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Business

The Fastest-Growing Till in San Francisco Is in Japantown

Aug 7, 2026

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6 min read

The Fastest-Growing Till in San Francisco Is in Japantown

Sales tax collected there over the last four quarters ran 62.2 percent above calendar 2019, the largest gain of the 38 neighborhoods with unbroken figures in both windows. Citywide the same measure is down 11.7 percent. The file’s own confidentiality rule rules out a single dominant taxpayer.

Housing

Thirty Years of Complaints at 74 Sixth Street

Aug 6, 2026

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7 min read

Thirty Years of Complaints at 74 Sixth Street

No parcel in San Francisco has drawn more building-code notices: 1,258 violation items across 166 notices since 1996. It spent most of those years as a residential hotel. Its residents now describe it, in the same complaint file, as a city-funded shelter.

Culture & History

Aug 2, 2026

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5 min read

The class of 2026 has no mansions in it

Fourteen buildings have joined the city's landmark register since New Year's, more than in any full year since 1981. The first landmarks were churches, banks, and whiskey warehouses. This year's are a coffeehouse, a steam bath, two firehouses, and a storefront on Cole Street the record calls simply Maud's.

Land & Water

Is the fog thinning? The question keeps being put to the one window that barely sees it

Aug 1, 2026

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7 min read

Is the fog thinning? The question keeps being put to the one window that barely sees it

Thirty-one years of San Francisco visibility, and a coastal check the desk owed since July, turn up no measurable decline in Karl — only a bay-side airport that meets him a few dozen winter hours a year, and a coast that has never once stopped being socked in.

Streets & Safety

Aug 1, 2026

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7 min read

What actually burns

A census of the year’s 39,160 fire calls turns up a department that mostly doesn’t fight fire — and, among the fires it does, a city where the thing alight is the trash in the street, not the house. The rare building fire is the one still doing the killing.

Business

Aug 1, 2026

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6 min read

The storefronts that would rather pay

Six years ago the city built a ladder of fines to make an empty storefront expensive — $250 a foot the first year dark, $500 the second, $1,000 the third. The tax records are in now, and they show a growing number of owners climbing to the top and staying put.

Housing

The buildings still betting against the earthquake

Aug 1, 2026

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8 min read

The buildings still betting against the earthquake

A decade ago the city put 4,900 apartment buildings on notice: retrofit the soft ground floor or be named a hazard. The work is 95 percent finished. What’s left is a list of 262 addresses, every one of them years past its legal deadline.

City Hall

Aug 1, 2026

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6 min read

A Yes vote is the beginning of a decade

San Francisco has better than four billion dollars of voter-approved bond work on its books. The old bonds are nearly all spent; the new ones have barely been touched — and the flagship among them, the 2018 seawall, is eight years past its Yes vote and still being drawn.

Housing

Aug 1, 2026

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3 min read

The rent is the one thing that didn’t

San Francisco’s cost of living rose about a quarter over seven years — but housing, the line the city is defined by, rose the slowest of anything that matters, and about half as fast as housing nationwide. The climb was the power bill, the tank, and the grocery cart.

Archive

The Fastest-Growing Till in San Francisco Is in Japantown

Thirty Years of Complaints at 74 Sixth Street

The class of 2026 has no mansions in it

Is the fog thinning? The question keeps being put to the one window that barely sees it

What actually burns

The storefronts that would rather pay

The buildings still betting against the earthquake

A Yes vote is the beginning of a decade

The rent is the one thing that didn’t

Read it free, three mornings a week.

The Frisconian