The Bayview: Fastest-growing area in San Francisco?
Looking over the charts of restaurant sales-tax revenues, the neighborhood that offers the biggest surprise is Third Street in the Bayview, where the numbers jumped 135 percent between 2014 and 2015, the largest year-to-year growth spurt seen — such a dramatic jump that The Chronicle asked the city to double-check the figures (they were correct). In comparison, between 2010 and 2014, sales tax revenue for Third Street actually declined 14 percent.
The fact that the Bayview is doing better doesn’t surprise anyone who owns a business in the neighborhood, though most had no idea the increase in sales could be so dramatic.
“The Bayview is still one of the last neighborhoods that remains affordable,” says Yvonne Hines, owner of the 10-year-old Yvonne’s Southern Sweets. “It’s going to turn around really quick.”
In fact, the city’s sales tax figures don’t take into account the economic activity taking place off Third Street, including the cluster of breweries and distilleries that have recently opened along Evans and the side streets further south.
“We’re not just Bayview anymore; we’re San Francisco,” Hines adds, referring in part to the T line, which has helped connect this formerly isolated neighborhood, though neighbors dispute how much of an effect the 8-year-old line has had to date on Third Street restaurants.
The improvements appear to be scattered along a very long commercial corridor, whose character evolves from industrial to a commercial core near Mendell Plaza, then returns to industrial again.
Bayview has problems with crime, says Kristin Houk, owner of All Good Pizza, who has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years. But the neighborhood also retains a strong sense of community that is disappearing in other parts of the city. “As the city changes, people are realizing this is a great place to build that,” she says. Where else, she asks rhetorically, could she rent a sunny, 7,000-square-foot lot where she could install a food trailer and picnic tables?
The north end of the strip, near Evans, has fared especially well in the past few years. Renaldo Guerrero, owner of the 15-year-old La Laguna Taqueria, has seen business increase 20 percent.
According to Earl Shaddix, executive director of Economic Development on Third, 21,000 people already come into the Bayview every day for work. Construction workers from Lennar Homes, which is building housing complexes in the Hunters Point Shipyards and former Candlestick Park site, are lunching in the neighborhood, and La Laguna now sees workers coming from UCSF Mission Bay as well.
“A few years back there were a lot of empty warehouses. Now they’re occupied,” Guerrero says. “People got to eat.”