New hotels in SoMa, San Francisco

SoMa is the part of San Francisco south of Market Street, a grid of former warehouses, convention halls, museums and office towers that runs from Mission Creek in the south to the Bay Bridge ramps in the east. One hotel here is open and two more are listed for 2026, and they sit at three different corners of the district: a 410-room conversion on Second Street, a landmark newspaper building at Market and Third, and a luxury hotel stacked inside a 61-story tower beside the Salesforce Transit Center. Where you sleep decides whether SoMa feels like a museum quarter, a convention town or a neighborhood of bars and lofts.

The parent city guide, San Francisco, covers the rest of the openings, and Union Square and Nob Hill have their own pages.

The hotels

The Clancy, Autograph Collection is the only one of the three you can book for a stay today. It stands at 299 Second Street, a short block from the foot of the Bay Bridge approach, and it began as a Courtyard by Marriott. Braemar Hotels & Resorts spent 19 months and about $30 million stripping that hotel down and reopening it on October 1, 2020 under the Autograph Collection flag, with 410 rooms, street-art motifs and a taproom-style restaurant on the ground floor. The architecture is by AXIS/GFA and the interiors by EDG. Rates start around $190 a night according to the listing we track. Sixth Street bought the building from Braemar for $115 million in November 2025, and Marriott still operates it.

The location is the real argument for the Clancy. Second Street is a short walk from Moscone Center, the Salesforce Transit Center and Yerba Buena Gardens, and Oracle Park is under 20 minutes away along the waterfront. The streets around it are workaday: tech offices, a few galleries, parking structures, converted warehouses. The hotel's design leans into that and does not try to smooth it over.

The Hearst Hotel, Auberge Resorts Collection is a different proposition. The Hearst Building went up in 1911 at Market and Third and housed the San Francisco Examiner until the 1960s. JMA Ventures is converting it, Roman and Williams is designing the interiors, and Auberge plans 150 rooms and suites, a rooftop bar, a destination restaurant and an Auberge Spa. The project was first announced in 2021 for a 2023 opening, and the date has slid since. The current target is 2026 and no firm opening month has been published, so treat it as a plan.

A hotel at Market and Third puts you on SoMa's northern edge, next to Montgomery Station and a few minutes from the Powell Street cable car turnaround. The Museum of the African Diaspora is a couple of blocks away on Mission Street, SFMOMA a few blocks south, and Union Square about ten minutes on foot.

The third is Rosewood San Francisco, at 550 Howard Street in the Transbay District. Pelli Clarke Pelli designed the 61-story, roughly 800-foot tower, and Joyce Wang Studio is doing the hotel interiors. Rosewood takes 15 floors for about 180 rooms and suites, and a pedestrian skybridge links the building to Salesforce Park. The group has announced a wellness program under its Asaya brand, an indoor lap pool and a private lounge. It has said 2026; we have no confirmed opening day and no published rates.

What to do in SoMa

SFMOMA, at 151 Third Street, is the anchor of the district's museum cluster. Its 2016 expansion by Snøhetta enlarged the building considerably and added free ground-floor galleries open to anyone walking in off the street. Allow half a day for the whole building. Across Howard and Mission, the Contemporary Jewish Museum occupies a former power substation on Mission Street, to which Daniel Libeskind added a blue-steel extension in 2008, and the Museum of the African Diaspora sits a block west on Mission Street.

The Gardens themselves are a park built on top of the Moscone convention halls. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, a waterfall you can walk behind, opened in 1993. The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with its theater and galleries, shares the site, and the Children's Creativity Museum has a restored 1906 carousel. On a foggy afternoon the Metreon next door has a cinema and a food hall.

Further out is South Park, a small oval of lawn and plane trees laid out in the 1850s and now ringed by cafés and startups. Twitter had one of its early offices here. Treat it as a lunch stop.

On a Saturday, the Folsom Street corridor around 11th Street wakes up differently. This is where the city's leather and queer nightlife concentrated from the 1970s on, and the district is now formally recognized as the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District. Bars like the Eagle and the Powerhouse are still open, and Ringold Alley holds the Leather Memorial. The Folsom Street Fair takes over the street the last Sunday of September. DNA Lounge and other clubs keep late hours.

Oracle Park, at Third and King, is where the Giants play and where kayakers wait for home runs in McCovey Cove. Chase Center, home of the Golden State Warriors and a concert venue, is a short walk south across Mission Creek in Mission Bay.

The Bay Lights, Leo Villareal's light installation on the Bay Bridge's western span, were switched back on in 2023 as a permanent work. They show after dark from the Embarcadero.

How SoMa got here

South of Market was the part of the city on the wrong side of the cable-car slot in Market Street, which is where the name "south of the Slot" comes from. Workers lived in wood-frame lodging houses and worked in foundries, warehouses and rail yards. The fire of 1906 destroyed most of it, and the area was rebuilt as an industrial district, with the brick loft buildings that survive south of Folsom.

By the 1960s city planners wanted the blocks around Third and Mission cleared for a convention center. Residents of the single-room hotels fought it for years, and the legal settlement that came out of that fight required replacement housing. Moscone Center opened in 1981, SFMOMA moved to Third Street in 1995, and Yerba Buena Gardens followed. The dot-com boom of the late 1990s filled the lofts with startups, and the second tech boom of the 2010s brought the glass towers. Salesforce Tower, at 1,070 feet, opened in 2018, and the Salesforce Transit Center and its rooftop park opened that same year before reopening in 2019 after a structural fix.

The district now has two faces: an office-and-convention one that empties by seven in the evening on weekdays, and a nightlife one around Folsom that fills after ten. Hotel guests in the first zone should know the second exists, and the reverse.

Where to stay in SoMa

The Yerba Buena and Moscone core, between Third and Fourth Streets and Mission and Folsom, is where museums and conventions sit within three blocks of each other. The Central Subway's T Third line has a station at Fourth and Folsom, and Muni Metro and BART stops are a few blocks north on Market. No tracked hotel sits in this pocket yet.

The Clancy is on the eastern side, in the stretch between Moscone and the waterfront. Rincon Hill and the East Cut around it have filled with residential towers over two decades, and the neighborhood does not have much nightlife of its own. For a conference at Moscone, the walk is short.

The Hearst takes the north edge along Market Street. It is the SoMa address for people who want Market Street's transit: Muni Metro, BART, the F-line streetcars and the cable cars on Powell, plus a short walk to the Ferry Building.

Rosewood has the Transbay District, which is the newest of the three: the transit center, the park on its roof and the tower cluster around Mission and First. AC Transit buses, Muni and Golden Gate Transit all use the bus deck below, and Caltrain trains to the Peninsula leave from Fourth and King, a walk or short Muni ride away. A Caltrain extension into the center is still on the drawing board.

Getting around

Walking works well in the grid, since the streets are flat, and the Central Subway makes the north-south run to Chinatown simple. A day that includes both a museum and the waterfront is about two miles on foot. Wind comes down the east-west streets in the afternoon, so a jacket is useful even in July. Parking around Moscone fills during big conferences, and Dreamforce, held each autumn, is the event that fills the neighborhood's hotels.

Which hotel for your trip

For a conference at Moscone, the Clancy is the practical choice today, and Rosewood will be the expensive one if it opens. Anyone going to SFMOMA and the Yerba Buena museums will do fine from the Hearst once it opens, because the museums are within ten minutes on foot. A Giants game or a Warriors concert favors the Clancy, which is the closest to the waterfront of the three. Visitors who plan to spend evenings along Folsom should stay near 11th Street rather than on the east side, and none of the three hotels here is in that part.

Families will find the Children's Creativity Museum and the Gardens useful, but the Folsom end of the district is geared to adults after dark. Travelers connecting to the airport should note that BART from Powell or Montgomery reaches San Francisco International in about 30 minutes.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a new hotel open in SoMa?

Yes, The Clancy, Autograph Collection, which opened on October 1, 2020 at 299 Second Street. It has 410 rooms and replaced a Courtyard by Marriott. Two more hotels are announced for 2026: The Hearst Hotel at Market and Third and Rosewood San Francisco at 550 Howard Street.

Is SoMa within walking distance of Union Square?

Yes. From Yerba Buena Gardens to Union Square is about 10 to 15 minutes on foot, and the Central Subway connects the Yerba Buena/Moscone station on Fourth Street to Union Square and Chinatown. Details on the other side are in the Union Square guide.

Is SoMa the same as Mission Bay?

No. Mission Bay is the district south of Mission Creek, built from the 1990s around the UCSF campus, Oracle Park's southern flank and Chase Center. SoMa is the older district to the north of the creek.

How do I get to SoMa from San Francisco International Airport?

BART from the airport reaches Powell Street and Montgomery Street stations in about 30 minutes, and both are a few blocks from SoMa's northern edge. A taxi or rideshare takes 20 to 40 minutes depending on traffic on US-101.

Is SoMa safe at night?

It depends on the block. The streets around Yerba Buena, the Clancy and Folsom's bars are busy into the evening. Some stretches further from Market Street are quiet after dark, as in most downtowns, so main roads and a rideshare for the last leg are sensible.