Small Business & Neighborhood Vitality

The Permission Problem

The irony is that D8's corridors are working. The Castro opens nearly two businesses for every one that closes. Time Out named Glen Park the coolest neighborhood in California. These are resilient commercial streets.

They're resilient despite the system, not because of it. And the people who keep them alive are starting to feel it. Residents' real income has dropped 11–14% over five years while the rest of the city's went up. When the people who live in a neighborhood can't afford to shop in it, corridor vitality becomes a surface that hides a deeper problem. A ground-truth count finds 70 vacant storefronts across the district though only 24 show up in official filings. The data that's supposed to track the problem is as broken as the system that creates it.

D8 permitting timelines dropped 65%, from 301 days to 105, after a series of reforms that began with Mayor Breed and continued with Mayor Lurie. I'll protect those improvements, and I'll push to take them further. Conditional use permit timelines, for example, remain untouched: a new restaurant taking over an existing restaurant kitchen with no changes to equipment or layout faces the same process as one moving into a brand new space. That's not regulation. It's redundancy.

The vacancy problem tells the same story from a different angle. The city passed a commercial vacancy tax in 2020. Just last year, almost 40% of commercial properties in D8 never filed the corresponding tax return. Not late or incomplete. Never filed. The consequence? Nothing. No audits, no penalties, nothing.

When over 200 property owners can ignore a legal filing requirement and experience no blowback, the tax can't work and vacancy rates stay hard to measure. Three property owners control 42% of reported vacancies, and the bulk of those are actively listed with brokers. The barrier for storefronts is also demand-side: rents, zoning constraints, startup costs. Enforcement alone won't fill every storefront, but you can't accurately diagnose the problem when the compliance system is this broken.

One-size-fits-all policy doesn't fit a district with four distinct commercial economies. The Castro's destination economy depends on citywide foot traffic, nightlife, and cultural anchors. Glen Park's village model thrives on remote workers shopping locally. Noe Valley's 24th Street is largely closed by late afternoon. Church Street is simultaneously a commercial corridor and the district's deadliest traffic corridor. I'll develop a strategy for each corridor rather than treating "economic vitality" as a single story.