Can the Hobby Economy Transform Failing Commercial Corridors?
Details from our winning entry in the ULI Market Street Reimagined competition
I’m so proud to have been part of a team that won an Honorable Mention in the ULI SF Market Street Reimagined design competition for our entry, RECreate Market Street.
Our entry explores how the “hobby economy” could revitalize San Francisco’s Market Street. RECreate is a play on recreation (or play) and re-creation (or reinvention).
While Amy Cohen (local economic development practitioner), Laura Crescimano (SITELAB urban studio),
(CO-), and I took the lead on the project, a full list of team members are credited on the winning entries page.More than 170 entries were submitted anonymously and reviewed by a jury that included Sir Norman Foster, Jony Ive, Janette Sadik-Khan, and Harriet Tregoning, among others. The five winning entries and eight honorable mentions split a $100,000 prize fund.
Below I’d like to share some thoughts on why I think the hobby economy is a compelling opportunity not only for San Francisco, but other cities with failing downtown commercial corridors (hi, Philadelphia’s East Market Street!).
My original April 2025 essay on the hobby economy, which prompted the entry, can be found here.
The Present Moment
Here we are: more than five years after the pandemic changed urban economies around the world.
Despite hopes that workers and shoppers would return downtown, that tourists would make up for lost foot traffic, that dozens of buildings would be converted to housing, these scenarios are either increasingly unlikely or slow to materialize in many cities around the country, particularly San Francisco.
In addition, lack of federal support for cities and the all-but-certain increase of AI in labor markets only add to economic uncertainty. Will past economic development strategies work in the future? I don’t think so.
There’s a need for a new urban economy that can comfortably occupy vacant, urban, commercial real estate. That gives people a reason to be out in public. The hobby economy is the perfect concept to stabilize and give purpose to the millions of vacant square feet along San Francisco’s Market Street and many other corridors like it. There are a couple of key reasons that the hobby economy can succeed here where other economic development strategies will fail.
First, unlike the knowledge worker economy which is going to be destabilized by AI, and the tourism economy which focuses on out-of-towners and sporadic visits, the hobby economy is centered around activities that nurture our souls beyond work or pure leisure and requires repeated visits.
The hobby economy is grounded in activities that are done in person, often with other likeminded enthusiasts — not done remotely or entirely alone. The hobby economy also resists digital replacement because it offers a type of engagement that screens cannot replicate. For example, you can’t outsource climbing a wall to AI, because that would defeat the whole purpose of climbing the wall in the first place.
It also builds off the most successful, growing part of retail – experiential retail uses, such as climbing walls in sporting goods stores or yoga classes in athleisure shops. Even online companies like Netflix are opening in-person experiential spaces.
But hobbies take this level of activity one step further. While hobbies involve purchasing goods, they also involve purchasing services — and services employ people at a completely different payscale than basic retail employees. For example, the yoga instructor makes a lot more per hour than the person selling yoga pants. The recurring nature of hobbies, the ability to engage at free or premium levels, aligns the hobby economy with subscription models that are increasingly familiar to people nowadays and akin to the way online services work — not outmoded one-and-done transactions.
A new vision for commercial real estate
The hobby economy also moves beyond storefronts to other levels of vacant commercial buildings. Many hobbies require precisely the expansive spaces that empty floors (and lobbies and rooftops ) of downtown buildings can provide: racquet sports, climbing, running centers, indoor golf facilities, and creative production facilities.
The truth is that offices were designed around cramming lots of people into small spaces. With smaller workforces in general and more remote work, offices are almost too efficient in their use of space.
At the same time, retail and restaurants are creating click-and-collect business models (to cut down on employee and retail space costs) where people spend less and less time in the store.
By contrast, hobbies can take advantage of our strange moment of excess space.
The hobby economy can also change the way people connect through the city. Right now, most buildings are private above the first floor, with housing or office spaces above. The hobby economy changes that dynamic and opens multiple layers of the building up to the public, creating more prosocial real estate.
Indeed, hobbies offer more than economic benefits: they can offer social, educational, and health ones as well. Research shows that young people and older adults stand to reap the most from developing hobbies. One study of 93,000 people across 16 countries found that for people 65 and older, people who did have hobbies reported better health, more happiness, fewer symptoms of depression, and higher life satisfaction. Another study on young adults found that youth with hobbies had lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of well being. You can imagine how many of the hobby tenants could be nonprofits working with youth, older adults, and others.
Finally, hobbies offer a theme for public spaces that have increasingly been turned into bland seating areas or worse. By turning public spaces over to hobbies, whether chess or a pickleball court, the city has a chance to encourage physical activity, social connection, and intellectual stimulation to everyone.
Practical and Implementable
As part of our entry, we proposed ways to quickly implement these ideas. Unlike many other economic development strategies that require building new structures or infrastructure, the hobby economy works with what we already have and desperately need to revitalize: our millions of vacant square feet.
The cost of getting a program like this up and running is then mostly a matter of soft costs.
So: the big question is, will San Francisco pursue the hobby economy? We not only hope so, but stand ready to help make it happen.
Thanks again to my teammates for an awesome collaborative experience! Thank you to ULI SF and the Civic Joy Fund for sponsoring the design competition. And special thanks to whose thinking on language and branding helped inspire the final project title.
What do you think? Could the hobby economy work in your city? I’d love your comments below.
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Here is an approach for how the city can code for your approach: https://howardblackson.com/2017/09/27/a-vertical-transect-context-elevated/
Super cool! Congrats!