Calling all North Beach small businesses: We’ve partnered with San Francisco OEWD & Invest In Neighborhoods to launch a new grant program. Selected businesses will be given free marketing services in the form of custom-made videos, beautifully shot photography, or crafted copywriting.
This program is open to all small businesses in the North Beach boundaries (Pacific to Bay, Jones to Montgomery). Learn more below and please share with your favorite businesses!
Deadline: July 24, 2022
Mayor London Breed joined North Beach Neighbors last week to celebrate the end of our North Beach Delivers program. She surprised a family with a delivery from Piazza Pellegrini, and also shared commendations with the organizers Teddy Kramer, Sri Artham, Danny Sauter, and Eric Dew.
The North Beach Delivers program raised more than $150,000 in revenue for local restaurants across North Beach, Chinatown, and Russian Hill. Thank you to so many of you that ordered each week, to our dedicated volunteers, and to our community partners who believed in our work.
Earlier this year, we released a Small Business Roadmap which contained 5 key recommendations on how to make our neighborhood a place where small businesses can not only survive, but thrive.
Our #1 recommendation was to make more allowances for restaurants and limited restaurants, doing so by changing the period in which a conditional use is required.
Now, we have good news. Our recommendation was adopted!
Moving forward, a conditional use will be required after 36 months of non-use, a significant improved from the previous mark of 18 months. This previous period was too tight, causing many new merchants to be caught in a spiral of endless delays if they missed the 18-month deadline.
Thank you to Aaron Peskin's office for their support on this legislation.
Thank you to the countless small businesses across the northern side of the city who supported our effort.
Thank you to Russian Hill Neighbors and Lower Polk Neighbors who endorsed this and see the value in building strong neighborhoods next to one another.
To be sure, much work remains. With vacancy rates in North Beach now over 20%, we cannot count on one change to reverse an environment which has been breaking down for years. We look forward to continuing to work with city departments, officials, and neighbors to make sure our neighborhood is one which is truly open for business.
We recently released a Small Business Roadmap that includes 5 recommendations for how we believe North Beach can be a community where small businesses not only survive but thrive. We came to these recommendations based on a year of research and conversations.
Now, we're excited to share that two tremendous neighborhood associations have signed on in support of our recommendations.
Lower Polk Neighbors
Russian Hill Neighbors
Their support indicates that our recommendations not only would be valuable to North Beach but to multiple commercial corridors in the Northeast corner of our city that are going through similar challenges and transitions.
We thank each of them for their support and look forward to continuing to work together on this important topic.
"Lower Polk Neighbors supports North Beach Neighbors 5 recommendations for addressing small business health. Much like our neighbors over the hill in North Beach, the Polk Street corridor suffers from too many retail vacancies due to a variety of factors. While we are working hard to improve the public realm through strategic partnerships, we would love to see the bureaucratic burden on small business eased to make it easier for more interim and creative uses of ground floor retail spaces"
-Adam Mayer | Lower Polk Neighbors
"Russian Hill Neighbors is pleased to join North Beach Neighbors in promoting the recommendations in the road map as well as working with NBN to develop additional data, analysis, strategies and recommendations to support thriving small businesses in our neighborhoods."
-Carol Ann Rogers | President, Russian Hill Neighbors
Today, we're releasing a Small Business Roadmap that we believe will help ensure businesses in North Beach not only survive, but thrive.
With a vacancy rate 2x the level of 2015, it's clear the current system isn't working.
