Owner of SF’s Largest Hotel, the Hilton Union Square, Is Walking Away, Surrendering It to Lender
“…Another bit of bad news for downtown San Francisco arrived Monday morning with the revelation that the investment firm that owns the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels is walking away from its debts and giving up hope on a return of SF’s convention market.
Virginia-based REIT Park Hotels & Resorts has opted to cease payments on a $725 million loan, as the SF Business Times reports today, essentially surrendering over 2,900 hotel rooms and hospitality facilities to its lender. This includes the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, which is San Francisco’s largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, and one of the country’s largest hotels outside of Las Vegas.
Park Hotels & Resorts is also giving up on the 1,024-room Parc 55, citing the continued debt burden of the two hotels on its portfolio, and multiple factors that have made the SF market less desirable for their business.
“After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market,” said Park Hotels CEO Thomas J. Baltimore in a statement. “Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges, both old and new: record high office vacancy; concerns over street conditions; lower return to office than peer cities; and a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand.”…”
Related:
San Francisco Falls Into The Abyss
“…No major American city has failed at the same level as Detroit, whose population dropped from 1.85 million people in 1950 to about 630,000 today. Move over Detroit, here comes San Francisco, which lost 6.3 percent of its population between 2019 and 2021, a rate of decline larger than any two year-period in Detroit’s history and unprecedented among any major US city.
Detroit’s fall was primarily driven by the relocation of the US auto industry to southern, right-to-work states, where auto producers, including foreign firms who build autos here, have avoided the union conflict that was endemic in Detroit. San Francisco’s decline is driven by absurdly bad local economic policies. How bad? As some city blocks have been taken over by drug gangs selling fentanyl in open-air superstores (think of an opioid version of Costco, without the membership card), city supervisors have spent their time talking about defunding police, abolishing rent, abolishing prisons, and demanding that if Whole Foods is to be allowed to develop a grocery store in a vacant building in the city, it must include affordable housing…”
Related. Colorado Democrats are working hard to implement San Fran style policies and destroy themselves for the sake of perceived virtue:
Colorado’s 32% increase in crime due to changes in prosecutions, sentences
Related. The woke destruction of our judicial system is a willful policy choice of Democrats nationwide: