Business

Storefronts, taxes, ships, planes, and payrolls.

Business

Treasure Island’s Shop-Tax Take Is Back to Its 2015 Level: $81,502

The number is sales tax collected, not sales made. On the state’s own quarterly count it more than tripled by 2023, then gave nearly all of it back.

Sep 23, 2026

Business

A Church Street Building Has Paid $3,500 in Vacancy Fines Since 2022

San Francisco’s vacancy tax, which applies only inside the city’s designated shopping districts, charges owners more each year a storefront sits empty. At one Church and Market corner, two units have paid the maximum rate three years running.

Sep 21, 2026

Business

Ruby Princess Is Set to Make 33 of San Francisco’s 89 Cruise Calls

For the second year running, San Francisco’s cruise pier will host more than two dozen different ships. Better than one call in three belongs to the same one, and next year’s schedule already repeats it.

Sep 14, 2026

Business

SFO’s Freighter Fleet Has Lost 64% of Its Cargo Since 2000

Dedicated cargo planes carried about a third of everything that flew as freight through San Francisco International a quarter-century ago. Today they carry about a fifth, and belly holds on ordinary passenger jets carry almost everything else.

Sep 11, 2026

Business

One Union Square Hotel Holds 1 Percent of All San Francisco Addresses

Club Donatello’s 45 rooms have been divided into 2,295 timeshare interests since 1984. That is most of the reason its downtown block logs more separate street addresses than all but one other in the city.

Sep 9, 2026

City Hall

San Francisco's 2004 chain-store law banned El Farolito's 12th shop

The ordinance that invented "formula retail" still bans chains outright in three neighborhoods. Seventeen years after writing North Beach's version of that ban, the former supervisor who wrote it found a way around his own law to let a Mission taquería in.

Aug 24, 2026

Business

Salesforce Tower Filed 7% of San Francisco's H-1B Sponsorships

One office tower accounted for 144 of the city's 2,044 H-1B filings last quarter, more than any other San Francisco address by a wide margin. A year earlier the tower carried more filings in raw terms, 164; what grew was Salesforce's own grip on the building, from three-quarters of its filings to nine in ten, as other tenants there pulled back and nearly all of Salesforce's own filings were renewals, not new hires.

Aug 17, 2026

Business

The Fastest-Growing Till in San Francisco Is in Japantown

Sales tax collected there over the last four quarters ran 62.2 percent above calendar 2019, the largest gain of the 38 neighborhoods with unbroken figures in both windows. Citywide the same measure is down 11.7 percent. The file’s own confidentiality rule rules out a single dominant taxpayer.

Aug 7, 2026

Business

The storefronts that would rather pay

Six years ago the city built a ladder of fines to make an empty storefront expensive — $250 a foot the first year dark, $500 the second, $1,000 the third. The tax records are in now, and they show a growing number of owners climbing to the top and staying put.

Aug 1, 2026

Business

Two of every three new S.F. raises is a fund, not a firm

Companies based in San Francisco filed 100 new private-capital offerings in July. Sixty-eight came from investment funds raising money to deploy, not from businesses raising money to build — and a single automation company took sixty cents of every operating dollar.

Aug 1, 2026

Business

Treasure Island’s Shop-Tax Take Is Back to Its 2015 Level: $81,502

A Church Street Building Has Paid $3,500 in Vacancy Fines Since 2022

Ruby Princess Is Set to Make 33 of San Francisco’s 89 Cruise Calls

SFO’s Freighter Fleet Has Lost 64% of Its Cargo Since 2000

One Union Square Hotel Holds 1 Percent of All San Francisco Addresses

San Francisco's 2004 chain-store law banned El Farolito's 12th shop

Salesforce Tower Filed 7% of San Francisco's H-1B Sponsorships

The Fastest-Growing Till in San Francisco Is in Japantown

The storefronts that would rather pay

Two of every three new S.F. raises is a fund, not a firm

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