The company that owns American Eagle is suing the former owners of the San Francisco’s Westfield mall, alleging the proprietors turned a blind eye as the shopping center was left to “deteriorate into disarray.”
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco’s Superior Court on Monday, comes on the heels of the mall’s foreign owners announcing in June that they had stopped making payments on a $558 million loan, transferring control of the mall to a receiver. They cited “challenging operating conditions in downtown San Francisco” for the decision, and previously complained of “unsafe conditions” and a general “lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity.”
But leaders of the company that owns American Eagle contend that it is not just the city of San Francisco that is responsible for the deteriorating conditions in and around the shopping center.
“Westfield cannot walk away from the harm that it has caused without consequence,” the lawsuit reads. “It must be held accountable for the damages caused by its failures and broken promises.”
Following the first months of the pandemic in March 2020, Westfield pulled back from enforcing basic safety protocols at the Market Street shopping plaza, leaving employees “to suffer and respond to gun violence, physical assaults, burglaries, and robberies,” American Eagle argued in court filings obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle
A National Review analysis of San Francisco Department of Emergency Management data over the summer found that crime and disorder in and around the mall have been a consistent and growing problem. Over just the last three years, authorities have been called to the mall more than 5,000 times for a variety of reasons, from shoplifting and purse-snatchings to reports of assaults, people with knives and guns, mentally disturbed people in crisis, and indecent exposure. The data show that reports of thefts are an almost daily occurrence at the mall. Fights are common, and there have been dozens of reported burglaries.
Sales in the mall nosedived from $455 million in 2019 to $298 million in 2022. And while foot traffic in 2019 approached nearly 10 million visitors, by 2022, that number had plummeted to just 5.4 million.
In May, the high-end department store Nordstrom announced it was closing its San Francisco stores, including its Westfield mall location, because of the changing dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market.
A little over a month later, the mall’s owner, a Paris-based multinational real-estate firm, announced that it, too, was pulling out of downtown San Francisco.
“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 company said in a statement at the time.
Mayor London Breed sought to downplay the announcement by casting doubt on Westfield’s intentions. “We’ve had numerous conversations with Westfield about the future of this site, and it’s been clear that they did not have a long-term commitment to San Francisco as they look to withdraw entirely from the United States market,” she told the Chronicle at the time.
Conditions in the mall have deteriorated to the point where basic facilities such as washrooms regularly go unserviced. Abimael Garcia, the manager of the mall’s janitors, told the San Francisco Standard in May that his workers regularly find human waste in elevators, in part, because the restrooms are often closed due to sanitation issues and drug use.
“It’s like twice a week now. It used to be once a month,” he said.