For eight years, a 50,000-square-foot storefront in San Francisco’s City Center Mall sat empty. City officials once promised a Whole Foods there; Amazon quietly dropped those plans in 2024. Then T&T Supermarket, a Canadian Asian grocery chain few Bay Area shoppers had heard of, agreed to take the space, according to reporting from the San Francisco Standard.
That single deal is part of a much larger pattern. Grocers catering to Asian and Hispanic shoppers have signed leases for roughly 850,000 square feet of Bay Area retail space, GlobeSt.com reported August 4, citing demographic shifts across the nine-county region as the driving force. The scale of that footprint, larger than eight Costco warehouses combined, is reshaping which retailers get first crack at some of the region’s most visible vacancies.
The math behind the trend is straightforward. Asian residents make up roughly a third of the population in the Bay Area’s four largest counties, and the group’s population grew by nearly 30% between 2010 and 2020, according to Census Bureau data cited by the Standard. Santa Clara County’s Asian share climbed to 38.9% from 31.7% over that decade, the largest gain of any Bay Area county, with Alameda and San Mateo counties not far behind, per Chronicle-reported Census figures. Latino and Hispanic residents grew as a share of the population in seven of the nine counties over the same period, with Solano County posting the biggest gain…