It's apparently come time for San Francisco's Mid-Market to be rebranded, 15 years after the neighborhood was primed for a big tech comeback that never really came, and a year after its defining tenant, Twitter, flew the coop.
You may have seen the news last week that the building we once called The Twitter Building, now Market Square (1355 Market Street), has a new tenant who has snapped up a small portion of Twitter's very large former footprint, and that's the vehicle fleet management software company Motive.
A realtor working in the SF office market noted to the Business Times that touring activity had begun to pick up in the Mid-Market area, after five years in which so much more desirable office space was available downtown and in Mission Bay that anyone who was in the market for new space wasn't really venturing that far up Market Street.
But, as the economy takes another shift upward in 2025, realtors have apparently taken to marketing the Mid-Market area as something new: Lower Hayes.
As the Business Times reports this week, this "informal rebrand" is part of the marketing campaign for Market Square, as Elon Musk and X continue trying to sublease Twitter's 400,000+ remaining square feet of former offices.
Mike Sample, a realtor with the firm JLL, tells the Business Times that 1355 Market is, "centrally located, especially for talent that lives in the city, and borders the popular Hayes Valley."
Sample adds, "Hayes is a Sunday-to-Sunday neighborhood with so much to do, which is really attractive to the companies interested in our sublease from X."
The marketing materials refer to the building as "Market Square at Lower Hayes," and a map shows Lower Hayes as a shaded area extending south of Market Street all the way over to Valencia Street.
The Chronicle notes that the boundaries of Hayes Valley have expanded a bit in the last decade or so, and now Zun Cafe, near Gough Street but still at the outer edge of what's been considered part of the neighborhood, now feels like a part of the larger Hayes environs.
We mocked the developer Lendlease for deciding three years ago to name their new building at the foot of Van Ness "Hayes Point," given that this was a stretch — and Van Ness is pretty much the main thoroughfare of Civic Center, not Hayes Valley. That development has since stalled, though there were signs last year that it was coming alive again, and it's unclear if they'll stick with the Hayes Point marketing scheme.
The Chronicle spoke to Jen Laska, a former president of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, who said it should be seen as flattering for the neighborhood. "You know your neighborhood has made it when the neighborhood next door starts borrowing your name," Laska said, adding, "If it helps revitalize Mid-Market, then I’m all for it."
But the Lower Hayes thing is most likely not going to stick, if we had to guess. There was a lot of effort put into the branding of the East Cut in and around Rincon Hill eight years ago — something we also mocked at the time. While the East Cut CBD (Community Benefit District) still seems to exist, SFist noted last fall that the neighborhood name appeared to have quietly disappeared from Google Maps and Apple Maps.
