A sign for San Francisco's season

Notices of small business closings along busy, effervescently gentrifying San Francisco streets pop up all the time these days. Few equal in grace this one from the long time proprietor of Ali Baba.

Let's hope Husein Dawah is correct that a successor enterprise will open soon. It's a puzzling and painful fact of this morphing city that many, many of the businesses which close are not rapidly replaced. The commercial streets with heavy foot traffic are dotted with empty storefronts.

We tend to blame greedy landlords and there seems to be something to this. According to SFist,

"A lot of [landlords] have unrealistic goals as to what the value of the property is," says Daniel Bergerac speaking to Hoodline. Bergerac is a Castro business owner and the outgoing president of the Castro Merchants association, and he suggests that in the current retail environment, local landlords seem to want too much out of their properties — and holding out for tenants who can pay instead of lowering the asking rent is leaving more properties empty longer.

The same article suggests that more and more building owners are absentees: perhaps their parents owned a building with flats and retail space; the inheriting generation just hands the rental over to a property management company to squeeze for cash.

And then there is the city permitting process, a nightmare as anyone who has dealt with it and with building inspection can testify. (I don't know quite when the latter got so bad; when I stopped doing remodels around 1990, inspectors were mostly old hands who understood balancing the codes with the realities of old structures. Apparently no more.)

The same SFist article suggests that the new residents don't get out much, defaulting to Instacart, Door Dash, and Netflix. Well maybe -- but anyone who has tried to walk on Valencia Street of an evening will doubt that lack of traffic is keeping storefronts empty.

And, of course, there is the fact of people who live on streets, getting by miserably in the gilded city, and often sleeping in the doorways of the vacancies.

The vacant storefront situation is so acute that our politicians have ordered a census of the problem and threaten to penalize landlords who hold out retail spaces.

We're seeing market failure here among the glitter. At some point, it ought to valuable to all the money floating around here to use these spaces to make more money -- but for now we're out of equilibrium.