Vol. I, No. 20 · San Francisco — WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2026 · Price: one commendation, suitably framed
BY MEL ADLER, COMMERCE DESK
San Francisco collected $147.1 million in sales tax across its neighborhoods over the four quarters ending March 2026, against $166.5 million in calendar 2019. That is a fall of 11.7 percent, six years on. Japantown, over the same span, went from $1,140,304 to $1,849,528, a gain of 62.2 percent. Of the 38 neighborhoods the file reports without gaps in both windows, none did better. Three others, Lincoln Park, McLaren Park and Twin Peaks, have quarters suppressed and cannot be ranked at all.
The ranking behind it is worth reading in full. Presidio comes second at plus 57.1 percent and Mission Bay third at plus 56.9, both places where new construction changed what was there to buy. Inner Sunset is fourth at plus 39.3. At the other end sit Treasure Island at minus 52.2 percent, South of Market at minus 37.5, Western Addition at minus 31.6 and the Tenderloin at minus 28.1. The largest loss in dollars belongs to Financial District–South Beach, which fell from $38.98 million to $30.12 million, giving up $8.86 million a year on its own.
The first objection to a 62 percent jump in a small neighborhood is that one arrival did it. The dataset answers part of that objection itself. To protect business confidentiality under state tax law, the city merges any area holding fewer than four sales-tax-paying businesses, or where a single business pays 80 percent or more of the total, into a neighboring area. Japantown is reported on its own line in all 45 quarters of the file, so it has cleared both thresholds continuously since 2015. That rules out a single business carrying the neighborhood. It does not rule out one business carrying most of the increase, and the published file cannot be pushed further than that.
The curve says the same thing more slowly. Japantown collected between $245,000 and $307,000 a quarter every quarter from 2015 through 2019, a flat decade line. It fell to $121,835 in the first quarter of 2020. It passed its own 2019 average again in the spring of 2021 and has risen almost every year since, reaching $493,261 in the last quarter of 2025, the highest figure the neighborhood posts anywhere in eleven years of records.
Two different things could produce that line: more places to spend money, or the same places taking more of it. Both happened. Business locations registered and open in the Japantown analysis neighborhood rose from 588 on 1 July 2019 to 684 on 1 July 2026, up 16.3 percent, while the citywide count of open registrations fell 1.8 percent over the identical dates, from 102,470 to 100,636. Sales tax per open registration still rose 39.4 percent on top of that, from about $1,939 a year to about $2,704.
The neighborhood is also young in a way its reputation is not. Of the 684 locations open this July, 305 registered on or after 1 January 2021, so 44.6 percent of the addresses trading there today opened after the shutdown. The six oldest registrations still active run: Sokoji at 1691 Laguna Street, on the books since 19 May 1950; Sequoia Living at 1525 Post, 1958; Keys Residential Care Homes at 2161 Sutter and the Permanente Medical Group on Divisadero and Geary, both 1968; the Japanese Community Youth Council at 1596 Post, 1970; and Kimochi at 1715 Buchanan, 1973. Two of the six are the Kaiser and care-home registrations that sit in the wider polygon rather than the historic core. San Francisco named Japantown a cultural district on 1 October 2013, the earliest designation date carried by any of the city’s ten.
Three cautions, and they matter. The city’s Japantown analysis neighborhood is considerably larger than the historic core around Post and Buchanan; it runs out to Geary and Divisadero, and Kaiser’s Geary campus registrations sit inside it, so the gain cannot be pinned on the malls alone. Registered business locations include plenty of firms that never collect sales tax, which makes the per-registration figure a direction rather than a margin. And the newest quarter in any tax file moves later, because the city says outright that its history changes with audit findings and amended returns.
The coarser cut still points the same way. Zip 94115, which contains Japantown along with the Western Addition and part of Pacific Heights, collected $5.63 million over the trailing four quarters against $5.24 million in 2019, up 7.4 percent, and it did that while two of its three components were falling. Confidence is high that Japantown’s commercial base grew substantially against a shrinking city, and that the growth is spread across many businesses rather than concentrated in one. Confidence is moderate on how much of it belongs to the six blocks a visitor would call Japantown, which is a question the published boundaries cannot settle.
The Board Files Half as Much as It Did in 1999. It Still Writes Nearly as Much Law.
Twenty years of Board of Supervisors filings, 32,727 of them, are queryable in a vendor archive that quietly stops in 2018. Annual output fell 49 percent. Ordinances fell 18 percent. What the Board shed was the paperwork that binds nobody.
BY EMMETT GRADY, ARCHIVES
The Board of Supervisors introduced 32,727 matters between 1999 and 2018. The annual count fell in twelve of the nineteen year-to-year steps across that run, and no later year ever climbed back to where it began. In 1999 supervisors filed 2,299 items. In 2018 they filed 1,173, a drop of 49.0 percent over twenty years.
A halved legislature sounds like a legislature doing half the work. The type breakdown says otherwise. Ordinances, which are the items that change the Municipal Code and carry the force of law, ran 414 in 1999 and 339 in 2018, down 18.1 percent. Resolutions ran 1,242 and then 455, down 63.4 percent. Ordinances were 18.0 percent of everything filed in 1999 and 28.9 percent by 2018, which is a share that rose because the denominator collapsed under it.
Across the whole twenty years the mix runs: 14,656 resolutions (44.8 percent), 6,827 ordinances (20.9), 5,077 motions (15.5), 4,949 hearings (15.1), 887 communications, 262 charter amendments and 66 reports. A resolution is the instrument for commending a citizen, accepting a grant, taking a position on a bill in Sacramento or naming a day after someone. It is most of what a supervisor files and none of what a supervisor passes into code. Charter amendments, the rarest instrument and the only one that goes to the voters, average 13.1 a year, running from 34 in 2001 down to two in 2013.
Very little of it dies. Of the 32,727 matters, 22,973 are recorded Passed, 7,732 Filed, 1,427 Killed and 166 Failed. That is 70.2 percent passed against 4.4 percent killed. The second-largest status is Filed, at 23.6 percent, which the file records as an outcome without saying how a matter got there, so the pass rate should be read as a measure of what reaches a vote rather than of how often the Board agrees.
One caution governs the whole reading. The archive is a vendor system rather than a city one, and it is frozen: the newest ordinary matter it carries was introduced on 11 December 2018, and file numbers from the 2020s return nothing. The first two years in it are partial, with 1998 climbing from 15 filings in January to 196 in August, so the twenty-year window begins in 1999, the first year of even monthly coverage. Confidence is high that the decline is real within 1999 to 2018, because all four of the main matter types fell over the run and no year after 1999 reached the 1999 total. Whether it continued into the present cannot be checked from this file, and the desk would want the scraped current site before saying so.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. DataSF Sales Tax by Analysis Neighborhood (w6qv-daq5) and Sales Tax by Zip Code (ytk4-yncf), collected by HdL under CDTFA rules, 1,845 rows covering 41 neighborhoods across 2015Q1–2026Q1, pulled 2026-08-05. Japantown 2019 = $1,140,304.01; 2025Q2–2026Q1 = $1,849,528.12 (+62.2%). The 38 neighborhoods with complete coverage in both windows: $166,522,746 → $147,105,843 (−11.7%). Lincoln Park, McLaren Park and Twin Peaks are excluded for suppressed quarters. Japantown quarterly range 2015–2019 $245,072–$306,528; trough 2020Q1 $121,835; 2019 average quarter $285,076; first quarter back above it 2021Q2 at $290,386; peak 2025Q4 at $493,261. Zip 94115: $5,238,416 → $5,625,518 (+7.4%). 2. Dataset description, section D: areas with fewer than four sales-tax-paying businesses, or where one business pays 80% or more of the total, are merged with a neighboring area. Japantown reports separately in all 45 quarters. 3. DataSF Registered Business Locations (g8m3-pdis), pulled 2026-08-05: open in Japantown on 1 July, 655 (2015), 588 (2019), 612 (2021), 669 (2023), 684 (2026); citywide 102,470 (2019) and 100,636 (2026); 305 open locations registered on or after 2021-01-01. Six oldest still-open registrations in date order: Sokoji, 1691 Laguna St, 1950-05-19; Sequoia Living Inc, 1525 Post St, 1958-01-27; Keys Residential Care Homes, 2161 Sutter St, 1968-10-01; Permanente Medical Group Inc, 1635 Divisadero St / 2238 and 2350 Geary Blvd, 1968-10-01; Japanese Community Youth Cncl, 1596 Post St, 1970-05-25; Kimochi Inc, 1715 Buchanan St, 1973-06-27. Cultural district designation from DataSF Cultural Districts (5xmc-5bjj). Full query URLs in receipts.json.
2. San Francisco Board of Supervisors matters via the Legistar Web API (webapi.legistar.com/v1/sfgov/matters), OData, keyless, pulled in 34 pages on 2026-08-05: 33,880 matters total, earliest introduction 1997-02-18, latest ordinary 2018-12-11. Restricted to 1999–2018 the file holds 32,727. Annual totals 2,299 (1999) to 1,173 (2018); ordinances 414 to 339; resolutions 1,242 to 455. The annual series falls in 12 of its 19 year-to-year steps and rises in 7; the highest year after 1999 is 2001 at 2,231. All four main types fall over the run: ordinances −18.1%, resolutions −63.4%, motions 220 to 202 (−8.2%), hearings 345 to 142 (−58.8%). Twenty-year type mix and the charter-amendment series as given. 5. Status counts from the same pull: Passed 22,973, Filed 7,732, Killed 1,427, Failed 166, remainder in committee or procedural states. Coverage caveat verified against the file’s own monthly distribution: 1997 holds 25 records, 1998 ramps from 15 in January to 196 in August, 1999 runs 149–246 a month. Full query URLs in receipts.json.
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