Vol. I, No. 38 · San Francisco — Wednesday, September 16, 2026 · Price: resolution passed, ordinance pending
BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL
Laundry World has washed clothes at 2799 24th Street since 1968, forty-six years before the city put a name to the block around it.
San Francisco has designated ten Cultural Districts since 2013, each one a Board of Supervisors decision naming a corridor worth protecting. Four of the ten, including the Latino district around Laundry World, were named before the city built any program to support them. The Cultural Districts Program, the office that funds each district and requires it to report on its own health, did not exist until voters created it in 2018. The oldest district is five years older than the agency meant to look after it. No new district has been designated since 2022, so the funding gap that shaped the first four is still the only model city hall has tried.
Voters funded the program in November 2018, when Proposition E passed with 75 percent approval. It set aside about $3 million a year from the city’s hotel tax for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, which now runs the Cultural Districts. Separate hotel-tax money funds arts grants and cultural centers citywide. Four districts already carried the name by then: Japantown (2013), Calle 24 Latino (2014), SoMa Pilipinas Filipino (2016), and Compton’s Transgender (2017). The Transgender district, the first in the world with that name, was founded by three Black trans women: Honey Mahogany, Janetta Johnson and Aria Sa’id.
The city’s own map of the ten districts hints at how informal the earliest namings were. Japantown, Calle 24, SoMa Pilipinas and Transgender are all logged with a designation date rounded to the first of the month. The four districts named after the funded program began carry exact days, down to the date of the vote. Two districts, American Indian and Leather & LGBTQ, carry no designation date in the file at all. That is not certain proof the earliest four were an afterthought. A records clerk could round any date to the first of its month regardless of what actually happened. But it lines up with what happened on the ground: the earliest four each grew out of a years-long neighborhood campaign, and only later became a city process.
Calle 24 shows the gap most clearly. The Board’s May 2014 resolution recognized the corridor’s Latino history, but it carried no legal weight: no restriction on what could open in a storefront, no protection for a business that wanted to stay. Three years later, the Board passed an ordinance creating the Calle 24 Special Use District. It capped new restaurants and bars at 35 percent of commercial frontage within 300 feet, and required a hearing before any legacy business’s storefront could be replaced or merged into something larger. The vote was unanimous.
Erick Arguello has led the corridor’s merchant association since 1999. He helped organize the 2014 campaign, and said the 2017 ordinance finally gave the district “some teeth to be able to preserve the culture and history of the Latino Cultural District.” Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who introduced the 2017 ordinance as her first piece of legislation, compared the district to “Chinatown, North Beach and Japantown,” calling it “a vibrant, thriving neighborhood.”
Whether the pause since Pacific Islander, the last district named, in November 2022, is an ending is not knowable from a designation list alone.
Within Calle 24’s roughly 55 blocks, 4,087 businesses are registered with the city today, found by matching the city’s business registry to the district’s own mapped boundary. That count includes home-based registrations along with storefronts, since the registry does not distinguish the two. Of the 4,087, 2,226, or 54 percent, opened after the 2014 resolution; 1,861 predate it. Neither number proves the 2017 ordinance changed anything on its own, since the registry does not record closures either. It does show a corridor that had already spent three years carrying a name with nothing in the planning code behind it.
Laundry World was open forty-six years before the city named its block a cultural district, and forty-nine years before that name came with a single rule attached.
BART’s Ridership Trails Every Major Bay Area System, Still 49% Below 2019
Every major Bay Area transit system has clawed back most of its pre-pandemic riders. BART, stuck at half of 2019 levels, is the exception.
BY INES CALLOWAY, TRANSIT
A BART train today carries, on average, about half the riders it carried in 2019.
BART’s annual ridership has recovered to 51 percent of its pre-pandemic total, the weakest rebound of any major transit operator in the nine-county Bay Area. The region as a whole is back to 72 percent of 2019 boardings. Muni, San Francisco’s own bus and rail network, is back to 78 percent. Only two of the region’s twenty-one tracked transit operators have recovered less of their ridership than BART. Both are small city systems: Vine Transit in Napa and FAST in Fairfield.
The recovery gap does not track a single obvious cause. SMART, the commuter rail line linking Marin and Sonoma counties, has more than doubled its 2019 ridership. Part of that growth traces to a new station: SMART opened a stop in Windsor in May 2025, its first extension since 2019. SF Bay Ferry and Marin Transit have also passed their 2019 totals. Caltrain, another system built around the downtown office commute, has recovered to 78 percent, about the same as Muni. BART alone remains near half.
MTC’s own operator-level file, pulled fresh tonight, matches its separate regional and per-agency tables. One caveat is worth stating: the file marks this fiscal year’s regional total as built from monthly rather than annual reporting, which could still be revised.
What is not in the file is why BART lags. The system’s stations sit closest to downtown office towers. Office towers’ own return to work has moved slower than the rest of the region’s economy, and this file alone cannot prove the link between the two.
By this measure, BART’s recovery is unlike every other system in the region.
ON THE CALENDAR
Why Are We So Bad at Being Happy? The Psychology of Happiness. A UC Berkeley psychologist’s public talk on why the pursuit of happiness so often backfires. 256 people are registered, up from 31 when this desk first logged it on August 28, and the event is sold out, with zero spots remaining. It’s a one-off lecture, not part of a running series: the calendar shows no other date under the host’s name.
Thursday, September 17, 7:00 PM · Swedish American Hall, Duboce Triangle · Sold out · lu.ma/4ge5bar2
From the desk’s calendar: public Luma pages, counts as of 2:22 a.m., September 15. Tell the desk about the gathering it missed.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. SF Cultural Districts (DataSF, 5xmc-5bjj), queried live tonight for all ten designation dates. Proposition E figures: Ballotpedia, “San Francisco, California, Proposition E, Partial Allocation of Hotel Tax for Arts and Culture (November 2018),” corroborated by KALW and SPUR voter guides. Program-formation and founder facts: Wikipedia, “Calle 24 Latino Cultural District”; KQED and CBS San Francisco on SoMa Pilipinas (April 12, 2016); ABC7 and The Daily Beast on Compton’s Transgender Cultural District. Full queries in receipts.json. 2. Mission Local, Laura Wenus, “A Latino Cultural District on Mission Street? That’s the plan,” March 2019. 3. Mission Local, Laura Wenus, “New Calle 24 Rules Approved, Efforts to Preserve Corridor Continue,” March 15, 2017. 4. Registered business locations (DataSF, g8m3-pdis), matched tonight to the Calle 24 polygon from source 1 using a point-in-polygon query. Full method in receipts.json.
2. MTC Vital Signs, Transit Ridership by Operator and by Region (data.bayareametro.gov, 4ekq-fnkb and dnk3-q5r9), queried live tonight, fiscal years 2019 and 2026, all twenty-one tracked operators. Full ranking and figures in receipts.json. 6. SMART’s Windsor station: web search summary of Pacific Sun and Wikipedia (“Windsor station (California)”) coverage.
The Frisconian · Published from forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality · @deaconsanti