All Jason Yu wants to do is serve ice cream.
But his sweet dream has turned awfully sour — thanks to a San Francisco city government that’s wrapped in red tape and often makes even the simplest idea for a small business shockingly complicated.
Sixteen months after signing a lease on a shop at 20th and Valencia streets — and more than $150,000 in the hole due to rent, a lawyer, an architect and other costs — Yu has nothing to show for it. The walls he wants to paint bright pink are still a dull gray and white. The windows are still boarded up. The space is still empty.
Yu’s entrepreneurial dreams are melting like soft serve on a hot day.
“We’re just trying to make ice cream, you know?” said Yu, 29, a San Francisco native who grew up in Chinatown and is trying to raise two children in this city that’s not particularly friendly to kids or middle-class families or small business owners.
“It’s so simple!” he said incredulously. “And my plans are nowhere near approved.”
Many of us are wondering whether San Francisco commercial corridors — already struggling with a host of major issues including numerous vacant storefronts before the COVID-19 pandemic — can survive. Proposition H on the Nov. 3 ballot will go a long way to help small businesses open in a timely fashion, but more on that later.
Yu’s dream-turned-nightmare began in late 2018 when he decided to open Matcha N’ More, a shop serving green tea-flavored soft serve ice cream along with other treats and nonalcoholic drinks. He landed on a long-vacant storefront at 3591 20th St.
He signed the lease for $7,300 a month in June 2019, figuring he’d be open in a few months. He hired an architect to draw up plans for upgraded electrical and plumbing systems, a front counter and some kitchen equipment. No structural changes were planned, and the outside of the building wouldn’t be touched.
Yu submitted his plans to the Department of Building Inspection in mid-November 2019. But the first step was getting the OK from the Planning Department to operate the ice cream shop — even though a restaurant had already operated there and his shop fit the corridor’s zoning rules.
The Planning Department, like always, required him to notify neighbors of the plan and allowed any one of them within 150 feet to object. Neighbors learned about the project in late February and had until mid-April to complain. And someone did complain, triggering a hearing at the Planning Commission, which can take 12 weeks to schedule. That’s many months of rent flushed away because one neighbor doesn’t like what’s allowed by the city.
San Francisco stands out among American cities for many reasons, and this ridiculous system is sadly one of them.
In Yu’s case, the complaining neighbor was a competing ice cream shop. It doesn’t take a genius to see why that shop might gripe, but nevertheless Yu had to hire a lawyer and wait until the hearing on June 11 to do any more work on his shop.
The hearing quickly became the subject of gobsmacked banter on social media. People live tweeted the ridiculous waste of time with 64 people — 64! — calling to weigh in on the great ice cream shop face-off. Both sides riled up their friends to phone in.
The final caller, No. 64, said, “I support the new business. The whole process is dumb as s—.” And that person may have been the smartest of them all.
After an hour and 15 minutes, the commission secretary said he really wanted some ice cream. The commission voted 7-0 — Matcha N’ More had the right to open. There was, in fact, “no extraordinary or exceptional circumstances in the case,” the Planning Commission said.
Yeah, no kidding. It’s an ice cream shop.
But the Dilbert cartoon come to life had only just begun.
Yu finally got his permit from the Planning Department, but only then could the real work to open his shop begin. Well, in theory. He’s now stuck in the hell that has become San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection.
That department has never been easy to navigate, but now it’s nearly impossible. It had long intended to move its system of paper permits and in-person meetings online and figured the COVID-19 pandemic was reason to rush the changeover.
But as Interim Director Patrick O’Riordan explained in a Sept. 3 letter apologizing to his department’s customers, “The new process didn’t work as intended and increased the workload exponentially on our remote and reduced staff. We now have a significant backlog as a result.”
That backlog totals 3,000 requests for permits.
The department shut down the online system until it can be fixed and went back to mostly reviewing permit requests on paper.
But Mark Hogan, an architect not affiliated with Yu’s project, said that when he tried to book an appointment this week to get permits for a residential remodel, the earliest available time slot was the second week of February.
“We’ve worked with small business owners on renovations where they’ve had to pay land use attorneys tens of thousands of dollars just to get permits to open a small business,” Hogan said. “Our office is actively going after work in other municipalities. ... It’s becoming impossible to do work here.”
Yu can relate. His file was assigned to a plan reviewer at the Department of Building Inspection in late June, and it took about two months for any response — compared with the usual response time of two weeks. The reviewer gave Yu’s architect 30 comments on the plans in late August, and about half of them have been dealt with, according to Daniel Lowrey, deputy director for permit services.
But even once those are resolved, the plans will still need approval from a mechanical plan checker at the Department of Building Inspection, the Fire Department, Public Works and the Department of Public Health.
Yu has asked for a rent break from his landlord, but no dice. He fears he’ll be in the hole by $200,000 or more by the time he can finally open. If that day ever comes.
“For an ice cream shop!” he said.
Thankfully, Prop. H on the November ballot is meant to sweep away some of the hurdles Yu and other small business owners face.
It would make it easier for a wider variety of businesses to open on commercial corridors, expand their ability to operate outside, eliminate the requirement to notify neighbors if their business fits with what’s allowed and require the city to complete its entire review within 30 days. The latter would be largely accomplished by having multiple departments conduct their work simultaneously rather than one by one.
Mayor London Breed, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association and several small business commissioners support the proposition. The only paid opponent is gadfly David Pilpel, who recently lost his appeals to several emergency transit measures. He argued the changes should have been made through the legislative process. The Board of Supervisors could have taken action long ago, but never has — and that’s why the mayor placed it on the ballot.
Sharky Laguana, president of the city’s Small Business Commission, said Yu’s story is “such a horror show,” but that it’s sadly not uncommon in San Francisco. He said the current byzantine process is so complicated and eats up so much money, only those who are wealthy and connected can usually weather it.
“You need to have a quarter million dollars on hand to open a f— ice cream store?” Laguana asked, clearly angry. “San Francisco with all its magic and glory should be the easiest place to open a business in America, and right now it’s among the hardest. In the aftermath of a pandemic, that’s going to be destructive to the city as a whole to maintain that attitude.”
As for Yu, he said he wishes he’d never tried to open his ice cream shop in the first place. Maybe in Daly City instead, he said. Or Pleasanton. Or anywhere else really.
Asked what ice cream flavor would most likely be inspired by City Hall, Yu laughed and said, “Oh my God. It would be very salty!”
One might even call it hard to swallow.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf
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Bid to open S.F. ice cream shop turns into a bitter saga because of byzantine small business rules - San Francisco Chronicle
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