Vol. I, No. 31 · San Francisco — Monday, August 31, 2026 · Price: meter expired 2021

BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK

At the corner of Mission and 11th Streets, San Francisco’s parking officers wrote 540 citations in the year ending in July, more than one a day at a single intersection.

That corner is a sliver of a much larger total. Mission and 11th sits at the northern edge of SFMTA’s Mission boundary. It is close enough to Market Street that a passerby might call the intersection SoMa, not the Mission. The agency’s own neighborhood lines govern every number in this story, though, and they draw the Mission that far north, not only down to the more commonly assumed edge near 16th Street.

Over the same year, the Mission generated $15.5 million in parking-citation revenue, more than any of San Francisco’s 41 neighborhoods. It beat the Financial District/South Beach bucket, SFMTA’s own category bundling downtown’s office towers with the condos and ballpark blocks of South Beach, by $2.5 million, and it out-earned South of Market by nearly two to one. A driver circling for curb space in the Mission is competing with the most heavily ticketed streets in the city.

San Francisco’s neighborhoods split $145.4 million in parking fines over the same twelve months, up 6.6 percent from the year before. The Mission’s $15.5 million was 10.7 percent of that citywide total, from just under 140,000 citations, itself 10.6 percent of every ticket written in the city. The Financial District and South Beach ranked second, at $13.1 million. South of Market was third, at $8.5 million, and the Tenderloin fourth, at $7.6 million.

The Mission’s lead held even as its own numbers moved in different directions. Citations there fell 2.4 percent from the year before, to 139,214, while the fines they carried rose 2.7 percent, to $15.5 million. Fewer tickets for more money apiece is the same direction the whole city moved. Citywide, citation counts grew a modest 1.5 percent while total fines grew 6.6 percent. That gap points to rising fine amounts, more than heavier enforcement, as the main driver of the year’s increase.

The gap is not the product of a harsher rulebook aimed at one neighborhood. Street cleaning is the single largest citation category everywhere in San Francisco, accounting for 38.7 percent of every ticket written in the past year. In the Mission it is 38.5 percent, statistically the same share. Expired meters, residential-permit violations and the rest of the file track just as closely to the citywide mix. The Mission is not policed under a different set of rules. It is a slightly larger version of how every San Francisco neighborhood gets ticketed, and larger, in this city, adds up to $15.5 million a year.

One number in the file needs a caveat before it travels further. The single address that drew the most citations in the Mission was not a curb at all. 42 Hoff Street, an SFMTA-run parking lot, drew 911 citations, most of them coded FACIL CRG, the agency’s own term for a citation written inside one of its facilities rather than on the street. The same code, at a comparable volume, tops the list at SFMTA’s Pierce Street Garage across town. It is a real number, and it is not evidence of an unusually harsh curb outside anyone’s door.

Confidence in the ranking itself is high, drawn directly from SFMTA’s own citation file with no modeling in between. The numbers cannot say why. The Mission’s mix of double-parked deliveries, dense street parking and a busy commercial corridor might draw more patrols, or more patrols might simply find more of what is already there. That is a question for a future edition, not this one.