The parent company of the formerly Australian shopping center brand Westfield announced a year ago that it wanted to divest itself of its US mall properties. And following the Nordstrom closure announcement, they are walking away from their Market Street mall in SF and surrendering it to the lender.

The Chronicle reported Monday that the Westfield Corporation and its partner, Brookfield Properties, have stopped making payments on a $558 million loan and are in the process of transferring ownership to an eventual receiver. While this could be a negotiating tactic with the lender — which one expert surmised could be the case with a similar public announcement by the owner of the Union Square Hilton and Parc 55 hotels — Westfield has already in recent years walked away from several of its US properties, including four malls in Florida.

And in April 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that Westfield parent company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield had near-term plans to back out of the US market altogether and focus solely on the EU. Chief Executive Jean-Marie Tritant told investors at the time that the plan was to sell off most of its US real estate by the end of 2023.

But, much like Nordstrom, the Hilton owner, and Whole Foods in recent months, the company points to downtown San Francisco’s specific problems and not the retail climate overall.

In a statement Monday, the company said, “For more than 20 years, Westfield has proudly and successfully operated San Francisco Centre, investing significantly over that time in the vitality of the property. Given the challenging operating conditions in downtown San Francisco, which have led to declines in sales, occupancy and foot traffic, we have made the difficult decision to begin the process to transfer management of the shopping center to our lender to allow them to appoint a receiver to operate the property going forward.”

The Chronicle notes that, according to Westfield, gross sales at the Market Street mall were down by a third in 2022 as compared to 2019. And after the departure of Nordstrom, the property will be just 55% leased — compared to the average for its malls, which is 93%.

The other anchor tenant in the mall, Bloomingdale’s, is reportedly tied in to a long-term lease that doesn’t expire until 2046. But, as the SF Business Times reported, two large tenants, the Century Cinema and H&M, both have leases expiring in the next six months.

Westfield opened the grand, fully rebuilt mall in 2006 along with then partner Forest City, and it was then called the largest mall on the West Coast — connecting the pre-existing, Nordstrom-anchored shopping center, open since 1989, to the historic Emporium building next door. The renovation project, which included the preservation of the Emporium’s grand glass dome on the fourth floor, began in 2003.

While the mall is in no immediate danger of closing, it has certainly seen better days in terms of foot traffic — and even on relatively busy weekends, many stores are far from crowded.

As SFist noted several weeks ago, this follows a larger, national trend in which large-scale retail in major cities is suffering generally, with more shoppers moving online or patronizing suburban shopping centers over urban downtowns. A new research paper from the JP Morgan Chase Institute found that Los Angeles, San Diego, New York City, Seattle, Miami, and Chicago all lost more retail stores than they gained between 2017 and 2021, as did San Francisco. And the pandemic was only one of multiple factors in that trend.

Related: Nordstrom to Shutter Downtown SF Department Store, and Nordstrom Rack, This Summer

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The post EU-Based mostly Westfield Says It Is Strolling Away From San Francisco Mall Property, as It Has A number of of Its US Malls appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Every once in a while a player comes along who redefines their position.

We’ve seen positionless defensive players, hybrid safety-linebacker types. We’ve seen corners who can play in the slot or happily kick out to the boundary. Over the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of the polar bears, tight ends as adept at mauling fools in the run-game as they are running down the field as their team’s finest receiver.

And yet, as a football collective, we’ve waited for the unicorn: The running back-wide receiver. There have been flashes. The spread revolution gave rise to tweener players, those who could align in the backfield as a running back or wriggle out to the slot (or wider) to catch passes. Getting the ball to your best athletes in space became the doctrine of offensive football.

In the college ranks, the likes of Tavon Austin and Percy Harvin embraced football’s move from a tough, between-the-tackles, thumping sport to one based on the principles of pace and space.

But in the NFL, coaches have always favored specialists over the hybrids. They didn’t need a receiver to line up at running back – they had a world-class running back to do that. They didn’t need a running back to flex out as the outermost receiver, they had all the elite receivers they could handle. These were professionals, masters of their craft; there was no time for split duty.

In Deebo Samuel, the unicorn has finally arrived. Samuel is the San Francisco 49ers’ best running back and the team’s best receiver. He may be the finest running back and the finest receiver in the league, at least in terms of efficiency and explosiveness. If he’s not, he’s as near as makes no difference.

There is a childlike glee to Samuel’s brilliance. To watch him is to see an athlete who is stronger and faster than the 21 other human beings on the field – and those 21 humans are among the strongest and fastest athletes on the planet. Samuel brings intricacy for the nerds and loud highlights for when you just want to see cool athletes doing the coolest things. With the ball in his hands, he’s a leaning, bobbing, weaving, stop-on-a-dime phantom.

The Niners offense now revolves around finding an ever-increasing number of ways to get the ball to Samuel, or leveraging his threat into easy yards for everyone else.

Smart teams have always sought crossover skillsets. During the heyday of the Bill Belichick-Tom Brady Patriots, the team would bring in a back whose receiving chops outdid their running skills. They would move that player around to identify mismatches. But that was the player’s value – as a moving chess piece that helped Brady identify coverages more than as an individual runner or receiver. Their flexibility was a big percentage of their overall value. It was about what they did without the ball as much as what they did with it.

With Samuel, it’s about how he damages defenses when the ball winds up in his hands, no matter his starting position.

So far this season, he has played 555 snaps split out as the outermost wide receiver, 222 in the slot, eight as an in-line ‘tight end’, and 93 as a running back. The trend of moving him around on a snap-to-snap basis is relatively new, though. As recently as Week 9, Samuel had played only seven snaps lined up in the backfield all season. Since then, he’s averaged nine snaps in the backfield per game (21% of his snaps). The past two games – the do or die game against the Rams in Week 18 and the playoff matchup with the Cowboys – represent the only times this season he’s taken more snaps as a running back than as a slot receiver, the position from which Kyle Shanahan typically initiates all the fun and games in his offense.

Of course, lining up in a bunch of spots in and of itself is no great skill. It doesn’t matter where you align, or in how many spots, if you stink at most or all of them. And that’s where Samuel breaks the convention: He’s the best at everything he does.

His output is jarring: 1,770 total yards, at an average of 13 yards per touch, with 14 touchdowns tackled for good measure. He’s a walking first down; a human touchdown.

If you’re into the fancier metrics you’ll know Samuel holds something of a monopoly over all of the league’s key categories, be it as a back or receiver. He led the NFL in the regular season in yards per reception. He’s averaging more than 10 yards after the catch per reception. To put that in context, no other receiver broke the seven-yard barrier during the regular season.

If that’s not enough, Samuel leads the league in yards per route run on targets of 20-yards or more down the field. That’s comfortably ahead of Ja’Marr Chase. It’s streaks ahead of Davante Adams, Stefon Diggs, and Tyreek Hill.

The numbers keep coming. Samuel finished second in the league in yards after contact per attempt. He finished second in the league in ‘breakaway’, which measures the percentage of a player’s rushing yards that come on runs of 15-yards or more. You have to go all the way down to [rubs fake glasses, squints a little] 60th on the list to find the next non-running back. There is not another wide receiver in the top 200.

He also happens to lead the league in the Guardian’s own Holy Bleep Is That Possible Should That Be Allowed Is That Even Fair metric.

Players of Samuel’s ilk used to be interesting footnotes and quirks. There are players now sprinkled around the league who take snaps in the backfield and outside as a receiver on a semi-consistent basis. Cordarrelle Patterson had a late-career resurgence in Atlanta this season. Curtis Samuel has filled a similar role in Carolina and Washington. Rondale Moore moves all over the shop in Arizona. In Buffalo, the Bills’ Isaiah McKenzie is able to nudge close to Samuel’s output.

Yet Samuel is the only multi-positional weapon assuming the creative pulse of a playoff offense. He is the only one piloting a championship contender, helping to elevate a flawed quarterback – by way of an outstanding offensive line. He is the only one who runs the ball with a battering-ram style, then breaks out in ballet when asked to run routes.

It is tempting to paint Samuel as the first of a new kind of positionless player. But to do so would be to understate the absurdity of his season and talent. Samuel hasn’t pushed up against the idea of ​​positional designations but fractured them altogether. There are running backs, there are receivers, there are hybrids, and then there is Deebo Samuel.

The post Deebo Samuel: the strolling first down who has damaged the thought of NFL positions | San Francisco 49ers appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The increase in happiness from a visit to an outpost of urban nature corresponds to the increase in mood at Christmas, claims a new study

Couple walking in the park together (

Image: Getty)

Christmas is often described as the happiest time of the year, but new study suggests that a walk in a park can be just as good for your mood.

Researchers found that the greener the green space, the happier and less self-centered people are.

The first study of its kind showed that visitors to urban parks use happier words on Twitter and express less negativity than they did before they visited.

The researchers also found that their upbeat mood lasted for up to four hours afterwards – “like a glow”.

The effect is so strong that the increase in happiness from visiting an outpost of urban nature corresponds to the increase in mood at Christmas, by far the happiest day of the year on Twitter.

As more people live in cities and the rate of mood disorders increases, the research team said their findings could have a powerful impact on public health and urban planning.

For three months, a team of scientists from the University of Vermont in the United States examined hundreds of tweets a day posted by people in 160 parks in San Francisco.

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Aaron Schwartz, a PhD student who led the research, said, “We found that people are happier on all of the tweets in parks.

“But the effect was stronger in large regional parks with extensive tree cover and vegetation.”

He said smaller neighborhood parks showed smaller increases in positive sentiment, and mostly paved citizen squares and plazas showed the smallest increase in sentiment.

Mr Schwartz said the study shows that greener areas with more vegetation have the greatest impact, and one of the words that shows the biggest surge in tweets from parks is “flowers.”

Co-author Professor Taylor Ricketts said, “In cities, large green spaces are very important to people’s wellbeing.

“We are seeing increasing evidence that it is central to promoting mental health.

“A big focus in conservation has been on monetary benefits – such as: How many dollars in flood damage did we avoid by restoring a wetland?

Teens who spend hours in front of the TV are more likely to be depressed, a study warns

“But this study is part of a new wave of research that goes beyond monetary benefits to quantify the direct health benefits of nature.

“Even more innovative here is our focus on the benefits of mental health – which so far have really been underestimated and insufficiently researched.”

The new study relied on a hedonometer – an instrument that uses a body of approximately 10,000 common words that were assessed by a large pool of volunteers.

They ranked words they thought were the happiest at the top from one to nine, with sad words at the bottom.

As an average of the volunteers’ answers, each word received a score: “happy” itself was rated 8.30, “hahaha” with 7.94 and “parks” with 7.14.

Neutral words – “and” and “der” – were rated 5.22 and 4.98, respectively. Below “caught” 3.08, “crash” 2.60 and “prison” 1.76. “Flowers” scored 7.56 points.

Enjoy a summer picnic together
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Picture:

Getty)

Brits are afraid to exercise outdoors because of the lack of PUBLIC TOILETS

Using the scores, the team collects more than 50 million tweets from around the world every day before calculating the average happiness score.

For the study, the team looked at tweets from 4,688 users who publicly disclosed their location in San Francisco.

This enabled the team to know which tweets were coming from which parks.

Co-author Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne said, “Working with the US Forest Service, we have developed some new techniques for mapping urban vegetation – with a very detailed resolution, about a thousand times more detailed than existing methods.

“That really allowed us to get a thorough understanding of how the green and vegetation of these urban areas relates to the mood of the people there.”

Mr Schwartz said, “This is the first study that Twitter uses to look at how people’s moods change before, during, and after they visit different types of parking

“The greener parks show a bigger boost.”

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Overall, the tweets from the city parks in San Francisco were happier by a dramatic 0.23 points on the hedonometer scale above baseline.

Prof. Ricketts said, “This rise in sentiment is in line with that of Christmas Day for Twitter overall in the same year.”

Prof. Chris Danforth, a math professor in Vermont, said, “Being in nature offers restorative benefits on dimensions that are not available in a store or downloaded on a screen.”

Prof. Danforth added, “Although we did not address causality in our study, we find that negative language – such as ‘don’t’, ‘no’, ‘can’t’, ‘can’t’ – has immediately decreased in the period after Visiting urban parks and providing specific language markers for the mood boost available outside. “

Conversely, he said the study shows that the use of first-person pronouns – “I” and “I” – decreases dramatically in Parks, possibly suggesting “a shift from the individual to the collective mental framework”.

The results were published in the journal People and Nature.

The post Strolling in a park can enhance your temper as a lot as Christmas, examine claims appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.