The San Francisco Chronicle has vacated its SoMa headquarters at Fifth and Mission after more than a century. The move is temporary — Hearst is headed to 450 Sansome — but 901 Mission's future is unannounced, and the corner is notably quiet.

A Thursday post on r/bayarea reported that moving trucks had finished clearing 901 Mission Street — the corner of Fifth and Mission in SoMa, which the San Francisco Chronicle has occupied since 1924. The day-of observation comes from a single social-media account, but the departure itself is not in question: Hearst Corporation announced the relocation in January 2025. The stuccoed exterior looks the same from the sidewalk. The Chronicle is out.

Hearst acquired a new perch — 450 Sansome Street in the Financial District, a 16-story, 143,000-square-foot office tower — for approximately $43 million. The move is explicitly temporary. What it clears the way for is a demolition next door.

The Chronicle building at 901 Mission and the Examiner building at 110 Fifth Street are adjacent Hearst properties with shared electrical and HVAC infrastructure — joined at the systems in a way that makes it impossible to demolish one while the other is occupied. The Examiner building is the one coming down. Phase 2 of the 5M development, a planned 400-unit residential condo tower on its footprint, has been on hold since May 2023, when Hearst paused the project citing construction costs and market conditions. The company told city planners it would break ground when "favorable economic and investment conditions" arrive. No date has been set.

That leaves 901 Mission with an ambiguous near-term future: Hearst is keeping the building and has not announced plans for it. The structure was already 70 percent vacant before the formal move-out — the Chronicle was among the last occupants in a building that had been hollowing out for years. The original 1924 design by Charles Peter Weeks and William Peyton Day was Gothic Revival; the exterior was stripped and re-clad in stucco in 1968. The building carries no formal city landmark designation. (The earlier Chronicle home, at 690 Market Street, holds that distinction as SF Landmark No. 243.)

The corner isn't alone in its condition. According to MissionLocal's analysis of city controller data and a January 2026 CBRE report, office vacancy in Yerba Buena has reached 64.5 percent; in SoMa West, 53.1 percent. Sales-tax revenue across the neighborhood fell 49 percent between 2019 and 2025, dropping from $18.5 million to $9.37 million. The Chronicle, which offered voluntary buyouts to staff in October 2024 while citing slowing revenue, is the last institutional name to clear out of a building that was mostly gone already.

At Fifth and Mission, the block looks unchanged from the street. No new signage on 901 Mission, no construction activity at 110 Fifth. What Hearst does with the building it just emptied — and when Phase 2 of 5M eventually breaks ground next door — remains, for now, an open question on an increasingly quiet corner.