London Breed [Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]
San Francisco Mayor London Breed has suggested that vacant downtown office spaces should be made available for biotech companies to expand, according to the San Francisco Business Times. The biotech industry could help breathe new life into the area, Breed argued.She highlighted a 5% life sciences vacancy rate in the city in contrast to the 25% office vacancy rate. For context, the vacancy rate for the office market was about 5% before the pandemic.
Breen recently announced a 75,000-square-foot expansion of the Gladstone Institutes’ facility in Mission Bay. The organization is a non-profit biomedical research institution.
She proposed removing code barriers to help developers convert office space into biotech labs, saying that the city wants to make it easier so that it happens more quickly. Breed said that biotech is the future of San Franc…