Episode Transcript
Katrina Schwartz: Rising up in San Francisco, I’ve all the time liked how every neighborhood is distinct…like little villages. Every with their very own purchasing streets
Sounds of automobiles passing and other people strolling by
Katrina Schwartz: My household lived within the Richmond District, so we did our purchasing on Clement. On it, you could find the whole lot from fresh-caught fish.
Fishmonger: So proper now we now have rock cod and we now have calamari…
Katrina Schwartz: To provide, hair salons, pastry outlets…
Bakery employee: You pay with money or card?
Katrina Schwartz: Ice cream, eating places, a bookstore — you title it. By and enormous, native companies, certainly one of a form within the neighborhood.
Bookstore employee: Welcome to Inexperienced Apple
Katrina Schwartz: And most neighborhoods in San Francisco have a road like this…it’s a part of what makes San Francisco really feel distinctive.
Sarah Soule: My title is Sarah Soule. I dwell in San Francisco. And I’ve grown up right here my entire life.
Katrina Schwartz: Sarah remembers purchasing largely at native companies rising up. She even remembers listening to that San Francisco didn’t permit large field shops, like Walmart or Residence Depot, in any respect.
Sarah: With a purpose to shield native companies.
Katrina Schwartz: However not too long ago, she’s observed extra chain shops within the metropolis.
Sarah Soule: We didn’t use to have Costco. Um, and I sort of bear in mind Costco opening right here for the primary time.
Katrina Schwartz: That was within the early 90s. Sarah remembers the battle round it.
Sarah Soule: Like, it was controversial. Some folks have been upset about it, and I used to be questioning, , why that occurred? Why did it get to open right here?
Katrina Schwartz: She’s making an attempt to grasp what’s modified within the metropolis since she was a child.
Sarah Soule: And my query is: Did San Francisco actually used to forestall large field shops from opening within the metropolis? And when did that change, and what results have that change had on town?
Katrina Schwartz: As we speak on Bay Curious, we’re going looking for some solutions to Sarah’s query and studying slightly retail historical past, San Francisco model. I’m Katrina Schwartz. Stick with us.
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Katrina Schwartz: San Francisco right now undoubtedly has chain shops. Suppose Safeway, Starbucks and Goal, to call just some. However there are a whole bunch of pages of planning codes and rules for them. And meaning politics. So we requested Scott Shafer, KQED’s senior politics correspondent and co-host of the Political Breakdown podcast, to stroll us by way of how these rules have modified over the past a number of a long time.
Scott Shafer: Land use in San Francisco is guided by town’s Byzantine Planning Code, which is sort of just like the twisty, curvy a part of Lombard Road. And few perceive it higher than this man.
Aaron Peskin: My title is Aaron Peskin. I dwell and work in North Seaside, and we’re within the coronary heart of North Seaside on the 400 block of Columbus Avenue.
Scott Shafer: Aaron Peskin served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for greater than 20 years, and his district included this neighborhood, which has been famously anti-chain retailer for a very long time..
Aaron Peskin: North Seaside has all the time been a eating and leisure vacation spot zone, but it surely’s additionally a spot the place folks dwell and store and sustaining the steadiness of neighborhood-serving companies can also be essential and likewise provides to creating it an actual neighborhood.
Scott Shafer in scene: So this neighborhood, clearly, as you mentioned, it’s a historic neighborhood. How are the companies doing right here, and the way the cafe scene doing?
Aaron Peskin: So the neighborhood is flourishing; it truly led the way in which in post-pandemic restoration. It has a particularly low emptiness charge. The cafes, as we will see, right here is Stella Pastry and Cafe is booming with a bunch of the previous Italians who’re hanging out. What’s happening, Frankie How are you gents?
Frankie: Buon giorno!
Aaron Peskin: KQED desires to know should you guys are alive and effectively.
Frankie: We’re okay. It’s slightly bit scorching. Yeah, however yeah. Once we examine his blood stress, he’s all proper. Yeah.
Scott Shafer: Among the many issues North Seaside is most well-known for are its small, unbiased espresso homes…like Cafe Trieste.
Aaron Peskin: Cafe Trieste is 70 years previous. It was the primary place on the western seaboard of america that began to serve espresso. It’s nonetheless in the identical household.
Sounds of espresso maker. Barista says: It is a espresso latte. The subsequent one is a cappuccino.
Aaron Peskin: It’s sort of North Seaside’s lounge.
Scott Shafer: The partitions are coated in previous images exhibiting the various well-known individuals who’ve been by way of.
Aaron Peskin: Right here’s Francis Ford Coppola sitting on the again desk writing the screenplay for The Godfather proper there. There’s Luciano Pavarotti singing in right here.
Scott Shafer: Folks come to North Seaside for companies like this. That’s why Peskin remembers someday at Cafe Trieste so clearly.
Aaron Peskin: And there was a petition on the counter. That is in perhaps the early Nineteen Nineties; this was a very long time in the past, asking folks to signal to object to a Starbucks on the nook of Columbus and Broadway. I bear in mind it vividly.
Scott Shafer: This petition, all these years in the past, was one of many first cases of a neighborhood pushing again towards a series transferring in. They succeeded in protecting the Starbucks out, by the way in which.
Again at his workplace, Peskin tells me that battle towards Starbucks was just the start. Different neighborhoods have been waging related battles.
Aaron Peskin: There was outcry from varied components of town.
Scott Shafer: In 2004, San Francisco outlined what a series retailer, extra formally often called “components retail”, was precisely — having 11 or extra shops nationwide.
Aaron Peskin: That definition by no means existed within the San Francisco Planning Code; it didn’t prohibit something in any respect. It outlined what a series retailer was after which left it to the longer term to find out the place they have been inexperienced mild, the place they the place pink mild, and the place they’re yellow mild needing a conditional use.
Scott Shafer: With that 2004 definition in place, neighborhoods started adopting completely different ranges of management.
A pink mild meant a complete ban on chains — that’s what Hayes Valley did.
Now, a few of you may say, “Hey, wait a minute. There are chain shops in Hayes Valley — like All Birds footwear and Warby Parker eyeglasses. Yep, that’s true. However after they opened, they have been comparatively small corporations … and had fewer than the 11 places nationwide that triggered these limitations.
A yellow mild utilized to neighborhoods — like Cole Valley and components of the Haight Ashbury — the place chains have been allowed, however solely after neighbors may weigh in earlier than any closing choices.
And eventually inexperienced mild areas — South of Market, Union Sq. and the remainder of downtown — the place chain shops like Macy’s, Nordstrom and Previous Navy are allowed with none extra permits.
Progressively, extra neighborhoods adopted limitations.
Because the rules grew piecemeal, in 2006, voters authorized Proposition G, dubbed the “Small Enterprise Safety Act,” mandating these conditional use permits for brand new chain shops in all neighborhood industrial districts the place small companies dominate.
However having clearer rules didn’t finish the fights over large field shops. That grew to become clear in a battle over whether or not to permit a significant {hardware} chain to open on Bayshore Boulevard.
Lowe’s industrial: Go to Lowe’s dwelling enchancment warehouse as a result of Lowe’s is aware of (fades out)
Scott Shafer: The positioning the place Lowe’s wished to open bordered on two very completely different supervisorial districts — the thriving Bernal Heights and the economically depressed Bayview.
Aaron Peskin: It was an enormous battle.
Scott Shafer: Lowe’s sweetened the pot by promising to rent a whole bunch of native staff..
Aaron Peskin: In the end, the Board of Supervisors, on a 6 to five vote, voted to approve Lowe’s. I used to be the swing vote.
Scott Shafer: The shop opened — and stays there right now.
This looks like a very good time to put out a few of the analysis on chains and the way they have an effect on native communities.
Aaron Peskin: There was a number of evaluation about how native companies stored cash within the native economic system and the multiplier impact of protecting cash within the native economic system moderately than it being sucked out to a company headquarters in Atlanta or New York Metropolis. The truth that native companies employed folks at higher residing wages. So there’s a number of knowledge that supported the laws past simply the truth that folks wished to keep up the distinctive character of their neighborhoods.
Scott Shafer: One other argument towards chains — they put upward stress on rents.
Aaron Peskin: There isn’t any query that multinational chain shops can command larger rents, and the influence of that has been to boost industrial rents for small companies and neighborhood industrial districts, which has been very deleterious to the well being of small companies.
Scott Shafer: On the professional aspect, counties get a number of tax income from chains, prospects like them, and so they do present some jobs.
Aaron Peskin: There are many locations in San Francisco the place they’re allowed as of proper or the place they’re allowed conditionally.
Scott Shafer: Actually, regardless of the hurdles, the rules and the NIMBY politics, San Francisco nonetheless has loads of chain shops.
Aaron Peskin: So this entire notion that San Francisco isn’t permitting companies to develop is sort of nonsense.
Scott Shafer: And when chains shut, folks complain. That occurred alongside Van Ness Avenue as KGO reported earlier this 12 months.
KGO clip: Van Ness Avenue was as soon as San Francisco’s auto row. Rambler, Dodge, Cadillac, Buick all had a stake within the metropolis. The bulk are gone, forsaking giant, empty industrial areas.
Scott Shafer: Supervisor Danny Sauter … co-sponsored laws making it simpler for chain shops to open on Van Ness.
Danny Sauter: It’s a mirrored image of the present state of issues. The place it’s rows and rows of empty storefronts, we now have to attempt one thing.
Scott Shafer: Sauter says there’s already a number of sprouts of curiosity … and even glimmers of success … together with a brand new Apple Cinemas film theatre to exchange one which closed years in the past. That opened fairly shortly at 1000 Van Ness.
All this reveals that town — for all its loopy constructing codes, allowing and chain retailer rules, as Peskin famous, has a good quantity of flexibility.
Aaron Peskin: San Francisco’s land use legal guidelines have been constructed on the notion that completely different neighborhoods had completely different destinies and have been making an attempt to do various things to be economically profitable. The entire notion was that it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.
Scott Shafer: In thriving neighborhoods like Hayes Valley…the place sidewalks are stuffed with buyers, it’s nonetheless laborious to open a series retailer. However in others, like Van Ness Ave, the place enormous storefronts sit empty, the calculus is altering. An enormous field retailer doesn’t look so dangerous anymore.
I took all this again to our query asker, Sarah, to see what she makes of it.
Sarah Soule: I truly spent a while as a small little one in these North Seaside cafes. And I realized to play Pac-Man in a kind of. So it’s attention-grabbing to listen to that it began in that neighborhood.
Scott Shafer: She’s been pondering lots about the place she chooses to spend her cash and needs to speculate extra in native companies.
Sarah Soule: One of many issues that makes any metropolis so particular is these small native companies that exist there and no place else
Scott Shafer: Little question town will maintain tweaking its guidelines for chain shops … looking for that elusive steadiness between defending the distinctive character of its neighborhoods and permitting chains to open the place they make sense.
Katrina Schwartz: That story was dropped at you by KQED’s senior politics correspondent and co-host of Political Breakdown, Scott Shafer.
Subsequent week, the Bay Curious crew shall be taking a break for the Thanksgiving vacation. However we’re again with you the next week …Dec. 4 … with a brand new episode. And…drumroll please…Olivia Allen-Value is again from maternity depart and shall be again within the host seat! We’re tremendous excited to have her again and need to say a particular thanks to producer Gabriela Glueck, who has been an incredible companion on the present throughout Olivia’s depart. A lot of the gorgeous scoring and sound design you’ve loved over the past many months is her magic. Thanks, Gabi.
It has been very enjoyable to host the present over these previous couple months, however I’m not going wherever, and I’m excited to do extra reporting and to get out into the sector a bit extra to reply your questions!
Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.
Our present is made by Olivia Allen-Value, Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz.
With further assist from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everybody on crew KQED.
Some members of the KQED podcast crew are represented by the Display Actors Guild American Federation of Tv and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California native.
Thanks for listening. Have a vacation and we’ll see you again right here in a pair weeks.
