By Kevin V. Nguyen : sfstandard – excerpt
A group of schools are providing a test case in the city’s most troubled neighborhood.
When San Francisco was mired in “doom loop” talk last year, Mayor London Breed and some business leaders began openly calling for college students to save downtown. Young adults, the thinking goes, would populate struggling areas, reinvigorate the economy and help transform downtown from a 9-to-5 office community to a 24/7 arts and culture destination.
Just one block away from the worst drug corner in the city, the University of California College of the Law SF is putting that theory to the test…
The key to getting the Academic Village over the finish line is the concept that it will be shared by multiple universities.
“Had this been only for the law school, we would have met much more skepticism trying to finance this project,” David Seward, chief financial officer of the university, told The Standard. To pay for Academe at 198, UC Law SF secured $364 million in tax-exempt bond financing…(more)