Where’s the boom?
What the restaurant scene in the Bayview, Excelsior and Divisadero-Haight reveals about S.F.
Few of us miss the signs that a neighborhood’s restaurant scene is booming. We see it on the Divisadero corridor in the Western Addition, Valencia Street in the Mission, practically all of Hayes Valley.
New businesses crowd onto a block like music fans rushing the stage. The lines outside the most popular make it hard to walk down the sidewalk. Food journalists begin to interject comments like “Just how many more restaurants can this neighborhood support?” into their stories about the street.
But not all of the boom zones are as apparent as Valencia Street. And tracking the neighborhoods where restaurant growth is most sluggish is difficult unless, perhaps, you run a business on that strip. Or unless you look at the data. The San Francisco Controller’s Office of Budget and Analysis recently provided The Chronicle with sales tax revenue for the hospitality industry on 31 commercial corridors in San Francisco. The figures lay out how much sales tax the city collected every year from 2010 to 2015, which we can reasonably interpret as a measure of how much sales the businesses are doing.
Two caveats: Sales does not equal profit. Minimum wage increased 15 percent (adjusted for inflation) between 2010 and May 2015, and health care expenditures under the San Francisco Healthcare Security Ordinance and the Affordable Care Act may have as well. Restaurants have bumped their prices up to accommodate for any number of increased costs, from rent to beef, which translates to rising sales numbers — and sales tax revenue for the city.
Looking at how quickly tax revenue has risen doesn’t tell us entirely about the economic health of a neighborhood, either. For instance, one of the slowest-growing commercial strips in San Francisco — Chestnut Street in the Marina — has few vacancies and many successful restaurants. The fact that it is slow growing may mean that failed restaurants are quickly replaced by new ones, or that the strip might be close to saturated with food businesses.
The data on three neighborhoods — the Excelsior, the Bayview, and the contrast between Divisadero and the Upper Haight — was surprising enough that we took a closer look to find out what factors might be affecting the health, or stagnation, of the restaurants there.
“The Bayview is still one of the last neighborhoods that remains affordable. It’s going to turn around really quick.” Yvonne Hines, owner of Yvonne’s Southern Sweets