After four decades, San Francisco’s visitor information center is moving from Hallidie Plaza to a shiny new home in the expanding Moscone Center at the end of the year.

The existing 900 Market St. center at the entrance to Powell Street BART station will close on Dec. 21. The Moscone Center facility will open on Jan. 2, 2019, a day before the rest of the $551 million Moscone expansion, according to the San Francisco Travel Association, the city’s tourism bureau.

The new center will be “much more current, much more modern,” said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of San Francisco Travel, which promotes tourism in the city. It will be within a few blocks of public transit, as well as museums and hotels in the South of Market area, he said.

The Moscone Center expansion will increase the span of the city’s main convention center by 21 percent, adding more than 500,000 square feet of exhibition space. It’s expected to create more than 3,400 permanent jobs. The South Hall expansion portion opened in November.

The new visitors center will have the same hours, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekends. Those weekend hours will be extended until 5 p.m. during conventions, according to San Francisco Travel.

The center has free visitor guides, maps and brochures and sells Muni passes and tickets for cable cars and other destinations.

San Francisco Travel operates another visitor center at Macy’s in Union Square and is a partner at California Welcome Center at Pier 39. The three locations draw a combined 600,000 visitors per year.

The 1,880-square-foot Hallidie Plaza location opened in 1976 with funding from the Swig family, one of the city’s oldest real estate developers. The city owns 900 Market St., and future plans aren’t clear. The city’s real estate division didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

San Francisco Travel has been urging the city to clean up its streets and provide more services for the homeless, in the face of horrified tourists and conventions threatening to leave San Francisco.

“We’re starting to see some progress,” said D’Alessandro, who cited the controversial removal of large tent encampments in May and increased police street presence. “We need to see a lot more, no question.”

The area around Powell Street and nearby Union Square is an epicenter for the city’s homelessness and crime. But two tourists visiting the information center on Thursday said they felt safe in the area.

“I think it’s in a location where the visitors can find it easily — just get off the BART station, and there’s a lot of tourists around,” said David Song, who is visiting from South Korea. He said “it wouldn’t matter to me” if the visitor center moved.

Sandra Ozáez, a tourist from Spain, said she felt safe and while there were homeless people in the area, it was “not as much as in Los Angeles.”

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Rebecca Aydin contributed to

this report.

Roland Li is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com