasts say graphite demand, driven by growth in electric vehicles, could rise 25-fold by 2040. Amid growing U.S.-China political tensions, supply chain experts have warned about the need to diversify America’s sources of graphite. 

Last year’s climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act, written in part to wrest control of electric vehicle manufacturing from China, is accelerating that search.

For new electric cars to qualify for a $3,750 tax credit under the act, at least 40% of the value of the “critical minerals” that go into their batteries must be extracted or processed domestically, or in countries such as Canada or Mexico that have free-trade agreements with the United States. 

That fraction rises to 80% in four years.

Graphite One is one of just three companies currently advancing graphite mining projects in the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. And company officials are already marketing their graphite to global electric vehicle makers.

But when they presented their preliminary plans to Tesla, “they said, ‘That’s great, we are interested in buying them, but we would need to write 40 contracts of this size to meet our need,’” Schaffner, the Graphite One vice president, said at a community meeting this year, according to the Nome Nugget. 

In response, Graphite One is now studying a mine that could be substantially larger than its original proposal.

The Tuksuk Channel, which reaches inland to the Imuruk Basin and its surrounding tundra, is a vital area for harvests by residents of the nearby Iñupiaq villages of Brevig Mission and Teller. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

It’s too early to know how, exactly, the mine’s construction could affect the surrounding watershed. One reason is that the level of risk it poses is linked to its size, and Graphite One has not yet determined how big its project will be.

While graphite itself is nontoxic and inert, the company also hasn’t finished studying the acid-generating potential of the rock that its mine could expose — another key indicator of the project’s level of risk. Stronger acid is more likely to release toxic metals into water that Graphite One would have to contain and treat before releasing back into the environment.

One fish biologist in the region has also said he fears the mine’s construction could negatively affect streams flowing out of the Kigluaik Mountains, though Graphite One officials disagree. The streams’ cool water, according to Charlie Lean, keeps temperatures in the shallow Imuruk Basin low enough to sustain spawning salmon — a critical source of abundant, healthy food for Brevig Mission and Teller residents.

Graphite One plans to store its waste rock and depleted ore in what’s known as a “dry stack,” on top of the ground — rather than in a pond behind a dam, a common industry practice that can risk a major breach if the dam fails. 

But experts say smaller-scale spills or leaks from the mine could still drain into the basin and harm fish and wildlife.

“There is always a possibility for some sort of catastrophic failure. But that doesn’t happen very often,” said Dave Chambers, president of the nonprofit Center for Science in Public Participation, which advises advocacy and tribal groups across the country on mining and water quality. “There’s also a possibility there will be no impact. That doesn’t happen very often, either.”

Freshly cut salmon dries on racks in Teller, a traditional Iñupiaq village on Western Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. Salmon are an essential food source for Teller residents, who otherwise must drive 70 miles on a gravel road to reach affordably priced groceries. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

Alfred Kakoona, 45, cuts up his morning’s catch of fresh salmon, a staple food for the Indigenous peoples of the Seward Peninsula, on the beach at Brevig Mission. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

A way of life at stake 

There are no Teslas in Brevig Mission or Teller, the two Alaska Native villages closest to the proposed mine. 

To get to the communities from the nearest American Tesla dealership, you’d first board a jet in Seattle. Then, you’d fly 1,400 miles to Anchorage, where you’d climb on to another jet and fly 500 more miles northwest to Nome, the former Gold Rush town known as the finish line of the Iditarod sled dog race.

A 70-mile gravel road winds northwest through tundra and mountains before dipping back down to a narrow spit on the Bering Sea coast. The road ends in Teller, population 235, where most residents lack in-home plumbing — let alone own electric cars.

If you need a bathroom here, you’ll use what’s known as a honey bucket.

Brevig Mission, population 435, is even more remote than Teller. It sits across a narrow strait and is accessible only by boat or plane.

(Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

The region’s Indigenous history is memorialized in the 1973 book “People of Kauwerak,” written by local elder William Oquilluk. It documents the founding of Kauwerak, an Iñupiaq village by a sandbar near the Imuruk Basin’s innermost reaches.

The area was chosen, according to the book, for the same reasons it’s treasured now: abundant fish and birds, berries and moose, even beluga whales. Kauwerak became one of the Seward Peninsula’s largest villages before it was abandoned in the 19th century, as residents left for jobs and schools.

Whalers, then gold miners, brought profound changes to the Indigenous way of life on the Seward Peninsula, especially through the introduction of pandemic diseases. One outbreak of measles and flu, in 1900, is thought to have killed up to one-third of residents in one of the region’s villages. In Brevig Mission, 72 of 80 Native residents died from the 1918 Spanish flu.

Today, the miners and whalers are gone. In Teller, the population of 250 is 99% Alaska Native. 

Four in 10 residents there live below the poverty level, and a typical household, with an average of three people, survives on just $32,000 a year, according to census data.

At the community’s main store, the shelves are completely barren of fresh fruits and vegetables. A box of Corn Chex costs $9.55, and a bottle of Coffee-Mate runs $11.85 — more than twice the Anchorage price. 

Residents can buy cheaper groceries in Nome. But gas for the 70-mile drive costs $6.30 a gallon, down from $7 in July.

The main store in Teller lacks fresh produce and charges steep prices for groceries, making hunting and fishing essential for the village’s Iñupiaq residents. (Nathaniel Herz/Northern Journal)

The high cost of goods combined with the few available jobs helps explain why some Teller and Brevig Mission residents are open to Graphite One’s planned mine, and the cash income it could generate. 

As Ayek, the 82-year-old subsistence fisherman, pulled his skiff back into Teller with a cooler of fish, another man was slicing fresh sides of salmon a little ways down the beach.

Nick Topkok, 56, has worked as a contractor for Graphite One, taking workers out in his boat. As he hung his fish to dry on a wood rack, he said few people in the area can find steady jobs.

“The rest are living off welfare,” Topkok said. The mine, he said, would generate money for decades, and it also might help get the village water and sewer systems.

“I’ll be dead by then, but it’ll impact my kids, financially,” he said. “If it’s good and clean, so be it.”

Topkok also acknowledged, however, that a catastrophic accident would “impact us all.”

Many village residents’ summer fishing camps sit along the Tuksuk Channel, below the mine site. Harvests from the basin and its surroundings feed families in Brevig Mission and Teller year-round.

“It’s my freezer,” said Dolly Kugzruk, president of Teller’s tribal government and an opponent of the mine.

Researchers have found all five species of Pacific salmon in and around the Imuruk Basin. Harvests in the area have hit 20,000 fish in some years — roughly 30 per fishing family, according to state data.

At a legislative hearing several years ago on a proposal to support Graphite One’s project, one Teller resident, Tanya Ablowaluk, neatly summed up opponents’ fears: “Will the state keep our freezers full in the event of a spill?”

Some 30 miles outside Nome, supplies for Graphite One’s remote mining exploration camp wait at a staging area the company uses for its helicopters. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

Gold Rush prospector’s descendants would reap royalties

Elsewhere in rural Alaska, Indigenous people have consented to resource extraction on their ancestral lands on the basis of compromise: They accept environmental risks in exchange for a direct stake in the profits.

Two hundred miles north of the Imuruk Basin, zinc and lead unearthed at Red Dog Mine have generated more than $1 billion in royalties for local Native residents and their descendants, including $172 million last year. On the North Slope, the regional Iñupiat-owned corporation receives oil worth tens of millions of dollars a year from developments on its traditional land.

The new Manh Choh mine in Alaska’s Interior will also pay royalties to Native landowners, as would the proposed Donlin mine in Southwest Alaska.

No such royalties would go to the Iñupiaq residents of Brevig Mission and Teller, based on the way Graphite One’s project is currently structured.

The proposed mine sits exclusively on state land. And Graphite One would pay royalties to the descendants of a Gold Rush-era prospector — a legacy of the not-so-distant American past when white settlers could freely claim land and resources that had been used for thousands of years by Indigenous people.

Nicholas Tweet was a 23-year-old fortune seeker when he left Minnesota for Alaska in the late 1800s. His quest for gold, over several years, took him hiking over mountain ranges, floating down the Yukon River by steamboat, walking hundreds miles across beaches and, finally, rowing more than 100 miles from Nome in a boat he built himself.

Tweet settled in Teller with his family, initially prospecting for gold. 

As graphite demand spiked during World War I, Tweet staked claims along the Kigluaik Mountains, and he worked with a company that shipped the mineral to San Francisco until the war ended and demand dried up. 

Today, Tweet’s descendants are still in the mining business on the Seward Peninsula. And they still controlled graphite claims in the area a little more than a decade ago. That’s when a Vancouver entrepreneur, Anthony Huston, was drawn into the global graphite trade through his interest in Tesla and his own graphite-based golf clubs. 

News of a possible deal with Huston’s company arrived at one of the Tweets’ remote mining operations via a note dropped by a bush plane. They reached an agreement after months of discussions — sometimes, according to Huston, with 16 relatives in the room.

So far, the Tweet family, whose members did not respond to requests for comment, has received $370,000 in lease fees. If the project is built, the family would receive additional payments tied to the value of graphite mined by Graphite One, and members could ultimately collect millions of dollars.

Bering Straits Native Corp., owned by more than 8,000 Indigenous shareholders with ties to the region, recently acquired a stake Graphite One’s project — but only by buying its way in. 

The company announced its $2 million investment this month. The deal includes commitments by Graphite One to support scholarships, hire Bering Straits’ shareholders and give opportunities to the Native-owned corporation’s subsidiary companies, according to Dan Graham, Bering Straits’ interim chief executive. He declined to release details, saying they have not yet been finalized.

As it considered the investment, Bering Straits board members held meetings with Brevig Mission and Teller residents, where they heard “a lot of concerns,” Graham said. Those concerns “were very well thought through at the board level” before the corporation offered its support for the project, he added.

“Graphite One is very committed to employing local workers from those villages, to being as transparent as possible on what the development is,” Graham said.

Graphite One officials say they have work to do to ensure the region’s residents are trained for mining jobs in time for the start of construction. The company had a maximum of 71 people working at its camp this summer, but Graphite One and its contractors hired just eight people from Teller and Brevig Mission. Sixteen more were from Nome and other villages in the region, according to Graphite One.

Company officials say they have no choice but to develop a local workforce. Because of graphite’s relatively low value in raw form, compared to gold or copper, they say the company can’t afford to fly workers in from outside the region.

Graphite One says it’s also taking direction from members of a committee of local residents it’s appointed to provide advice on environmental issues. In response to the committee’s feedback, the company chose not to barge its fuel through the Imuruk Basin earlier this year; instead, it flew it in, at an added cost of $4 a gallon.

Since Graphite One acquired the Tweets’ graphite claims, progress on the development has been slow. But now, escalating tensions with China and the national push to Americanize the electric vehicle supply chain are putting Huston’s project on the political fast track.

In Nome, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski walks away from a helicopter that flew her to the Graphite One project, a mining exploration camp that the Canadian company is developing to build an open pit graphite mine. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, stands in the Nome airport, holding a bag with chunks of graphite she received at Graphite One’s exploration project. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

‘We don’t have a choice’

In July, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski boarded a helicopter in Nome and flew to Graphite One’s remote exploration camp overlooking the Imuruk Basin.

A few days later, the Alaska Republican stood on the Senate floor and brandished what she described as a hunk of graphite from an “absolutely massive,” world-class deposit.

“After my site visit there on Saturday, I’m convinced that this is a project that every one of us — those of us here in the Congress, the Biden administration — all of us need to support,” she said. “This project will give us a significant domestic supply, breaking our wholesale dependence on imports.”

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, and GOP Gov. Mike Dunleavy have all expressed support for the project.

Graphite One has enlisted consultants and lobbyists to advance its interests, according to disclosure filings and emails obtained through public records requests.

They include Clark Penney, an Anchorage-based consultant and financial advisor with ties to the Dunleavy administration, and Nate Adams, a former employee of Murkowski and Sullivan who’s worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

Murkowski has said the mine will reduce dependence on foreign countries that lack America’s environmental and human rights safeguards.

“Security of supply would be assured from day one, and the standards for the mine’s development and operation would be both exceedingly high and fully transparent,” Murkowski wrote in a letter to the Biden administration in 2022.

The Defense Department, meanwhile, announced its grant of up to $37.5 million for Graphite One in July. This month, the company also announced it had received a $4.7 million Defense Department contract to develop a graphite-based firefighting foam. 

In a statement, a department spokesman said the July agreement “aims to strengthen the domestic industrial base to make a secure, U.S.-based supply of graphite available for both Department of Defense and consumer markets.”

In Teller and Brevig Mission, Graphite One’s opponents have noticed how the electrical vehicle transition seems to be driving interest in the mine planned for nearby. 

Gilbert Tocktoo is the president of the tribal government in Brevig Mission. In an interview at his home, he said he opposes the large graphite mine planned on state land near the Imuruk Basin. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

As the project gathers outside political support, some village residents said that local attitudes have been shifting, too, in response to the company’s offers of jobs and perks. 

Tocktoo, the chief of Brevig Mission’s tribal council, said resistance in his community has diminished as Graphite One “tries to buy their way in.”

The company awards door prizes at meetings and distributes free turkeys, he said. Two years ago, the company gave each household in Brevig Mission and Teller a $50 credit on their electrical bills.

The project, though, remains years away from construction, with production starting no earlier than 2029.

Before it can be built, Graphite One will have to obtain an array of permits, including a major authorization under the federal Clean Water Act that will allow it to do construction around wetlands.

And the project also faces geopolitical and economic uncertainties. 

At least last year, Graphite One was tight on cash. It had to slightly shorten its summer exploration season because it didn’t have the money to finish it, company officials said at a public meeting this year. 

And while Graphite One is counting on a partnership with a Chinese business to help set up its graphite processing and manufacturing infrastructure, the partner company’s top executive has said publicly that U.S.-China political tensions may thwart the transfer of necessary technologies.

Murkowski, in an interview at the Nome airport on her way home from her visit to Graphite One’s camp, stressed that the project is still in its very early stages. 

The permitting process and the substantial environmental reviews that will accompany it, she added, will give concerned residents a chance to pose questions and raise objections.

“There’s no process right now for the public to weigh in. And it’s all so preliminary,” she said. “When you don’t know, the default position is, ‘I don’t think this should happen.’”

Lucy Oquilluk is president of the tribal government of the Iñupiaq village of Mary’s Igloo. Though the Mary’s Igloo village site near the Imuruk Basin is now abandoned, the area is still an important place for tribal members to fish, hunt and gather food. Many of them live in the nearby community of Teller and maintain their own tribal government. (Berett Wilber for Northern Journal)

But opponents of the project in Brevig Mission and Teller say they fear their objections won’t be heard. Lucy Oquilluk, head of a Teller-based tribal government, said she feels a sense of inevitability.

“It just feels like we have nothing to say about it. We don’t have a choice,” Oquilluk said. “They’re going to do it anyways, no matter what we say.”

This story was produced by Northern Journal, APM Reports and Alaska Public Media as part of the Public Media Accountability Initiative, which supports investigative reporting at local media outlets around the country.

Nathaniel Herz is an Anchorage-based journalist. He’s been a reporter in Alaska for a decade, and is currently reporting for Alaska Public Media. Find more of his work by subscribing to his newsletter, Northern Journal, at natherz.substack.com. Reach him at natherz@gmail.com.

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You can see it walking down Central Market Street at dusk: One by one the windows of the new residential buildings are starting to light up.

Despite empty office buildings and rows of shuttered retail — and open air drug dealing that has become so bad that in December the city declared a state of emergency — residents are moving into the long-troubled heart of San Francisco’s main street.

At Prism, a 193-unit complex at 1028 Market St., 36 units have leased since it opened about six weeks ago. Next door, the 301-unit 50 Jones St., which debuted during the darkest days of the pandemic, is now about 85% leased. A block to the east, the traffic of potential buyers to the Serif condos at 950 Market St. has doubled since February as COVID cases started to drop. About 50 condos out of 242 have sold there.

“We are seeing a lot of people who are moving to San Francisco for the first time, whose companies are requiring them to come back to the office soon,” said Olympic Residential Group Director Adam Tetenbaum, who oversaw development of Prism.

For years the injection of thousands of several of housing units along Central Market Street was seen as the missing element of a revitalization that took off a dozen years ago as tech companies like Dolby, ZenDesk, Twitter, Square and Uber took over vacant or under-utilized buildings. Tens of thousands of workers shifted much of downtown San Francisco’s entrepreneurial verve north from SoMa and west from the financial district. That brought retail, restaurants and a burgeoning arts scene.

But while about 2,000 new housing units opened in the west end of Central Market Street — these included 100 Van Ness, Trinity Place and Nema — proposed Market Street developments between Mason and Jones street moved much more slowly through the approval process. The result is that signature housing projects at 50 Jones, 1028 Market and 950 Market missed the Mid-Market tech boom, instead opening at a time when the pandemic had left office buildings deserted, foot traffic sparse and storefronts boarded up.

“So much closed down on Market Street during the pandemic,” said Simon Bertrang, executive director of the Tenderloin Community Benefit District. “It’s not a very active place right now.”

Developers Dan Diebel (left) and Adam Tentenbaum at Prism on Market Street in San Francisco. The building with 193 housing units and a green space rooftop opened in January.

Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle

Businesses that shut down included Popson’s Burgers, Equinox Coffee, Warm Planet Bikes, Huckleberry Bikes, Homeskillet and World of Stereo.

For the developers of 1028 Market St., a joint venture of Olympic Residential Group and Tidewater Capital, the hope is that the expected return of office workers will combine with new investment to jump start the stalled Mid-Market story. And already there are glitters of home. Ikea started construction on its $260 million mall at 945 Market St. A new Line Hotel will open this summer alongside the Serif condos at 950 Market. Next week the city’s largest Whole Foods will open at 8th and Market, part of the 1,900-unit Trinity Place project.

And even some of the shuttered restaurants are finding new life: the former Homeskillet at 1001 Market is now Gai Chicken & Rice while what was Popson’s Burgers at 988 Market St. will become Fayala, a French and Mediterranean restaurant.

Prism is aiming to attract younger, price-conscious workers. The building is offering eight weeks of free rent on a 13 month lease. Even without the incentive Prism’s units are competitively priced. The most affordable studios are renting for $2,275 a month, less than the city average of $2,423. One bedroom start around $3,300, about average for the city but less than other amenity-rich buildings similar to Prism — which has a large rooftop garden, gym and entertainment spaces.

William Deng, 22, landed at a Prism studio after moving to San Francisco from New York. A life science researcher, Deng recently landed a job at a biotech company in South San Francisco and wanted to be close to BART and Caltrain but also “close to the hustle and bustle of the city.”

He said he was attracted to Prism because it’s new construction. He said the staff in the building has been accommodating, organizing resident get-togethers and offering free tickets to Harry Potter and The Cursed Child at the nearby Curran Theater.

Deng is well aware of the street conditions in Mid-Market and the Tenderloin, but said it’s “not as bad” he imagined. He said he has already noticed more activity on Market Street in the weeks since he moved in. Foot traffic will only increase as offices open up this spring and summer, he said.

“We are surrounded by countless companies and apartments with people working from home,” he said. “Just imagine how different and safer the morning and evening commute will be with all those people on the street.”

Rather than seeing its lack of parking as a disadvantage, Prism uses it to attract a young, environmentally conscious worker like Deng, according to Tetenbaum.

“We gear it to people who want to bike and walk and use transit,” said Tetenbaum. “The bike lane and Muni and BART are out the front door.”

Overall, San Francisco’s rents rose 9% in the last year, after dropping about 25% during the first year of the pandemic, according to the brokerage CBRE. Occupancy is now about 95%. With some companies planning a March return to office — at least part time — buildings like Prism could benefit from new hires moving to San Francisco, said CBRE research director Colin Yasukochi.

“A lot of the tech companies have done very well during the pandemic,” said Yasukochi. “They have hired tens of thousands of people and a lot of those new hires have never seen their home office. And housing is still in short supply.”

The question is whether the new investment along Market Street will help improve the lives of the 30,000 Tenderloin residents to the north of Market Street who have long struggled with rampant drug dealing, violent crime and trash-strewn sidewalks and alleyways, according to Bertrang.

“If we can’t deliver clean and safe sidewalks … it will be a wasted opportunity,” he said.

The historic tenderloin “should be an attraction for people moving into the new buildings instead of something they are worried about,” Bertrang said. “If the city can address the basic issues of cleanliness and safety it’s going to support everyone. The intensity of the drug trade right now is really damaging.”

Tenderloin Housing Clinic Executive Director Randy Shaw said the contrast along Market Street is evident. On the one hand, buildings like Prism are delivering housing that was a decade in the making. On the other, it’s hard not to be discouraged about an area that was bustling five years ago and is now more depressed and hard hit by drug dealing than it was five or 10 years ago.

Even the land where Prism now sits was full of life from 2015 to 2017 when it was The Hall, a pop-up food court that featured jazz, bluegrass and afterschool art programs for Tenderloin kids.

“I’m trying to figure out how we get that scene back,” he said. “There are good things on the horizon but at the moment it’s tough out there.”

JK Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen

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Residents fled New York City and San Francisco following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, but cell phone data shows they didn’t go too far.

A new study shows that many of the residents who have moved from Manhattan and the City by the Bay have changed their address to the outskirts or neighboring suburbs, which are within a 100-mile radius.

Almost two in five – or 37 percent – of those who moved out of Manhattan settled in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island and Westchester.

According to a study by analyst Placer.ai, only 2 percent of Manhattan residents migrated to Miami-Dade County, Florida, while roughly the same percentage moved to Palm Beach County.

The study analyzed cell phone data from the 12 months leading up to January 2021.

The largest percentage – 14 percent – of former Manhattans withdrew to Suffolk County, where many are believed to have second homes in the Hamptons and nearby hamlets along the south coast of eastern Long Island.

A new study shows that many of Manhattan residents who have moved have changed their address to the outskirts or neighboring suburbs

Similar trends have been observed in San Francisco. According to the study, many who left the city stayed in the Bay Area. One in ten Franciscans moved across the bay to San Mateo County, while slightly fewer – 9.2 percent – moved to Alameda County

A U-Haul moving truck can be seen in this 2016 file photo up in San Francisco. New York and San Francisco were two of several major cities that experienced negative net migration between January 2020 and January 2021

Another 15 percent moved together to Nassau County, Queens, Brooklyn, and The Bronx.

Fairfield, Connecticut; Westchester County, New York; and Monmouth County, New Jersey, made up 7.4 percent of Manhattanites transplanted.

Similar trends have been observed in San Francisco.

According to the study, many who left the city stayed in the Bay Area. One in ten Franciscans moved across the bay to San Mateo County, while slightly fewer – 9.2 percent – moved to Alameda County.

The third most popular destination for those leaving San Francisco was Contra Costa County, home of Berkeley.

The study also found that New York, California, and Massachusetts were among the states that experienced the highest negative migration between January 2020 and January 2021. Meanwhile, low-population states like Montana, Idaho, Delaware, and Hawaii saw population growth over the same period

Around 6.3 percent of San Francisco residents moved south to Los Angeles, while 5.2 percent stayed a little closer to home and settled in Santa Clara County.

Overall, around 15 percent moved to various locations including Sacramento, Orange County, San Diego, Sonoma County, and Marin Counties.

“The clear finding is that even large communities with high rates of migration outside of the state have lost a large percentage of their residents to nearby inland and neighboring out-of-state counties,” concluded the authors of the Placer.ai study.

“While cities lose population in the short term, they don’t necessarily lose their center of gravity.

“This information can have a significant impact on local office and retail sales decisions.”

The study also found that New York, California, and Massachusetts were among the states that saw the highest negative migration between January 2020 and January 2021.

New York State had negative net migration of 1.8 percent, while California’s net negative migration was 1.1 percent.

Massachusetts net negative migration was 1.4 percent.

In cities, San Francisco had the largest negative net migration (2.4 percent), followed by Los Angeles (1.9 percent), Boston (1.7 percent), New York (1.2 percent) and Chicago (0.7 Percent).

In sparsely populated states such as Montana, Idaho, Delaware, and Hawaii, there was population growth over the same period.

Idaho’s population grew nearly 4 percent, while Montana saw positive net migration of 3.7 percent.

In cities, San Francisco had the largest negative net migration (2.4 percent), followed by Los Angeles (1.9 percent), Boston (1.7 percent), New York (1.2 percent) and Chicago (0.7 Percent).

The cities with the highest positive net migration in 2020 include Tampa (1.5 percent), Charleston (1.5 percent), Austin (1.3 percent), Phoenix (1.3 percent) and Las Vegas (0.8 Percent).

Despite the grim news, recent developments such as the introduction of a COVID-19 vaccine and falling infection rates offer hope.

In the past few days, New York City has shown signs that the coronavirus pandemic has been brought back to life a year later. Tourism slowly increased and more pedestrians frequented Times Square.

Although activity in the city is still well below pre-pandemic levels, tourism officials say visitor traffic is increasing in yet another sign of New York bouncing back.

The Times Square Alliance, a nonprofit group that oversees the area, told the Wall Street Journal last week that 115,000 people a day recently passed through the iconic area.

On March 12th, people gather in Times Square for a performance. Recently, around 115,000 people a day have been walking through the cult area, a 15% increase over the winter numbers

People wear face masks as they walk the Mall in Central Park amid the coronavirus pandemic in New York City on March 11, 2021

Mobility data from Apple shows that pedestrian activity in New York City is 35 percent below the pre-pandemic baseline

That’s a 15 percent increase over daily traffic in Times Square since September – but less than a third of the 365,000 daily visitors the tourist Mecca saw before the pandemic.

Hotel occupancy in the city hit 47 percent for the week ended March 13, according to STR, a data firm that tracks the hospitality industry. This is the highest weekly value since June last year.

That’s a 38 percent increase in January, but well below the city’s hotel occupancy rate of 87 percent for the same week in 2019.

Tourism is a major engine of the New York economy, and in 2019 the city had a record 66.6 million visitors, according to NYC & Company, the city’s tourism bureau.

Last year the number fell to 22.3 million, but the agency estimates it will climb to 36.4 million this year.

Mobility data from Apple shows that pedestrian activity in New York City is 35 percent below baseline before the pandemic, up from 80 percent below baseline a year ago.

The data shows that driving activity is roughly in line with baseline, while transit activity remains 48 percent below baseline.

Transit data from the MTA shows that NYC’s daily subway count is still more than 60 percent lower than last year as New Yorkers eschew public transportation in favor of other modes of transportation or working from home.

This is a caveat on Big Apple’s relief as New York State plans to end a two-week quarantine mandate for overseas visitors on April 1st.

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