The Frisconian

Sunset sales tax grew 2.5% after the Great Highway fully closed, behind most of the city

Eighteen days before San Francisco votes on Proposition G, which would bring back weekday cars, injury crashes in the Sunset have held flat while the city’s rose. Its sales tax grew more slowly than most neighborhoods’, about as fast as the Outer Richmond’s, which lost no road.

Oct 16, 2026

Montgomery Street BART draws 18,908 riders a weekday, a third below the dot-com bust

That was September’s average: 41% of September 2019, and 36% under fiscal 2003, the bust’s worst year. Fridays fell furthest. In 2025 a Friday drew two-thirds of a midweek day, down from 88% before the pandemic.

Oct 14, 2026

AI events held half of SF’s 100 biggest guest lists in September

The city listed 1,403 public gatherings last month. The 22% with AI in the title drew 40% of every registration the public could see. A bar saying goodbye drew one of the five longest guest lists of all.

Oct 12, 2026

San Francisco vowed zero landfill trash by 2020 and sent 515,037 tons there in 2025

In 2003, when the city set its deadline, 718,863 tons of its trash went to landfills; in 2019, 713,010. The state’s count has sat near 500,000 since mid-2019, when it changed how it counts. The city’s own gauge barely moved.

Oct 9, 2026

Parkmerced’s 1,538 apartments voted for demolition in 2011 still stand; the complex is 12% empty

The complex’s own filing to the Rent Board, signed in December with a court-appointed receiver running the property, lists 3,162 units at San Francisco’s largest apartment complex and 383 of them vacant. That is nearly three times the 4.4 percent vacant across all 133,320 rent-controlled units in the same file, and down from one in five in June. Nothing in the 2011 plan has been built. A court handed the complex to a receiver in 2025 after its owner defaulted on a $1.5 billion loan, and the first four building sites went to a second lender at foreclosure in July.

Oct 7, 2026

59% of homes in San Francisco’s new buildings sit on ground that can give way in a quake

The state maps the 700 block of Valencia Street, where a hotel sank in 1906, as ground that can liquefy, or weaken and give way, in a strong earthquake. Of 48,718 homes in new buildings the city has permitted since 2001 and finished, 28,780 stand on ground mapped the same way. That ground covers about a fifth of the city.

Oct 5, 2026

Russian Hill car break-ins fell 88% in two years; residents feel safer walking at night

Police took 243 reports of car break-ins at the ends of Lombard Street’s crooked block in 2023, and none this year. In the city’s new survey, the share of Russian Hill residents who feel safe walking alone at night rose from 29% to 80%, against 37% to 60% citywide.

Oct 2, 2026

San Francisco Bay Topped NOAA’s Flood Line on 6 Days in 2026, Twice in Summer

From 1920 through 1968, NOAA’s tide gauge in the Presidio never once counted a flood day, and every one it counted after that fell between November and February. This year it has counted six, two of them on summer nights. The Bay sits about nine inches higher than it did a century ago.

Sep 28, 2026

The Baldwin Drew 353 Complaints, Most of Any SRO in San Francisco

The Baldwin at 74 6th Street has logged more Department of Building Inspection complaints since 1994 than any of San Francisco’s other 457 single-room-occupancy buildings, though its size explains much of that gap. The city converted the old supportive-housing hotel into an emergency shelter in 2021.

Sep 25, 2026