View the San Francisco for Thursday, March 27, 2025
“I want to build what I perceive as an office of the future, which is a place where you come to work where it’s cooler than where you live,” said the music mogul, who goes professionally simply by the name Ghazi.
“This will give us identity.” The property Ghazi seeks to transform is One Montgomery, a highly recognizable early 20th-century Italian renaissance revival-style temple of stone that dominates a corner of Montgomery and Post streets in the Financial District with its open-air rotunda., Ghazi saw a chance and bought the building in January for a price that real-estate company CBRE put at $24.5 million. “I never even imagined that I would be able to afford to acquire something like this,” said Ghazi, 48, sporting black Prada sunglasses, a Prada jacket and Prada sneakers. “So when I saw a window of opportunity, I went for it.”Music producer Ghazi Shami, seen in front of One Montgomery: “I want to build what I perceive as an office of the future, which is a place where you come to work where it’s cooler than where you live.” One Montgomery, a city landmark with elements dating back to 1908, has a cavernous main floor with 30-foot-plus ornamented ceilings, elaborate towering columns, copious decorative metalwork around doors, stairs and windows, and lots of marble. There is also a mezzanine, a second floor for offices, a basement and a roof garden.Ghazi, who founded his independent recording, publishing and distribution company in 2010, said he plans to install his growing roster of 150 San Francisco-based employees on the second floor, which is double the size of the space he has been leasing in a nearby downtown high-rise. Empire has another 100 employees in 25 countries, Ghazi said, with hubs in Nashville, Tenn.; New York; London; Lagos, Nigeria; and Johannesburg. Ghazi said he plans to punch a hole in the floor of one banking hall for a skylight to the basement, where he envisions possibly building a gym and hosting banquets. There is also a gleaming walk-in safe that could make for an ideal speakeasy/bar, he said. “It feels really good,” Ghazi said of his real-estate venture, which he said he hopes will inspire others to invest in downtown San Francisco. “I’ve worked really hard to get to this point.”A walk-in safe in the basement is one of the unique features of the historic former bank building at One Montgomery Street acquired by Ghazi Shami for his music company Empire. Ghazi said he grew from “humble roots.” His father, he said, “was a refugee of war from Palestine” who studied chemistry and mechanical engineering in communist East Germany before becoming a head chemist at the Columbus meat company, where he worked for about 25 years. His father and mother together also ran a coin-operated laundromat. The family moved to Westlake in Daly City and later to San Mateo, but Ghazi and his younger brother were often brought to visit family members in Potrero Hill. After returning to study audio and video engineering at San Francisco State University, Ghazi never left The City again. While taking night college classes, Ghazi said, he worked assembling computers for Burlingame-based Tangent.On the side, Ghazi also recorded music and refined his skills mixing music in a studio. By the time he was 21, he was “one of the go-to mix engineers and producers in The City,” he said. Marrying his knowledge of technology and music, Ghazi launched Empire with an emphasis on hip-hop music. Since then, the company has spread into many different musical genres and languages and expanded into varied aspects of the music industry. “I’m definitely a product of my environment, because the company is half software and half music,” he said. With a focus on early-stage artist development, Empire has helped launch the careers of multiplatinum and award-winning artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Fireboy DML, Shaboozey, Asake, XXXTentacion, and Anderson .Paak. The company has a recording studio in SoMa that Ghazi bought in 2019 and remade. It is used by artists “from all four corners of the world,” he said.One point of principle Ghazi emphasizes is that his company does not acquire permanent rights to artists’ material.Ghazi said that is “an equitable” way of doing business. “We built the company in a way where we don’t take advantage of artists and creatives,” he said. “That’s your art.” Meanwhile, Ghazi has made his personal support for Palestinians clear on social media, including with photographs of himself at demonstrations where some protesters carried signs calling for an end to military support for Israel. In one image, Ghazi is waving a large Palestinian flag at a demonstration on Market Street near Eighth Street in San Francisco.since an Oct. 7, 2023 attack by the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization Hamas killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel. Asked about the impact of his public stance on his business, Ghazi said, “It’s not something I really think about,” and he follows his “moral compass.”Ghazi said the last time he visited the area was in 2022, but he has relatives in and around the West Bank and can trace his family lineage in the region going back hundreds of years. “I’m first generation, and I can still speak the language, and there’s a lot of familiarity,” he said. “When you go back home and you walk around, you’re like, ‘Wow, I hear my language everywhere. People look like me everywhere. The food is familiar. The customs are familiar. This is stuff that I grew up with at home.’”Back in San Francisco, Ghazi said he hopes to help foster a more vibrant local music scene, and to that end he emphasizes hiring and nurturing local talent. “We’ve invested in local artists,” he said. “We’ve built infrastructure here. We’ve thrown events in the city, tons of events in the city.” One example was a free electronic music festival last July that Empire’s Dirtybird Records helped stage on Embarcadero Plaza, an event that city officials boasted drew 5,000 people. Ghazi rattled off the names of digital-music startups with roots in San Francisco that he said subsequently moved operations and jobs elsewhere. “We build amazing things here, and then we export our culture,” Ghazi said. “Imagine if we had 2,000 more music jobs here. We would have our own scene, right?”School children on a field trip playing at the Helen Diller Civic Center Playground in San Francisco on the first day of Spring on Monday, March 20, 2023. A long-dormant proposal to dramatically renovate San Francisco Civic Center might finally have new life. The San Francisco Planning Commission on Thursday will vote on whether to endorse “The Civic Center Public Realm Plan,” nearly 10 years after the project was originally hatched and former Mayor Ed Lee spearheaded it prior to his death. Thursday will be the first time since 2019 that the plan is back on The City’s planning agenda. Stakeholders say the overhaul is needed now more than ever amid downtown San Francisco’s “The plan’s relevance, in my opinion, has only grown more and more apparent, more obvious and stronger,” said Willett Moss, a partner of CMG Landscape Architecture, the firm leading the rebuild. The plan was originally devised in 2015 as a way to refresh the purpose and look of Civic Center, the sprawling 45-acre complex home to a cluster of San Francisco’s most important public institutions such City Hall,Under the Public Realm Plan, The City would install an array of fresh plants and trees, refurbish U.N. Plaza and further establish the complex as a place for large public gatherings.The Public Realm Plan, which is set to go before the Planning Commission on Thursday, could produce major changes to the Civic Center area. The nearly 130-year-old Civic Center has not been renovated extensively since 1960. And, according to Moss, these changes are long overdue.Former Mayor London Breed supported the project, which in 2019 had reached the point where it was greenlit for environmental review. But when the pandemic hit, Moss said funds for emergency services took priority over those dedicated to the plan’s environmental evaluation. Until very recently, the plan sat in bureaucratic purgatory, technically still in the system but needing someone to revive it. Moss said he still doesn’t know why it’s back on the table Thursday. “What I was told is that the plan was not a priority — there were so many other things that needed to be done,” Moss said. “The years go by, so I don’t know what tipped the balance at this point.” As downtown-revitalization projects in Union Square and the Financial District have taken shape, Civic Center stakeholders have advocated for attention from City Hall. Breed helped usher in smaller-scale changes, including reopening and widening of the plaza’s skate park in 2023 and hosting a Skrillex and Fred Again concert in front of City Hall last year. RoughlyUnder the Civic Center Public Realm Plan, The City would install an array of plants and trees, refurbish U.N. Plaza and further establish the 45-acre complex as a place for large public gatherings. Moss admitted that he does not know how much the plan will ultimately cost, though he said that is largely “irrelevant” right now. He argued that The City should adopt the framework so officials have a roadmap for Civic Center’s future. After that, Moss’ team can worry about what is and isn’t financially possible. Moss said the popularity of the recently constructed Presidio Tunnel Tops park shows there’s both an appetite for more public spaces in The City and that officials will be able to find the funds for it. He also said he was confident that new Mayor Daniel Lurie will prioritize such projects when Still, Moss said Thursday’s vote at the Planning Commission is only the first of many steps until the plan becomes a reality.A new report says the budget proposal narrowly passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives last month would have dire consequences across all 50 states, including significant job losses and budget shortfalls, making it harder for Americans to stay healthy and afford food. The federal budget plan directs the committees that control Medicaid and Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program spending to find a combined $1.1 trillion in cuts over 10 years to help offset trillions in tax cuts — and the report finds the resulting losses would hit California the hardest. The report, released Tuesday by the Commonwealth Fund and the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, studied the projected effects of those cuts on states via economic modeling. Its authors concluded that if the cuts are implemented, more than 1 million people nationwide would lose their jobs next year, states would lose up to $8.8 billion in tax revenues, and state gross domestic product would decline by $113 billion. “We expected that it was going to be on this scale,” said Leighton Ku, lead author of the report and the director of the Center for Health Policy Research and a professor of health policy and management at the George Washington School of Public Health. “There were signs already that the president and a lot of the Republicans wantedKu said his team started looking into this possibility back in November, expecting that President Donald Trump and a Republican-majority Congress would seek to extend tax the cuts they implemented in 2017, during Trump’s first term in office.per month as of 2023. California, which is projected to be hit harder than any other state according to the findings, would lose $2.9 billion in SNAP funds and $10.9 billion in Medicaid funds in 2026. “California is the biggest state in the country,” Ku said. “Gov. Gavin Newsom is already saying California already has some serious budget problems this year, and this is in addition to those problems.”the year before. If the proposed federal budget were to go through, the state would lose more than $1.4 billion in state and local tax revenues due to the fallout from SNAP and Medicaid cuts, according to the report. That’s due to the ripple effect of cutting these programs, as “the direct beneficiaries are places like hospitals and doctors offices and nursing homes and grocery stores, which is where the federal Medicaid payments and SNAP payments go,” Ku said. Such businesses would see their revenue shrink, which would trickle down to their employees further in the supply chain, across food production, farming and medical equipment manufacturing. As firms would have to reduce salaries, staffing, or goods and services to make up for the losses, consumer habits would change too, reducing the amount state and local governments are able to collect in taxes, the report finds. “If you cut federal spending, yes, you’ve helped the federal budget somewhat,” Ku said. “But on the other hand, that money has to come from somewhere, and so where it comes from are from states and from the people who are receiving those benefits.” Additionally, nearly 140,000 California jobs would be lost in directly related fields such as agriculture, food processing, pharmacy and nursing, and indirectly related fields such as retail and manufacturing. The state’s gross domestic product would suffer a projected loss in 2026 of $17 billion. There are few options available to state legislators to ease the shortfalls that would be caused by the proposed budget. Because SNAP is primarily a federal program, changes to its budget would go into effect almost immediately, though the state does have some discretion on how changes to Medicaid are implemented, Ku said. “Either the state tries to fill in with some of the extra money through state tax dollars — and given California’s current budget problems, that seems kind of unlikely that it could do all that much to help out,” he said. “Or it really cuts benefits for people, which is why this is, in the end, such a tough call for a state like California.” It’s unclear if the report will sway the public in one direction or the other, Ku said, adding that its purpose was to inform the budget debate. “How this is going to play out remains to be seen,” he said. “There’s still a lot of budget negotiations to be done, and these are going to be some tough negotiations.” “Republicans want to cut $880 billion or more in Medicaid so they can give a tax cut to the wealthiest people in America,” said House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco in Congress since 1987, in a statement to The Examiner in response to Tuesday’s report. The office of House Speaker Mike Johnson did not respond to The Examiner’s request for comment prior to publication.the anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act by highlighting the current risk to health-care funding due to the proposed federal budget cuts, reiterated her view that Congressional Republicans’ priorities were clear. “Republicans are choosing to protect billionaires while ripping away health care from millions of hardworking Americans, closing hospitals and nursing homes, and diminishing the quality of care,” she said. “Democrats stand united against this cruel Republican scheme.”Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. 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