The storefronts that would rather pay

Vol. I, No. 12 · San Francisco — Tuesday, July 28, 2026

BY MEL ADLER, COMMERCE DESK

I keep the obituaries in this shop — the Emporium, the White House, the City of Paris, every storefront that ever went dark and had the decency to die. What I did not have, until this week, was a file for the ones that will not die and will not live: the storefronts held empty on purpose, year after year, by owners who have decided that a shuttered shop is worth more to them than an open one. San Francisco has been taxing exactly that since the voters approved Proposition D in March of 2020, and the ledger of who has paid is a public file called Taxable Commercial Spaces. It is 21,863 lines long, and it is the closest thing the city keeps to a register of deliberate emptiness.

The tax was designed as a ladder, and a clever one. A storefront in one of the named neighborhood commercial districts — a Mission block, a stretch of Castro, an avenue in the Richmond — that sits vacant owes $250 for every linear foot of its frontage the first year. Keep it empty and the rate doubles to $500 the second year, then doubles again to $1,000 the third year and every year after. The theory is a landlord’s arithmetic: sooner or later the fine for doing nothing exceeds the trouble of finding a tenant, and the shop lights up. That is the theory. The file records what actually happened.

In 2022, the tax’s first year in the record, 156 storefronts were declared vacant, and every last one of them sat on the bottom rung, paying $250 a foot — a fresh vacancy is always a first-year vacancy. Follow that cohort forward and you watch it climb. By 2023, 107 storefronts had rolled up to the $500 rate. By 2024, of 241 declared vacant, 131 — a clear majority — were paying $1,000 a foot, the maximum the city can charge, which is to say they had been dark for three years or more and were still dark. Twenty-three storefronts appear as vacant in all three full years running, without interruption. The ladder is working exactly as built; it is simply not producing the effect it was built to produce. It has become less a deterrent than a fee schedule, and a fair number of owners have looked at the bill and decided to keep paying it.

Where they are is its own quiet tell. This is not the downtown vacancy everyone photographs — the tax does not reach the Financial District’s empty towers, only ground-floor storefronts in the designated shopping districts. So the map is of neighborhood main streets: in 2024 the Mission led with 29 declared-vacant storefronts, then Castro/Upper Market with 23, the Outer Richmond, Nob Hill, the Inner Richmond. The top-rate cases — the hardened, three-years-plus vacancies — cluster hardest in Castro/Upper Market and the Mission. One address on Church Street tells the whole arc by itself: 252–258 Church, declared vacant and billed at $250 in 2022, at $500 in 2023, at $1,000 in 2024, its filer of record listed as an entity called SF JV LLC, which turns up on several of the corridor’s empty storefronts at once. Somewhere a spreadsheet has decided the block can wait.

Why would anyone pay the city a thousand dollars a foot to keep a shop empty? The file cannot say, and I will not make it. But the arithmetic is not mysterious to anyone who has buried a lease. A storefront held vacant is a storefront kept clean for a better tenant, or a higher rent, or a redevelopment that pencils only if the ground floor is delivered empty; it is a bet that the corner is worth more sold than let. Against that patience, even the top rate can read as a modest holding cost — the price of not committing. The vacancy tax put a number on emptiness. What these records show is that the number, even doubled and doubled again, was not always large enough to beat waiting. Confidence is high on the counts and on the climb up the rungs; on why each owner holds, that is a read, and offered as one. One caveat the file forces me to print: more than a third of the covered storefronts — 2,731 of 7,158 in 2024 — filed no return at all, so the count of declared vacancies is a floor, not a ceiling. The emptiness we can see is the emptiness someone bothered to admit to.

San Francisco’s blotter shrank by a quarter over four years. In the same stretch, drug arrests tripled. When a single column climbs while the whole page falls, the number has stopped measuring the city and started measuring the department.

BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK

There are, I have always held, three stories in this city — land, water, and who signs the permits — and crime is usually the fourth, which is to say weather. But a number crossed my desk this week that is worth stopping for, because it reads backwards from the way it is usually told. The police incident file records every report the department writes, and in 2025 it wrote 95,545 of them — down from 125,162 in 2021, a fall of nearly a quarter. The city’s blotter, taken whole, is thinning. Inside that shrinking total, one line is doing the opposite.

Drug offenses bottomed out in 2021 at 2,097 — the quiet pandemic year, when the police were doing little of the work that produces them. Then they climbed: 3,668 in 2022, past 4,000 in 2023 and 2024, and last year to 6,712, more than triple the 2021 floor and up 62 percent in the last twelve months alone. Warrant arrests, over the same years, doubled. Set those against a total that fell by a quarter and the shape is unmistakable: these are not categories that move with the city. They move with the department.

The clincher is in how the drug cases close. Of the 6,712 logged last year, 6,537 — 97 percent — ended in a citation or an arrest. These are not crimes a victim called in; almost none of them have a victim. They are encounters an officer chose to make. A drug-offense count, then, is not a measure of how much narcotics moved through San Francisco. It is a measure of where the police were standing and how often they reached out a hand. Read it that way and the geography stops being a surprise and becomes a confession: 84 percent of the year’s drug offenses came from three neighborhoods — the Tenderloin, South of Market, and the Mission — which is precisely the footprint of the downtown enforcement surge the city has been announcing, and re-announcing, since 2023.

None of which tells you whether there is more fentanyl on Turk Street than there was in 2021; the file cannot see the drug, only the arrest, and I will not have it testify past what it knows. What it can tell you is worth the ink: the same years in which San Franciscans reported less crime to their police, the police recorded far more of the one crime they go out and find. The blotter is not the city. It is a diary the department keeps of its own days, and last year the department decided to spend a great many of them downtown. Confidence high on the counts and on the reading — a total falling while proactive categories triple, closed almost entirely by arrest, is about as clean as this evidence gets. What it means for the corner is another story, and a harder one, and not in this file.