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.