A San Francisco developer plans to build a quarter million square feet of retail space in the Mid-Market neighborhood, a project some see as a catalyst for drawing additional stores and restaurants to an area better known for street-level enterprise of a different sort.

Urban Realty Co. wants to knock down three buildings on the dilapidated block of Market Street between Fifth and Sixth streets, to construct a five-story, glass-facade structure dubbed CityPlace. The company is targeting value retailers, such as the Ross and Marshalls stores it houses in other nearby buildings, promising a mix far different from the neighboring Westfield San Francisco Centre.

“It will totally change the character of at least the south side of the street,” said Carolyn Diamond, executive director of the Market Street Association, a nonprofit founded in 1963 to promote the rehabilitation of the city’s downtown artery. “It will open that invisible door that people don’t go through,” at Market and Fifth.

Attracting retailers to the district, at least other than adult bookstores or pawn shops, has long proved challenging for landlords. Most prospects are quickly dissuaded by the open drug dealing and abusing, public inebriation and urination, and aggressive panhandling.

“I’m now very used to seeing people sell crack and smoke crack,” said David Addington, who bought the Warfield Theater building in 2005 for $12 million and is working to land a restaurant or store on the ground floor. “But you have a retailer who flies in from basically anywhere else and these things are kind of shocking.”

CityPlace could attract enough shoppers to help displace or dilute the scarier elements on the street, and the mere fact such a large-scale retail project is moving ahead has already encouraged other stores to take a second look at the area, he said.

“The deals are still not struck, but the groups that are looking have changed considerably,” Addington said.

Likewise, Diamond said the shopping center could encourage other district landlords to consider similar upgrades to their properties.

Many believe a number of recent Mid-Market developments have already begun improving the long-blighted area. Those include the completed Federal Building and SoMa Grand condominium mid-rise as well as the under-construction Trinity Plaza apartment complex, all on the block of Mission Street between Seventh and Eighth. The Skid Row of Sixth Street, part of a South of Market Redevelopment Project Area, has seen a number of new restaurants and shops open recently, including Split Pea Seduction, Rancho Parnassus and LaunderLand.

Urban Realty hopes to secure city approval for the development by the end of the year, begin construction in 2009 and open the doors in 2011.

“We’re moving along and wrapping it up,” said David Rhoades, principal with the company, which began buying up the necessary sites several years ago. CommonFund Realty Inc., the real estate arm of a Connecticut investment manger for nonprofits, is an equity investor in the project.

Under the current plan, there will be at least five tenants, many with their own ground-floor entrances, others accessible through elevators in an atrium, he said. The approximately 250,000 square feet of retail space will be spread over six floors, five above ground, one below. There will also be two levels of underground parking with 236 spaces.

Urban Realty doesn’t plan to negotiate leases for CityPlace until closer to its completion, but initial conversations suggest “there’s tremendous demand,” Rhoades said.

Rob Kashian, co-founder of San Francisco brokerage firm Retail West, said high-end stores wouldn’t locate along such a rundown block, but off-price retailers will be drawn to the brand new urban space with ample parking. He named a number of possible fits, including PetSmart, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Bed Bath & Beyond.

E-mail James Temple at jtemple@sfchronicle.com.

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it’s come to that.

“God is the only one we can turn to at this point,” said Twyman, 59. “Our leaders don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.”

Gas prices have been driven relentlessly higher this year by the bull market for crude oil, gasoline’s main ingredient. A gallon of regular now costs $3.89, on average, in California, while the national average has hit $3.58.

To solve the problem, Twyman isn’t begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded.

Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.

“God, deliver us from these high gas prices,” Twyman said. “That’s all they have to say.”

Consumer advocates who have been howling about gasoline prices for months say they understand his frustration, even if they haven’t tried his tactics.

“Given the complete inertia and silence of this White House on a crisis that has people feeling just hopeless, prayer is probably as good as anything,” said Judy Dugan, research director with the nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog. “Frankly, I wish them luck.”

Her organization has a list of proposals to help tame gas prices. Federal officials could stop adding oil for the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve and start selling some instead, for example. That would boost supplies in the market and drive down the price. Officials also could tighten oversight of crude oil trading.

“This is government’s job - it shouldn’t be God’s job - but government is in gridlock or ignoring it,” Dugan said.

Some of Consumer Watchdog’s ideas may finally be gaining support. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, on Thursday asked President Bush to stop filling the strategic oil reserve. And on Friday, she called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the oil market is being manipulated.

Twyman, 59, has a history of taking on interesting causes, some whimsical, some deadly serious. Three years ago, he led a petition drive to have Oprah Winfrey nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It didn’t work, obviously, but he says he had a great time with it.

His real passion, however, has been persuading African Americans to become bone marrow donors. A friend of his who had just adopted a child died from leukemia in 1995 without ever finding a donor, and Twyman threw himself into the cause.

For years, racial and ethnic minorities have been underrepresented on the national donor registry, a problem because people in need of a transplant have a greater chance of finding a match with donors of the same race or ethnic group. Twyman estimates that his bone marrow drives, many of them organized through churches, have netted 14,000 potential donors. The drives also brought him an Above & Beyond award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

Twyman knows his approach to gasoline prices may sound simplistic. He’s quick to point out that anyone praying for cheaper fuel also has an obligation to do something more active about the problem.

“People have to walk more, leave those cars at home, and carpool, man,” he said. “We have to become more practical.”

He’s also hoping that if enough people start praying at the pump, politicians who might actually be able to do something about the problem will listen.

But he says his prayer for gas-price relief from God is sincere.

“I’ve seen him work miracles in my life,” Twyman said. “He told us that all we need to do is ask and believe. He can do it, and he will do it, but we have to ask him to do it.”

E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.

You can learn a lot by looking at the quarterly update of mutual funds and reading between the numbers.

Knowing that the average fund investor isn’t a big fan of sifting through charts filled with numbers, here are some nuggets that become evident from a careful reading of the quarterly results.

Everything bad is good again: OK, maybe not everything, but a remarkable number of funds that are the absolute worst fund in their category during several long-term periods of time have been winners in the shortest of time frames.

On Lipper Inc.’s list of leading and trailing funds by asset class, the worst large-cap core fund year-to-date and during the past 52 weeks is the Direxion S&P 500 Bull 2.5X fund (DVSLX) - designed to move 2 1/2 times a bull market - is the top fund in the peer group during the past week and month (having gained roughly 11 percent in the past four weeks).

It’s not surprising to see a souped up, leveraged fund playing at the extreme ends of its asset pool, but there were plenty of other, more mainstream names that had the yin and yang of performance. Forester Value (FVALX) was Lipper’s worst fund among large-cap value funds during the past five years, despite being the top fund in the group year to date. Its sister fund, Forester Discovery (INTLX), pulled off the same feat among international multi-cap core funds.

Likewise, Hotchkis & Wiley Small Cap Value (HWSIX) is the laggard over the two- and three-year time horizon but leads small value funds during the past month. B2B Internet HOLDRs (BHH) have lagged all science and technology funds during the past three and five years but have been at the front of the pack for the past month and thus far in 2008.

Expand the horizon so that it includes the top and bottom 10 funds in a peer group, and the number of funds appearing in both places quickly gets big. And the trend is prevalent in fixed-income funds, too, so it’s not a phenomenon that is peculiar to stocks.

Investors need to recognize that a fund that can live at the extremes of performance may give a ride that’s too hard to handle. The same things that pick you up one day can be precisely what holds you underwater the next. Even when the circumstances are reversed - and a long-term winner shows up on the list of short-range laggards - the volatility has the potential to scare an investor off, and probably should.

An ideal fund is one that a shareholder can hang on to without looking at any quarterly statement and wanting to rip their hair out.

Diversification works over time: Take a look at charts showing performance by investment objective and it’s easy to see why investors want to build a portfolio of funds and spread money around. Among diversified U.S. equity fund types, 15 of 17 categories are negative year-to-date, but 14 of the categories show an annualized average return during the past five years that is better than 9 percent. Look at the interim figures and you will see all manner of struggle, but spreading money around clearly would smooth out the ride.

It’s even more obvious among world equity funds, where 24 of 26 categories are negative in ‘08, but all 26 categories average double-digit gains during the past five years, with the lowest annualized average gain standing north of 13 percent.

Misery loves company right now: Flip those investment statistics and it shows that unless you resort to funds that are built to go against the trend, the fact that all of those asset classes are down means that avoiding short-term loss without going to cash or bonds is mighty hard. Gold funds and Latin American funds were the two groups among world-equity issues to be positive year-to-date; among diversified domestic funds, only bear-market funds and “specialty” funds were in the black for the quarter.

Why mutual fund statistics drive investors nuts: It was almost a clean sweep for the Ivy Cundill Global Value fund (ICDAX) in the global small/mid-cap value category, with the fund taking top honors in every time period from four weeks through five years. Alas, in every time period from 52 weeks and longer, the fund was also the worst in its peer group. Same fund, top and bottom, with 14.94 percent annualized average gain through five years.

That’s what happens when the research firms make a new category that has only 10 funds in it, most of them new. The industry will solve its own problem, however. In the next 24 months, you can bet that plenty of fund firms will create their own “smidcap” value funds, hell-bent on coming up with something that can top the charts in a small-sample world.

Chuck Jaffe is senior columnist for MarketWatch and host of Your Money Radio ( «www.yourmoneyradio.com»). He can be reached at cjaffe@marketwatch or at Box 70, Cohasset, MA 02025-0070.