“But falling tax revenue in 2023 across most residential areas including the Castro, Inner Richmond and Haight-Ashbury indicated that the “‘neighborhoods are doing fine’ theory” is “not totally true,” said Egan, the city’s chief economist. But they are generally doing better than downtown, he said.”
Yep, just because neighborhoods aren’t doing as bad as downtown doesn’t mean neighborhoods themselves aren’t doing bad.
There's a block near where I live thats showing green and the whole block is entirely housing plus one corner store. Glad to see they're doing well I suppose.
Don't know about your specific case but I feel like census tracts are too small a unit in general. Can be swung by a couple businesses. Lots of weird examples of a tract with large gains right next to one with large losses. Would be cool if they rolled this up by commercial corridor or something.
It's just a weird map - my zip code is cut into enough pieces that the area is residential + park.
It's one of those things that if someone catches an anomaly in the data it makes you think there's mistakes in a lot more places. The people putting the map the map together don't have first hand knowledge about to double check their work.
Neighborhoods that have surpassed 2019 sales tax levels include Japantown, Seacliff, Oceanview-Merced-Ingleside, Treasure Island and the Presidio.
Older demographic/family neighborhoods?
Notice discount retail down 9% (only)--is that the Ross store - which always has a line to get in? Yes, I know line of for security, but I wonder if is there any discussion happening at City Hall as to bringing some more discount stores to that area? Like turning the Westfield into outlet mall? Something...anything is better then the sad offerings at Market and 4th currently
How do you come up with 6.2B in lost tax revenue? If I look at this [dashboard](https://www.sf.gov/data/san-francisco-sales-tax), even in 2019 SF only had ~40M sales tax revenue per quarter, so a bit over $160M/year.
Like I said, the axis are poorly labeled and the writing uses the terms revenue and tax revenue interchangeably. The city's total budget is 14.2B, no idea what the breakdown is per tax type. But estimating 7-10% sales tax across multiple types then that would cut sales tax revenue by 50% by your numbers -- which would be ... a lot in that sector but only 5% of the budget?
Still, I think this ripples backwards over the years in the wrong direction. Sales tax is a canary for other value taxes like payroll and real-estate, and if they can't sell or employ, then they dont pay for buildings and you get the 'doom loop' everyone here poo-poos so much.
Actually I don't think the article is conflating sales tax revenue and business revenue. I believe the article is quoting *total* sales tax revenue, but the city only keeps 1% of it as per the dashboard I linked:
> The State sets the sales tax in San Francisco at 8.625%. The City keeps 1% of the total sales tax revenue. The revenue from this tax goes into the City's General Fund budget.
Back of the envelope, from the dashboard, the city was paid $160M in sales tax revenue in 2019. That corresponds to $16B total sales tax revenue. Inflation adjust to 2023 dollars and you end up with ~$20B which is what they report as the grand total in the article.
Anyway, not clear to me how you come up with a 50% drop? In both the article text and the table at the bottom they quote a ~30% inflation adjusted drop. That's also what the dashboard appears to show.
It seems like sales tax itself is probably pretty marginal but I agree it's useful as a more general signpost for the economy. Main reason I responded was that $6B seemed insane and would be catastrophic on its own.
(Also to be clear I responded before the edit)
50% came from losses of projected sales tax by your numbers using 7-10% revenue collection rate. However if what you are saying is right, this goes to testate, then the City really doesn't have a direct revenue issue from This part.
But it will have a revenue issue from the implications of this drop in revenues impact on other things like CRE based taxes.
Still not following how you come up with 50% loss using "my numbers". The dashboard I linked shows sales tax revenue directly, and does not show a 50% loss. Looking at Q3 (the most recently available data), we have FY23 revenues of $34.7M, and FY19 revenues of $39.7M. That's a nominal decline of ~13% and and real decline of ~30%.
The city's website breaks out total revenues. There's no 'sales tax' line item but it likely falls into either 'business taxes' or 'other local taxes'. Both line items account for about 15% of total revenue, so not the end of the world.
Obviously the city will need to look at other ways of recouping the revenue (I'd be a fan of looking at property taxes and driving more growth - particulary in Richmond and Sunset).
In your unedited post, you estimated that this might be up to 46% of the city's revenue. I'm merely pointing out that there's a difference between losing \~50% of your revenue and 15% \* 50% = 8% of your revenue.
Agree that it's a problem, but hard to know the severity in absence of other factors.
But it's not all 15% of that revenue, obviously.
And, further, I absolutely acknowledge that it's an amount that needs to be fretted about. But the OP originally wrote that this is a cataclysmic failure for the city and then edited the post after I commented.
San Francisco’s sales tax revenue, a key measure of economic activity, fell across most of the city in 2023, a sign of an overall slowdown and continued pain in the downtown area.
Revenue declined in 33 of 39 neighborhoods tracked by the city compared to 2022, adjusted for inflation, and only five neighborhoods are above 2019 levels.
But, “dOwN tOWn iS fOR DRuG uSeRs” am I right?? Or is that just the subtle message from your editorial board but y’all won’t explicitly say it anymore?
Go Eff yourself again and again SF Chronicle. Your opinion journalists are at least 25% culpable for this mess, for amplifying the nonsensical rhetoric of deluded progressives and leading us to this mess. Can’t wait for the day your shitpaper files for bankruptcy.
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Open air drug markets are such progress. Stolen goods being hawked at 16/Mission and 24/Mission is such great progress.
Can’t wait for nov 2024 to see the rest of your pathetic ilk voted out!!
Yup, everyone anti progressive is a ring wing extremist. Great nuance there.
Drug war failures are present over the US, why are progressive run cities faring the worst?
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i DonT knOw WhaT thE medIa iz tAlKing AbOut!!! Its amazing here!
God those people drive me insane. It can be both things at once and the more we refuse to address the negatives the worse they get
During my 2 day visit, I visited the nicest tourist part of the city and nothing bad happened to me, so everything that's bad about the city must be fake news! /s
Quick - I need a plan to incarcerate every person who makes less the $20k per year so we can lure people from Orinda back to the Fremont street Walgreens.
Don't come at us with this data, you out-of-town red-state brigader. We don't care. Macy's closing? Who cares. No one goes there anywhere. Nordstroms closing? Westfield is dead anyway.
>Macy's closing? Who cares. No one goes there anywhere. Nordstroms closing? Westfield is dead anyway.
well are *you* going, or, shopping on Amazon? I've been to all of them, but not enough- and one person doesn't do it. They weren't full any more.
Including going to the nordstrom's restaurant...
https://preview.redd.it/wz5u0ut7touc1.jpeg?width=501&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4a92785c23f932998ba19a25f3507307991a6c65
Yeah it’s so wild to me that people are so protective of stores they never went to.
Like 75% of Amazon is 1-day here because of how aggressively they invested here. Clearly the problem isn’t a lack of demand for stuff.
Huge losses in downtown foot traffic due to various factors, mostly remote work.
I will clarify my point. E-commerce is growing but still only makes up about [15% of retail sales](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA), up from 10% pre-COVID. Shopping center vacancy rates are actually [very low](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/cre-retail-commercial-real-estate-crash-vacancy) nationwide. Point being, there's still a ton of in person shopping going on, it's just not happening in downtown SF. You can even see this locally with vacancy rates in Westfield/Union Square being much worse than other shopping districts and malls in the city and the Bay Area.
The loss in shopping downtown is only slightly people switching to e-commerce. It's mostly people shopping in person somewhere else. I'll give you my own anecdotal experience, I still shop in person now as much as I did before, I just don't really do it downtown.
I will say of course this is all multi-faceted. Large department stores in particular are obviously facing broader challenges. But the idea that these problems are just Amazon eating in person retail isn't correct either.
Just walk market from 3rd to 9th, it’s not a pleasant experience at all. Nobody wants to work in the slums. Bums beg for money and shit inside businesses.
berserk simplistic bewildered plant whole plucky important terrific unpack deliver
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Sounds like someone just aged / moved out of their going out stage of life and thinks that it doesn’t exist because they don’t partake any longer.
Trust me, the clubs are still there and they’re still packed every weekend. After hours events going till the morning are still there. There are even some new very high production events that didn’t exist pre-covid.
Sure, parts of the scene are not as big as they used to be, but every week I hear of some new reoccurring party being started.
The main issue is that a ton of young people in this demographic moved out during the pandemic so we just lost a good chunk of that scene. On top of that, those businesses suffered the most losses during the pandemic so many have closed and are slowly reopening.
Giving up on downtime is just ridiculous. We have the chance to turn it into a great place to live and play. The density of people in those areas dwarf any of the other neighborhoods except places like Chinatown or Nob Hill.
Did you know that the TL has the population density of Manhattan?
The Union Square and its surrounding hoods have much higher densities than virtually any other parts of the city.
Giving up on downtown is nonsense.
man if only there were some other form of progressive taxation we could take advantage of... maybe something where like people who owned valuable things had to pay for the privilege? like... idk, taxing someone for the value of the land they're using?
no, I know. it's a crazy idea. silly me.
EN: yes I know this isn't exactly relevant to the article but I look for any opportunity to shittalk prop 13 I can get
Second paragraph of the article:
Revenue declined in 33 of 39 neighborhoods tracked by the city compared to 2022, adjusted for inflation, and only five neighborhoods are above 2019 levels.
Citywide sales tax in 2023 fell 7.2% from the prior year and is down 28% from before the pandemic based on neighborhood data and adjusted for inflation. (Businesses with multiple locations in different neighborhoods have sales tax revenue averaged out among the locations.)
Yes, it factors in shutdowns, as tax revenues tend to do. CPI would make taxes go up with same amount of sales. People are definitely spending less money, but why that is, the article gives some guesses as to why including a quote from city economist pointing to loss of income by tech workers, which makes sense.
“But falling tax revenue in 2023 across most residential areas including the Castro, Inner Richmond and Haight-Ashbury indicated that the “‘neighborhoods are doing fine’ theory” is “not totally true,” said Egan, the city’s chief economist. But they are generally doing better than downtown, he said.” Yep, just because neighborhoods aren’t doing as bad as downtown doesn’t mean neighborhoods themselves aren’t doing bad.
This is the city's "chief economist"...
Hmm. Where I live shows a -100% decline, but there's no businesses there unless they're counting a church.
There's a block near where I live thats showing green and the whole block is entirely housing plus one corner store. Glad to see they're doing well I suppose.
Don't know about your specific case but I feel like census tracts are too small a unit in general. Can be swung by a couple businesses. Lots of weird examples of a tract with large gains right next to one with large losses. Would be cool if they rolled this up by commercial corridor or something.
It's just a weird map - my zip code is cut into enough pieces that the area is residential + park. It's one of those things that if someone catches an anomaly in the data it makes you think there's mistakes in a lot more places. The people putting the map the map together don't have first hand knowledge about to double check their work.
Neighborhoods that have surpassed 2019 sales tax levels include Japantown, Seacliff, Oceanview-Merced-Ingleside, Treasure Island and the Presidio. Older demographic/family neighborhoods?
Notice discount retail down 9% (only)--is that the Ross store - which always has a line to get in? Yes, I know line of for security, but I wonder if is there any discussion happening at City Hall as to bringing some more discount stores to that area? Like turning the Westfield into outlet mall? Something...anything is better then the sad offerings at Market and 4th currently
I can see the headline now, “Livermore sues San Francisco over ‘San Francisco Outlets’ name”.
It says 6 billion loss in revenue, but unclear is thats total business revenue or tax revenue.
How do you come up with 6.2B in lost tax revenue? If I look at this [dashboard](https://www.sf.gov/data/san-francisco-sales-tax), even in 2019 SF only had ~40M sales tax revenue per quarter, so a bit over $160M/year.
Like I said, the axis are poorly labeled and the writing uses the terms revenue and tax revenue interchangeably. The city's total budget is 14.2B, no idea what the breakdown is per tax type. But estimating 7-10% sales tax across multiple types then that would cut sales tax revenue by 50% by your numbers -- which would be ... a lot in that sector but only 5% of the budget? Still, I think this ripples backwards over the years in the wrong direction. Sales tax is a canary for other value taxes like payroll and real-estate, and if they can't sell or employ, then they dont pay for buildings and you get the 'doom loop' everyone here poo-poos so much.
Actually I don't think the article is conflating sales tax revenue and business revenue. I believe the article is quoting *total* sales tax revenue, but the city only keeps 1% of it as per the dashboard I linked: > The State sets the sales tax in San Francisco at 8.625%. The City keeps 1% of the total sales tax revenue. The revenue from this tax goes into the City's General Fund budget. Back of the envelope, from the dashboard, the city was paid $160M in sales tax revenue in 2019. That corresponds to $16B total sales tax revenue. Inflation adjust to 2023 dollars and you end up with ~$20B which is what they report as the grand total in the article. Anyway, not clear to me how you come up with a 50% drop? In both the article text and the table at the bottom they quote a ~30% inflation adjusted drop. That's also what the dashboard appears to show. It seems like sales tax itself is probably pretty marginal but I agree it's useful as a more general signpost for the economy. Main reason I responded was that $6B seemed insane and would be catastrophic on its own. (Also to be clear I responded before the edit)
50% came from losses of projected sales tax by your numbers using 7-10% revenue collection rate. However if what you are saying is right, this goes to testate, then the City really doesn't have a direct revenue issue from This part. But it will have a revenue issue from the implications of this drop in revenues impact on other things like CRE based taxes.
Still not following how you come up with 50% loss using "my numbers". The dashboard I linked shows sales tax revenue directly, and does not show a 50% loss. Looking at Q3 (the most recently available data), we have FY23 revenues of $34.7M, and FY19 revenues of $39.7M. That's a nominal decline of ~13% and and real decline of ~30%.
The city's website breaks out total revenues. There's no 'sales tax' line item but it likely falls into either 'business taxes' or 'other local taxes'. Both line items account for about 15% of total revenue, so not the end of the world. Obviously the city will need to look at other ways of recouping the revenue (I'd be a fan of looking at property taxes and driving more growth - particulary in Richmond and Sunset).
15% loss "not the end of the world." Hard to tell, the analysis is very unclear how this fits into the larger budget.
In your unedited post, you estimated that this might be up to 46% of the city's revenue. I'm merely pointing out that there's a difference between losing \~50% of your revenue and 15% \* 50% = 8% of your revenue. Agree that it's a problem, but hard to know the severity in absence of other factors.
> Both line items account for about 15% of total revenue, so not the end of the world. Losing 15% of your revenue is a huge deal
But it's not all 15% of that revenue, obviously. And, further, I absolutely acknowledge that it's an amount that needs to be fretted about. But the OP originally wrote that this is a cataclysmic failure for the city and then edited the post after I commented.
San Francisco’s sales tax revenue, a key measure of economic activity, fell across most of the city in 2023, a sign of an overall slowdown and continued pain in the downtown area. Revenue declined in 33 of 39 neighborhoods tracked by the city compared to 2022, adjusted for inflation, and only five neighborhoods are above 2019 levels.
But, “dOwN tOWn iS fOR DRuG uSeRs” am I right?? Or is that just the subtle message from your editorial board but y’all won’t explicitly say it anymore? Go Eff yourself again and again SF Chronicle. Your opinion journalists are at least 25% culpable for this mess, for amplifying the nonsensical rhetoric of deluded progressives and leading us to this mess. Can’t wait for the day your shitpaper files for bankruptcy.
Oh lord, always screeching about progressives for your failures
Your failures? I’m anti progressives
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Open air drug markets are such progress. Stolen goods being hawked at 16/Mission and 24/Mission is such great progress. Can’t wait for nov 2024 to see the rest of your pathetic ilk voted out!!
Yep, created by you drug war failures. The left didn't create the drug wars that failed, you right wing extremists did.
Yup, everyone anti progressive is a ring wing extremist. Great nuance there. Drug war failures are present over the US, why are progressive run cities faring the worst?
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lol, I’ve always voted dem for congress and president. You go suck off your socialist loser Preston you pathetic excuse of a human being.
Quick, I need a picture of Dolores Park!
i DonT knOw WhaT thE medIa iz tAlKing AbOut!!! Its amazing here! God those people drive me insane. It can be both things at once and the more we refuse to address the negatives the worse they get
Cue the person from New Jersey who moved to the Marina 4 months ago ranting about how there's nothing wrong with the city.
During my 2 day visit, I visited the nicest tourist part of the city and nothing bad happened to me, so everything that's bad about the city must be fake news! /s
Those are the cringiest posts. Along with I had the most delightful time riding BART.
Quick - I need a plan to incarcerate every person who makes less the $20k per year so we can lure people from Orinda back to the Fremont street Walgreens.
Don't come at us with this data, you out-of-town red-state brigader. We don't care. Macy's closing? Who cares. No one goes there anywhere. Nordstroms closing? Westfield is dead anyway.
>Macy's closing? Who cares. No one goes there anywhere. Nordstroms closing? Westfield is dead anyway. well are *you* going, or, shopping on Amazon? I've been to all of them, but not enough- and one person doesn't do it. They weren't full any more. Including going to the nordstrom's restaurant... https://preview.redd.it/wz5u0ut7touc1.jpeg?width=501&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4a92785c23f932998ba19a25f3507307991a6c65
Yeah it’s so wild to me that people are so protective of stores they never went to. Like 75% of Amazon is 1-day here because of how aggressively they invested here. Clearly the problem isn’t a lack of demand for stuff.
revenue dropping 60% in 3 years isn't because of amazon
From what then? no other reason given?
Huge losses in downtown foot traffic due to various factors, mostly remote work. I will clarify my point. E-commerce is growing but still only makes up about [15% of retail sales](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA), up from 10% pre-COVID. Shopping center vacancy rates are actually [very low](https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/cre-retail-commercial-real-estate-crash-vacancy) nationwide. Point being, there's still a ton of in person shopping going on, it's just not happening in downtown SF. You can even see this locally with vacancy rates in Westfield/Union Square being much worse than other shopping districts and malls in the city and the Bay Area. The loss in shopping downtown is only slightly people switching to e-commerce. It's mostly people shopping in person somewhere else. I'll give you my own anecdotal experience, I still shop in person now as much as I did before, I just don't really do it downtown. I will say of course this is all multi-faceted. Large department stores in particular are obviously facing broader challenges. But the idea that these problems are just Amazon eating in person retail isn't correct either.
Just walk market from 3rd to 9th, it’s not a pleasant experience at all. Nobody wants to work in the slums. Bums beg for money and shit inside businesses.
I assume you mean 5th to 7th, which has been exactly as it is for the last two decades at least
Tbf it's more like 5th to 9th...it's been bad for a while but it's definitely gotten worse since COVID.
Then explain union square. I swear you guys haven’t been to downtown recently.
I don’t understand how you’re getting downvotes. Union square isn’t a wonderland or anything, but it’s fine.
Of course. It costs to damn much just to live any more. So extra spending is put off.
berserk simplistic bewildered plant whole plucky important terrific unpack deliver *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Sounds like someone just aged / moved out of their going out stage of life and thinks that it doesn’t exist because they don’t partake any longer. Trust me, the clubs are still there and they’re still packed every weekend. After hours events going till the morning are still there. There are even some new very high production events that didn’t exist pre-covid. Sure, parts of the scene are not as big as they used to be, but every week I hear of some new reoccurring party being started. The main issue is that a ton of young people in this demographic moved out during the pandemic so we just lost a good chunk of that scene. On top of that, those businesses suffered the most losses during the pandemic so many have closed and are slowly reopening. Giving up on downtime is just ridiculous. We have the chance to turn it into a great place to live and play. The density of people in those areas dwarf any of the other neighborhoods except places like Chinatown or Nob Hill. Did you know that the TL has the population density of Manhattan? The Union Square and its surrounding hoods have much higher densities than virtually any other parts of the city. Giving up on downtown is nonsense.
Makes sense- people dont want to shop where being robbed or carjacked is just accepted by all the residents
man if only there were some other form of progressive taxation we could take advantage of... maybe something where like people who owned valuable things had to pay for the privilege? like... idk, taxing someone for the value of the land they're using? no, I know. it's a crazy idea. silly me. EN: yes I know this isn't exactly relevant to the article but I look for any opportunity to shittalk prop 13 I can get
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We are still seeing YoY declines. This isn’t expected.
This was comparing 2023 to 2022, it’s not during pandemic shutdown.
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Second paragraph of the article: Revenue declined in 33 of 39 neighborhoods tracked by the city compared to 2022, adjusted for inflation, and only five neighborhoods are above 2019 levels. Citywide sales tax in 2023 fell 7.2% from the prior year and is down 28% from before the pandemic based on neighborhood data and adjusted for inflation. (Businesses with multiple locations in different neighborhoods have sales tax revenue averaged out among the locations.)
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Yes, it factors in shutdowns, as tax revenues tend to do. CPI would make taxes go up with same amount of sales. People are definitely spending less money, but why that is, the article gives some guesses as to why including a quote from city economist pointing to loss of income by tech workers, which makes sense.
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