Vol. I, No. 40 · San Francisco — Monday, September 21, 2026 · Price: renewed, never replaced

BY MEL ADLER, COMMERCE

Two ground-floor storefronts in the same building at Church and Market Streets, in the neighborhood the city’s own maps label Castro/Upper Market, have not held a paying tenant since 2022.

San Francisco’s Commercial Vacancy Tax charges the owners of empty ground-floor spaces in the city’s designated shopping districts an annual fee. The longer a space sits empty, the more it costs: $250 in a storefront’s first vacant year, $500 in its second, $1,000 in its third. The building’s owner, 210-218 Church I3, LP, has paid that fine on both units every year since 2022 rather than fill them. That is $1,750 per unit over three years, $3,500 combined, now at the top of the scale this desk has observed. A third unit on the same parcel, 212 Church Street, was marked vacant on the identical schedule in 2022 and 2023: $250, then $500. It carries no 2024 filing at all, so this desk cannot say whether it was leased, sold, or folded into 218 Church St before collection resumed this year.

The corner is one of 34 San Francisco storefronts that have sat vacant every year the tax has existed. Fines assessed inside the city’s taxed commercial districts jumped from $39,000 in 2022 to $168,250 in 2024, a 331 percent rise. The count of vacant filings rose far less over the same span, from 156 to 241. Most of that dollar increase is the fee schedule maturing on chronic addresses like this one, not a surge of new vacancies. The tax was built to make emptiness expensive. For some owners, it has become a fixed cost instead.

Two other ground-floor spaces in the same building tell the opposite story. Aquitaine LLC has held 216 Church Street continuously since before 2022, filing occupied every year. Verve LLC has done the same next door at 2101 Market Street. The building is not empty. Only the two units its owner controls directly are.

The pattern is rare but not unique. Of 386 San Francisco storefronts ever flagged vacant under the tax, 34 have now gone three straight years without a tenant. Seven more of them sit along the same run of Market Street between Church and Sanchez. Citywide 2025 filings are still incomplete, so this desk cannot confirm whether the corner’s streak reached a fourth year. The last confirmed filing, for 2024, still shows both units vacant and the fine still climbing.

Confidence is high on every number here: filings are public record, and every total was re-run live against the Treasurer-Tax Collector’s own file. A $1,000 annual fine is small next to what two ground-floor storefronts on Market Street would otherwise cost to lease up or carry, which is the arithmetic the tax is meant to change. The data cannot say why this owner has chosen the fine instead. It can only say that, on this corner, paying it has lasted three years running.