Well, there's also the whole "work from home" thing which means there's a lot fewer people in SF proper, period.
And Westfield can complain about crime in SF but they're just trying to cough up an excuse. UWR completely ejected from ALL their US Westfield malls in 2022 while keeping all their EU malls. Somehow the EU homeless and crime problems aren't an issue but the US ones are. Interesting that.
SF certainly has its issues. However, in this instance, they are completely orthogonal to the reasons why Nordstrom is closing.
The structural changes in the way people shop were bad even before Covid, but the work-from-home contingent fleeing the city (SF has almost 30% working from home--the highest in the nation by the way--and it would probably be larger except many of them left SF) really accelerated the transition.