Starting a business in SF is extremely difficult. Proposed process streamlining is not going far enough. Opening a restaurant in the Mission is as tough as opening a strip club & requires a @sfplanning hearing which “community stakeholders” often abuse to harass newcomers.🧵 /1

With the proposed legislation before the @sfbos , restaurant & bar applications within Mission NCT zoning still require a multi-month/year Conditional Use Authorization (CUA) with a public hearing. Nothing is changing! /2

CUA process in the Mission is required for businesses such as “gas station”, “large scale urban agriculture” and “adult business” aka strip clubs. Very disproportionate to apply the same standard for bars and restaurants. /3

Only in the Mission, Planning code has a 179 cap for eating and drinking places (that includes ice cream shops) when we have a heartbreaking 75% vacancy rate from 14th street to Cesar Chavez. /4

BTW imagine needing to figuring out how many “eating places” (cafes, ice cream shops, delis, restaurants) exist, and also determine if more less 25% of street frontage is eating place on your block. Applicants must prove that or be denied. Who came up with this?? /5

This lengthy and costly process (which I have gone through in 2020), subjects merchants like myself to harassment & threats by so-called neighborhood “stakeholders'' who told me I do not belong in the Mission. /6

Examples: what hours we should be open, what color swatches and decorations they approve, details of our menu items. Countless meetings are wasted to appease these demands by random people from unaccountable “coalitions”! /7

I have wasted days & weeks putting together absurd paperwork, 300’ radius research, print shops, producing 1000s of envelopes, campaigned & collected 130 letters of support and 1500 signatures for my business to avoid going bankrupt due to opposition or delays. /8

All of this to open a wine bar restaurant and music venue that supports hundreds of musicians, performers, vendors, farmers, winemakers and my 20 staff. This process is being abused and it is time for it to stop. /9

My recent job posting for a cook got 100s of applications. Working class, immigrants, young dreamers are back but SF can’t place them all. Fellow merchants on the corridor say business is slow, might have to close. More job seekers in the making. /10

As long as a new business follows all the million city building, planning, police, fire and other required codes, this should be streamlined to be outright “Permitted”, end of story. /12

If we truly want to revitalize our commercial corridors, also in the Mission, which is one of the last neighborhoods in the city to recover economically, we need to stop identity politics and uplift ALL. /13

@nazkhorram Maybe it is all of the protection clauses that are the problem. There should be some sort of objective standard to avoid two ice cream shops from opening up on the same street, but the rest should probably be tossed to open stuff up for everyone.

@nazkhorram And of course they won't recognize that if the original members of the Mission had used the same tactics to keep the Mission Irish, they'd be complaining.