San Francisco’s Van Ness Avenue is full of vacant storefronts, and city officials are blaming past city policies discouraging chain stores in the area. In order to fill those vacancies, city officials have promised to speed any permitting applications for new stores, chain or otherwise.
Google street view shows that 1700 Van Ness Avenue was occupied by a chain store, Staples, in 2013. Note that there is parking the entire length of Van Ness on both sides of the street plus a nice tree-filled center strip.
That’s nice of them, but at least one of the stores that is now vacant used to be a chain store. The Staples at 1700 Van Ness was open in May 2022 but closed by December.
In May, 2022, one month after the busway replaced the tree-filled center strip, two lanes of traffic, and all of the parking on the both side of the street (in that block), the Staples is shown to have survived the imposition to its customers caused by busway construction.
Lots of places in San Francisco closed due to the pandemic, but what makes Van Ness special is not an anti-chain store policy. Instead, it is the $346 million busway that opened in April 2022. This two-mile-long busway converted a six-lane street with plenty of street parking into a street with two exclusive bus lanes, three to four general lanes, and less than half the previous amount of parking.
In September 2022, scaffolding has been erected in front of Stables, possibly so the store can take down its signs in preparation for going out of business.
As a Portland developer once said, “parking drives retail.” If auto drivers can’t park near a business, that business will lose many of its customers. Only a few types of businesses can succeed solely on foot traffic, and there aren’t enough such businesses to fill up the storefronts on Van Ness.
By January 2023, Staples was gone and its red awnings vandalized. At least one Google Street View photo shows that it was closed in December 2022, but that photo isn’t as clear as this one. Office Depot and other office supply stores can still be found in San Francisco, but not on Van Ness Avenue.
When the Van Ness busway opened, I criticized it for costing a lot of money and increasing congestion. To those problems we can add retail shop killer.
I’m curious as to whether the buses are even well utilized and whether FTA has anything to do with this fiasco.
#DOGE take notice! In your line of work, this (i. e., transit in general) is low hanging fruit.