Just two years ago, downtown San Francisco’s commercial real estate was in a grim position.

Retailers fled, and empty storefronts had turned Union Square — once the city’s crown jewel — into a state of disrepair, with open-air drug markets, homeless zombies and crime pushing out customers.

Downtown office real estate sales in 2024 slumped to $310-per-square-foot on average — almost two-thirds below the $861 average of 2018, according to CBRE.

However, Union Square’s fortunes are now in the process of a dramatic reversal — thanks to good governance and private investment.

Clothing brand Uniqlo, which had left Union Square in 2021, has signed a lease and is set to reopen later this year. Zara is set to expand to a four-story, 40,000-square-foot flagship store. They will join a Nintendo store, which has commanded lines around the block, The RealReal, Aritzia, Pop Mart and AT&T. Kith has signed a lease and Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s are said to be eyeing space. 

In the middle of that remarkable turnaround is a nascent firm, Uris Acquisitions, helmed by Max Raskin, 36, and Ian Jacobs, 49. The pair began snapping up real estate just months after Mayor Daniel Lurie took office in Jan. 2025.

Their conviction was that San Francisco wasn’t dead, but struggling — with problems they believed Lurie could rapidly fix. They began raising capital ahead of his campaign and have deployed almost all of it, $75 million, in just the last 15 months.

“Forget blood in the streets,” Raskin joked — a reference to a popular investment maxim. “We bought when there was feces in the street.”

Jacobs is from a family of real estate investors, but had first focused on finance at Goldman Sachs, then later as a Warren Buffett analyst, picked after writing him a fan letter.

Raskin worked as a journalist at Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley before landing at law school, then the Treasury Department. He has a good head for politics — and a belief that the greatest cities in the world always make a comeback. Although he now only occasionally writes, he met Lurie when interviewing him for a story.

Their relationship with Lurie has proven key to their success. “It is a public-private partnership,” Raskin explains. “I talk to the mayor quite frequently, and it’s just, ‘Hey, what can we do to help out?’

“It’s not rocket science. It just takes a lot of willpower… You just arrest the criminals and you don’t give them drugs.”

Mayor Lurie, for his part, is clear that, “If we make the streets safe and clean, people will want to be here. When people don’t feel safe, nothing else matters.”

“Government needs to do its job, which is providing the basics. If we provide the basics, the city can sell itself.”

Lurie isn’t only taking Raskin’s calls. When Jamie Dimon was in town for JPMorgan’s 2025 annual healthcare conference — an event which, in 2021, The Post reported execs were “pleading” with the company to cancel due to the out-of-control crime — Lurie invited him to City Hall afterward. It was Dimon’s first time inside the building.

JPMorgan then recently announced it’s not just expanding its office but also making San Francisco its 24th corporate center and putting $200 million into a waterfront housing project.

All of those calls have helped Lurie implement common-sense reforms — like making it far easier to get building permits, which previously had stood in the way of new development.

“Retailers have been dating San Francisco, waiting to fall in love again … waiting for an indication that the time was right and that the frog had turned back into a prince,” joked Julie Taylor, the realtor Uris has used to purchase property. 

“It’s really a full gut remodel of Union Square…  We’re going to have fresh brands in every door.”

Since early 2025, Uris has acquired five buildings in and around Union Square: 200 Powell, 35 Powell, 71 Powell, 120 Maiden Lane and 233 Grant. They are also under contract for two more buildings in Union Square.

Of course, there are still challenges with homelessness and crime and people who are wary of change. And while Uris made the bet that effective government could resolve the biggest problems, there is not a guarantee that type of governance will last.

But Raskin says his optimism and positivity have helped.

“We didn’t know it was going to be the AI boom, but we knew something was going to boom… We just bet on people. We bet on smart people, and we bet on cities.”