The rent is the one thing that didn’t

Vol. I, No. 15 · San Francisco — Friday, July 31, 2026

BY HAZEL WONG, NUMBERS DESK

The price of living in San Francisco climbed 25.2 percent between 2019 and this June, by the federal government’s own index for the metro. The line item the city is defined by — housing — climbed 18.3 percent, slower than anything else in the household budget that carries real weight, and slower than the all-items average it is supposed to be dragging upward.

Rent of a primary residence rose slower still: 16.9 percent over the same seven years. Nationally, housing rose 34.9 percent in that window. San Francisco housing rose at roughly half the country’s pace — an unusual sentence to set in type about the most expensive rental market in America.

So what did the climbing. Energy rose 65.4 percent, with electricity alone up 79 percent through the end of 2024, the last month the metro series prices it. Gasoline rose 52.2 percent. Food rose 39.7 percent — groceries 42.4, restaurants 38.5. Getting around rose 39.6 percent. Recreation, 35.9. Only medical care (12.4 percent) and apparel (10.5) — small corners of the basket — rose less than the roof.

The reason the roof sits at the bottom is that the pandemic emptied it. Rents cratered in 2020 and 2021 as tens of thousands left, and the index still carries that hole; asking rents have clawed back only part of the drop. Because housing is the single heaviest weight in the basket, San Francisco’s near-flat rent pulled the whole city index below the nation’s, which rose 30.6 percent.

Which is the read: the feeling that San Francisco keeps getting more expensive is true, but it is not the lease doing it. It is the power bill, the tank, and the grocery cart — the non-negotiable monthly costs that arrive whether or not the apartment is a bargain. A city can hold the most expensive housing in the country and, across seven years, the slowest-rising.

Confidence is high on the figures, which are the government’s. Two cautions cut the other way: the price index measures shelter as a smoothed, lagging stock — owners’ equivalent rent folded in — so 18.3 percent describes the seven-year drift, not what a tenant signing a lease this week is quoted. And the index records what rose, never why; the exodus rent crater is well documented, but the reading of it is ours, not the data’s.

San Francisco has 173 active mobile-food permits on its curbs. Twenty-four operators hold them, and three of those hold nearly two-thirds. The signature item isn’t the taco. It’s the sandwich.

BY MEL ADLER, COMMERCE DESK

The city’s permitted street-food fleet is smaller than its reputation. As of this week, San Francisco holds 173 active mobile-food permits — 164 trucks and 9 pushcarts — and just 24 distinct operators carry them, out of 123 that have ever held one in the file.

They are not evenly spread. Three operators hold 108 of the 173 permits — 62 percent of the licensed curb. Brazuca Grill holds 38; Natan’s Catering, 37; Ting Ting Mini Mobile Deli, 33. Each permit is a single approved location and schedule, so the leaders run permitted routes across dozens of corners, while the names a passerby would recognize — Señor Sisig, Off the Grid’s own street spots — hold eight apiece.

And the signature dish, in a town that pictures itself in foil-wrapped burritos, is the sandwich. Of the 173 active permits, 113 — 65 percent — list sandwiches among their offerings; 71 list burritos, 50 hot dogs, 38 noodles, and just 37, a little over a fifth, list a taco. Sandwiches outrank tacos on the licensed trucks better than three to one.

The read is a caution about a romance. “Food-truck city” conjures a teeming, rotating fleet; the permit file describes a couple dozen operators, three of them holding most of the concrete, selling mostly a sandwich and a drink to a weekday lunch line. The caveat runs in the paper’s favor: this is the Public Works street-vending file, and it does not count the private-lot pop-up markets, the festival vendors, or the storefront kitchens — the lunch scene is larger than 24. But the public curb, the part the city actually licenses, is held by two dozen names, and mostly by three. Confidence is high on the counts; the rest is a read.