imagine working anywhere else but in sannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn >> this is the regular meeting of the small business commission held on july 26, 2021. the meeting is being called to order at 4:32 p.m. the small business commission thanks media services and sfgov tv for televising the meeting which can be viewed on sfgov tv 2 or live streamed at sfgov.org. members of the public who will be calling in, the number is 415-655-0001,. the access code is 146 399 4657.

press pound and then pound again to be added to the line. when connected, you will hear the meeting discussion, but you will be muted and in listening mode only. when your item of interest comes up, dial star 3 to be added to the speaker line. if you've dialled star 3 before public comment is called, you will be added to the queue. when you are called for public comment, please mute the device that you are listening to the meeting on. when it is your time to speak, you will be profrmented to do so. best practices are to call from a quiet location and speak clearly and slowly and again, turn down the device you are listening to the meeting on. public comment during the meeting is limited to 3 minutes per speaker unless otherwise established by the presiding officer of the meeting. and an alarm will sound once the

time has finished. speakers are requested but not required to state their name. sfgov tv, please show the office of small business slide. >> today we'll begin with a reminder that the small business commission is the official public forum to raise your questions about the policies that affect economic vitality. the office of small business is the best place to get answers about doing business in san francisco during the emergency. find us online or via telephone. as always, the services are free of charge. before item number one is called, i would like to start by thanking media services and sfgov tv for coordinating the virtual hearing and the live stream and a special thanks to matthew for assisting with the public comment line. please call item number one. >> item one is roll call and call to order. commissioner adams is absent.

commissioner dickerson? >> here. >> commissioner dooley? i think so she is having issues. commissioner huie is absent. commissioner laguana? >> commissioner zouzounis? >> present. >> commissioner ortiz-cartagena. >> present. >> will you do the ramaytush ohlone land acknowledgment, please? >> it would be my honor. the san francisco business commission and office of small business acknowledges we are on the unseated ancestral homeland of ramaytush ohlone who are the original inhabitants. in accordance with their traditions, the ramaytush ohlone

who have never ceded nor lost their caretakers as well as for people who reside in the traditional territories, as guests we recognize we benefit from living and working on the traditional homeland. we wish to pay respects by acknowledging the ancestors, relatives and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. >> wonderful. thank you. please call item number two please. >> clerk: item two is presentation, status of reopening the san francisco economy. san francisco chief economist will review the current status of san francisco's economy. this is a discussion item. and presenting to you tonight is ted egan, chief t city's chief economist in the office of the controller. ted, let me give you presentation control.

>> great. ted, welcome back. it is a pleasure to have you. please, you have to floor. >> thank you, commissioner. good afternoon, commissioners. i am going to be sharing my screen now. hopefully you can see that. let me full screen. okay, great. last week our office released the second of what we intend to be a monthly series of reports that is tracking various aspects of the city's changing economy. the reason for doing that we know as the vaccinations increased and the restrictions br loosening, the economy would change fairly quickly and we wanted to public and decision makers to be apprised of the various ways it is changing. these presentations or these reports take the form of a

monthly deck of charts with some summaries. and i'll walk through what we have introduced or released last week. and i am happy to take any questions from the commission at any time. i think some of the highlights of this week's -- i'm sorry, this month's report -- from our standpoint and in each month there is both a combination of news we think is relatively good news and news that continues to be concerning. among the good news items in june was the jobs report. we had 17,200 jobs gained in the san francisco metrocommission. we are still 100,000 jobs below the pre-pandemic level of february 2020, but that is a very strong month. it is the strongest month we have had since last june. i would also mention that not just in the local economy and the national economy is

hospitality. hospitality locally added 7,000 of the 17,000 jobs. so it is proportionately benefitted from the job growth last month. one of the more vastly improving local ind kay, to i would say s the hotel industry -- indicators, i would say, is hotel occupancy. 45% of the rooms pre-covid were occupied during the week of july h. the reason i make that distinction is they are not all open now, but if you define occupancy as a share or the pre-pandemic hotel rooms were open, we reached 45% which is quite a bit higher than it was a couple of months ago. it was well below the pre-pandemic average of 80%, but it is moving in the right direction and a little faster than other indicator. one of the ones that is still a bit struggling is weekly office attendance. we track this by looking at the data from a company that tracks

the security card swipes at office buildings, so they know how many people are entering office buildings during a given week, and they have metrowide indexes for 10 of the major metro areas in the united states. and san francisco lags all of those other metro areas. however, it did increase to 20% occupancy or 20% attendance -- i'm sorry. it came close to 20% during the last week that we looked at. that's an improvement. it is still lagging other metro areas. other concerning news from the office sector is the office vacancy rate. this isn't people showing up at their offices, but this is firms letting go of the office space or choosing not to renew their leases. that office vacancy rate now tops 20% over the april-june period, which is a relatively very high number.

that indicates continuing weak office demand. similarly, another downtown measure that is struggling is bart traffic. less than 20% of bart ridership over bart ridership is less than 20% of normal. other measures of transportation like people traveling over the bridge or traffic congestion are much closer to pre-covid levels. but not bart attendance. or bart ridership. this is a list of indicators in the report. i'm not going to go through this, but this is to highlight some of the things i'll be pointing at. one of the things that we are tracking on a monthly basis is a measure of the amount of time san franciscans spend outside of their home. and this is based on data from google mobility that ultimately comes from people's cell phones and knowing whether or not they are in their homes. this is an important indicator because it changed rapidly at the start of the pandemic when people are staying home and it

is a good measure of people's willingness to go outside or their feelings about mixing in outdoor groups again, so it is important this come back to normal, and one of the good things for the city's economy and one of the important step is that it is moving back toward normal. people were spending about 40% less time outside of their home in spring of 2020. that's now only about 15%. so there is a bit of a way to go. we're still lagging the state somewhat, but this is one where we're moving in the right direction. in terms of people's willingness to stay outside the house. this is the data on office attendance. the security card swipe data that i mentioned and here in this chart we are just showing san francisco comparing to the san jose area, which is also relatively weak, and new york which is also relatively weak, but los angeles which is doing better and metro austin which is doing quite a bit better. generally, you've seen increased improvements in a lot of other

areas. our improvement is a bit slower than some other major metro areas. but we started from a bigger shutdown at the start of the year. so we have further to go. this is just the little bit of perspective on the city's office vacancy rates over the past year and a half. we had, of course, a very low office vacancy rate around 5% at the start of the pandemic in early 2020. that's risen significantly each quarter up to 20%. i think the growth from just above 15% to 20% surprised a lot of people who aren't in the market. i found it to be a surprising jump, but we are continuing to see large office tenants releasing space onto the sublease market.

and increasing the overall vacancy rate. this is a new indicator that we are releasing this month, which we will continue to release going forward. it comes from a survey that the census bureau conducts of small businesses around the country every two weeks. and they release data nationally at the metro area level. and this is what they call the expected recovery index about how small businesses are feeling about the amount of time it will take for things to get normal in their businesses. and the good news s of course, it's been increasing. and it was prettily close to as low as it can get, minus 1 at the start of the pandemic.

zero is kind of low so we are not overall feeling good about where things are nationally. we are closer to the national level and what week you are looking at. and moving increasingly upward from the heart indicator and it matches what other areas are tracking. and another indicator that we hope to add to the report is knew business formation and by the office of treasurer and tax collector and counting new registrations we have each month. numbers are down relative to the pandemic and people may be surprised how strong new business formation that we are

seeing between 800 and 1200 a month which is fairly healthy in terms of new business formation. another indicator that is healthy but i also think is a sign of concern and it's good news but also raises questions is the data on consumer spending. this is an index of consumer spending in san francisco relative to the pre-pandemic period and it comes from a company called affinity which is tracking credit and debit card spending. and the opportunity inside harvard is providing so much valuable realtime data for government across the country. and this indicator is interesting because really it was in may that we reached above pre-covid levels of consumer spending by san francisco residents. so the economic problems cannot be laid at the door of the san

francisco residents having spending power. we are lacking tourists and commuteers and we are lacking some residents, but the ones that are here are spending more than before. when we look at other ind kaytors of small business opening -- indy 500 -- of indicators, it is not by lack of spending of san francisco residents whose incomes have held up very well all things considered. this is the job status that i mentioned. we are showing a little bit of perspective on how many jobs were lost by the two county metro area and where we are. we continue to add jobs every month since january. i mentioned june was a healthy month with 17,000 jobs. we still have a way to go. we need five or six more months like that before we get back to normal. and i don't think it will happen in the next five months. although, there's no reason not to hope.

that would be very good news. we are also tracking the san francisco unemployment rate. one of the things that's interesting is how much the unemployment rate has come down while the job numbers have not gone up as much. when there is a discrepancy, i tend to trust the job numbers. there is a little bit of math involved with the unemployment number. it is not something the government directly observes, whereas the job number is a much more direct administrative number crunching exercise, but for what it's worth, the job numbers and -- the unemployment rate has been around 5% for the past few months. that's quite good for a recession. it is not the 2% that we have had before the pandemic. but it is much better than it was at the start of the pandemic. this is the hotel occupancy number that i mentioned. we're looking at this on a total

inventory basis counting all the hotel rooms in the city, not just the hotels that have chosen to open. i mention that we had 80% attendance of hotels before the pandemic. now we are around 45%. that is quite a bit better than where we were in february when we were south of 2%, but on the other hand, july 4 is a big tourist time. so it's getting better. it still has a long way to go. something that is interesting about the hotel story is that rates are increasing as well. they are not increasing a lot. they are up from just north of $100 a night in february up to about $170 a night. again, much less than where they were before the pandemic, but it is interesting that hotels are able to raise rates and increase occupancy which is a sign of recovering demand, albeit slowly recovering.

and of course, vital to the local tourism industry is getting people to ride on airplanes to san francisco airport. that is also moving in a good direction after levelling off in january. again, quite a bit below where it was pre-covid. we're at about 1/3 of pre-covid traffic. we're still seeing suppressed numbers because of restrictions on international travel and frankly, air travel is a form of transportation that people were very averse to during the pandemic. and there's going to be some changes in consumer psychology before we start to see very big changes in air travel. air travel in the tourism industry sort of go hand in glove. we need the tourism industry to get back on its feet and totally open to give people a reason to come to san francisco. and we need people to fly here before the businesses have a

reason to fully reopen. but at least that virtual circle, if you like, is starting to move in the right direction. again, we have a ways to go. one of the areas of tourism that remains a concern and i think people expect, frankly, to remain a concern is moscone bookings. we didn't see much change from the previous month. this is a forward look at the bookings that we have and number of events through the end of 2024. right now we don't have anything like the numbers that we had before the pandemic. again, you've got the air travel problem. you have concern about gatherings in large groups, and then you also have businesses and associations dealing with the logistics of reopening and getting back to work and moving into the office, and perhaps it's the case that the conventions are not everybody's highest priority at the moment. there is also a lag time in getting them booked.

so this may be a segment of the tourism industry that takes longer to recover. a few data points about transportation. we started tracking the easiest way, i think, for us to look at how many people are driving in the city is to look at freeway speeds. and this is a chart of the average freeway speed during evening rush hour. you can see that before the shelter in place in march of last year, the average speed was around 25%. through 2019 it is around -- i'm sorry, not 2019. in the low 30s was the average rush hour speed on the freeways in san francisco in 2019. we're about at that level now. so what that means is despite relatively weak job recovery and not a lot of tourist there is, the traffic has come back. and that is a feature of the

transportation changes that have happened in the wake of covid. here is another indicator of that. this is traffic on the golden gate bridge and the bay bridge together. in june it was about 90% of normal after dropping to about 50% of normal during the shelter in place month of april. that is essentially close to recovery when it comes to people driving into san francisco. however, when we look at the bart data, it is nothing really like that. june was a good month with a jump of a couple percentage points but still only about 15% of normal for bart. when i say bart, i mean bart exits at the downtown san francisco stations. this is not system wide bart numbers and next month i think we will look at exits in a regional context and see whether or not there is something about downtown san francisco doing better or worse than other bart

accessible centers in the bay area. lastly, turning to housing. san francisco has the biggest drop in asking rent of any large city in the country last year, about a 27% drop. by january of 2021 we have had a pretty robust recovery in apartment rents. one of the better performing apartment markets in 2021 and we have gotten back about 1/3 of the decline. and so we have seen 80% growth in rent. it appears to be concentrated in the areas of the city particularly on the eastern side of the city that had the biggest drops in rent in 2020. it may be a case of people moving away and coming back. and that's a good news for the economic recovery of the city, at least the population is returning. housing construction, however, which you would expect to drop off when at least rents are down, we're tracking housing

permits on a monthly basis. still nothing like the 380 or so, 390 units per month that we were permitting on average before covid. and although, housing prices in san francisco have done well, single family homes have done well the past two years. and probably take recovery and present since before we start to see the numbers start up again. so that concludes the indicators that we have in our report. i am happy to take questions from the commissioners now. >> president: great. let's see. commissioner, do we have questions? while they formulate their questions, i will start firing them off, ted. i have a bunch for you. on the hotels with the occupancy

at 45% and i think you said the vacancy rate was 20%, do you feel a sense of where the geographic concentration is? correct me if i am wrong, but most of the airports are closer to the airport or in downtown. so i would presume we are mostly talking about downtown. >> this is only within the city limits. and so we're not considering the hotels by the airport. this is the airport largely downtown. so can just as easily reflect the weakness of downtown overall. i guess the question i am asking is, is there any sense or have you seen incidentally -- i know you are not measuring hotel results outside the city, but

are hotels doing better than downtown? i suppose i can ask kevin carol, but if you happen to know. >> we don't actually happen to know, but that is another thing we are going to add to the report next month, not just sort of local comparisons, but also how is the san francisco metro area doing in hotels compared to other cities. >> great. bart ridership, i don't think that comes as a big surprise either given that so many factors seem to stem from not having office workers downtown seem to be a big driver of a lot of the economy. but do you know of or can you think of any way to measure whether lack of service is a factor, to what degree it might be a factor? >> well, like a lot of the indicator, there's a little bit of a chicken and egg and transit

is a classic example of that. if you don't have the rider, you can't offer the service. if you don't offer the service, you can't have the riders. you really need to have a push that puts bart in the situation where they can offer ridership and a level of service that entices people back onto the trains. i would say that there are a couple of things hanging on in the background respect to office workers and job recovery generally. we wouldn't have expected some economic recovery from the lifting of the mask mandates and so forth and the rising vaccination levels, but school and child care is still a major issue. so i think we're expecting to see more recovery in the september-october data, aened in particular that will free up folks who are office workers and transit rideers.

>> president: i think that makes a lot of sense. and then do you -- are you seeing any correlation in asking rents with vacancy levels? i feel like rents have been lagging where the market is a bit. and i am wondering if what is driving the other and how sensitive each is to the other and if there is a way to measure that sensitivity. >> i have been kind of surprised by how low the reported residential vacancy rates have been over the course of the pandemic given how much rents have dropped. it is hard to imagine vacancy rates kind of below 10% as someone said. and yet you have a 20% drop and the kind of outmigration that we have talked about before that

would have to lead to rising residential vacancy. >> sorry, just to be clear. i was talking about office vacancies. >> office va can sis. okay. >> so again, to repeat the question, with respect to -- and actually, the answer you were giving was also interesting to make we'll come back to that, but on the offers vacancies, i guess what i was trying to get a sense of is i don't see that commercial asking rents have dropped as precipitously as vacancy has. do we think that is a lagging indicator? are they holding out? at what point do we give up the ghost and we see commercial lease rates drop? >>ic the best way to describe it is a lagging indicator. we as of the second quarter,

average lease rates south of $80 a square foot and they were around $92 at the start of 2020 so that is a 15% plus drop. i don't think that's going to be the end of it. i mean, there is a certain amount of what's your strategy, but when you look at the data there is a bit of a memberingcism there which is to say when office vacancy goes up, the only way it comes down is some growth and demand that comes out of nowhere and sort of saves the day or you have to cut the rent to fill up the building. what we're seeing with offices and i think whether the concerns we have about the city's economy in the medium term after we can talk about reopening is how many 2019 office workers really need and want to be in a san francisco office on any given day. if that number is a fraction of what it was in 2019, then we're

seeing the opposite of the growth and we're seeing a drop. that may take even more enticing rent and frankly, even more time. >> president: is there a role that the city can play in helping to prime that pump? is there -- do you see or do you have a sense of whether there are regulatory mechanisms within our control, zoning being an office unwith, but perhaps others that make it difficult for businesses to consider filling that space? how much blue sky is available to the city through policy change? >> well, i mean, i think the city has a number of ways that it affects the cost of doing

business in the city and frankly t experience of working in the city and travelling to the city for office workers. i really, i mean a lot of people are suggesting that the bay area and tech industry itself is sort of at a cross roads. i don't think that's true, but i do think the city has a new kind of competitor if you like. and that competitor is people's home offices. so we are seeing played out in the public a lot of our major employers clapping their hands and saying, okay, it is time to start going back to the office, and employees are pushing back saying i don't want to go back to the office. so one of the things that the city can do that weighs in the favor of work in the office as opposed to at home is the atmosphere of working in san francisco, going to lunch in san francisco, going to places after

work, and the commute, all the rest of that. if that is a pleasant experience on the whole, people will be more likely to do that. i think we have recognized the quality of life in san francisco is an economic asset. it is critically more so now when the people we need to be in the city drives more. >> and noticeably absent from the slides is other than small business starts, and i didn't see a whole lot of data on economic performances of small businesses. i did see on one of the slides to track the recovery what is the insight and they have paused their small business reporting because they are doing some sort of review of the data.

periodically they seem to change the methodology or whatnot. but i guess i am kind of tossing a couple of questions in here at once. you did have some indicator of what spending is vis-a-vis consumer spending relative to that -- i forget what the firm was that was doing the spending analysis, but at the credit card level so presumably reliable. i guess the question number one was, that consumer spending resumebly is at the individual level, not the merchant level. where i am going with this is i think one would expect if people were transitioning to working from home that you would see

some of that economic activity migrate outwards from the better lying neighborhoods. at least in the slides we have seen we don't see to have our clear grasp on how to measure that. >> i think that the last point is certainly true, but let me go back to the first point about the small business indicator. in the first business report which we released is to track the recovery small business indicator which was the percentage of merchant that were cloized and that number is around 45% and kind of stall there had for a while. in july that number started to look a little funny and a sharp drop in san francisco and nationally. and it may have become a data problem and i hope they fix that

and bring it back because it is important to us precisely for the reason that you mentioned, which is sort of that the consumer demand picture looks strong. where is that spending going if it's not going to small businesses in san francisco? particularly if, you know, well, for example, residents in the city if they are not commuting to downtown, would we expect that to go to the neighborhoods? we might. on the other hand, if they are going to the neighborhood supermarket and buying sandwich bread instead of going out to lunch at a downtown restaurant, that is probably a net loss for the small business sector even if it's a gain for the supermarket f you follow me. in other words, if they are buying online instead of buying at a neighborhood store.

>> i would expect to see net small business consumption go down but at a greater cost to the downtown small businesses and possibly some net winners at the local level. but i would city think the consumer behavior would tend to tilt towards amazon and insta cart and what have you, stuff that all the buying is happening at home and all the consuming is happening at home. but i think that they will go out to eat maybe not with the same frequency that they would if they were at the office downtown. but it would be great to put a number on that. we hear anecdotalty all sorts of different things and it is hard to make sense one way or the other what the real, prevailing trends are and what direction they are headed.

i think kind of most importantly autoof all of this is you nailed the one half which is how many starts are we seeing which is 800 to 1200 start which is you thought was pretty good, but i don't have the slide in front of me, but i think that was down from prior years. yes. so i guess that if our net starts are still not at, let's call it replacement level, i don't know, if that was where we were at in 2019, but presumably since vacancy rates were fairly low, commercial vacancy rates. if our net new starts are still below replacement level and we're -- we don't really have any idea of what our complete

closure rate was, and that continues to be a very difficult problem to get to the bottom of because nobody -- there's no reporting mechanism for when you see us doing business. you just don't see the registration renewal. what are you thoughts to push policy solutions in it would be great to be more targeted. >> we are continuing to look for al tern tifr measures of small businesses at least temporarily closed. and you are correct that i don't think we have a verifiable, permanent closure for small business that would be timely. we would need to wait for a year and see who doesn't file for

renewal. and encourage you not to draw a 1:1 relationship between what is going on in neighborhoods and commercial corridors and the new business formation. a lot of new businesses are sole proprietors doing construction or real estate and not things that need commercial space, but that points to another data gap about what is the drivers of growth in neighborhood commercial areas? we have, as you know, fairly detailed sales tax information, and we've recently gotten the first quarter 2021 sales data and some of the questions you raised we could address with that. for example this, question of are there neighborhoods there have been net winners during the pandemic? when last we looked at that last summer, we couldn't find a single zip code where there was

growth in sales tax, but into 2021, maybe some areas are doing better tharn downtown. downtown is particularly hard hit. >> president: i think the technical word is [bleep] show. >> there are a number of anecdotal terms that work just as well. >> president: okay. and my gosh, the conventions, out of every slide you showed, that was possibly the scariest. and i think everything else feels like something that could be solved with the return of business or opening up or what have you, but with conventions not showing any real signs of life yet, that is certainly pretty concerning. i guess, again, anecdotally, but

i interact with a few of those folks. you mentioned some of the factors, appetite for conventions and appetite for people getting together, but i will note that next month i will be attending a convention in las vegas and clearly some trade conventions are still happening. i have heard or at least it is a belief that in the communities that thrive and depend on conventions that there are other factors in play here such as public perception about crime, public perception about cleanliness of streets. are you aware of any empirical research into this of surveys,

data, and is there something you are looking at there? it seems to me that so much of the economy counts on people coming back to visit. it seems like we, almost like we need a queue score for the city as a whole to address the perception issues. i was wondering if that is on your radar. >> it is something that folks of travel have been talking about for a number of year, and i would sort of defer to them as the ones in communication with the visitors and the businesses directly reporting those concerns. i don't think it is something we're equipped to -- there certainly is a third party indicator that we can find and we are not really equipped to i think create our own survey around this, but i think this is an issue that's been a competitive disadvantage of the

city in conventions for a while. and it is arguably worse as the convention arena is recovering nationally. >> president: that same number you showed for conventions, is a similar number available for comparison to see where we are respect to our peers? >> we can look into that. our data is from sf travel, but perhaps we could have a conversation with them about what is their competitive intelligence on their competitors. >> president: and that seems

really relative to getting people back. by the way, commissioner, if you have questions, drop it in chat. i'm just going because i don't see anything popping up, but feel free to interrupt at any point in time. respect to employment, looking at the chart, it seems clear that employment is down, but at least the jobs are coming back. i was kind of surprised to see that there was still down as much as they were in terms of jobs. one thing we are hearing a lot is lack of supply. we are having trouble filling as

it is. is that the nature of jobs and are people moving out of the service industry or choosing not to be in the service industry and have to migrate to different occupations? >> there is some evidence of both of those migrations migrating out of the hospitality industry and finding work in other industries. and also with other workers with the amount of job staff and that puts a slow down on number of

people that with the sectors and inflationary impacts on prices? for instance, the cost of a meal or cost of a sandwich, etc., etc. >> we're not seeing signs of that yet in the inflation data. what we're seeing in terms of consumer price inflation which is higher than it has been. over the past few months. used cars is up 24% year

overyear. with pretty healthy year over year with livestock and beverages and those can work into food prices and work into hospitality, restaurant, supplies, spryses and that could have an inflationary effect. this is a that is a peer of what is happening. for me that is a key and critical indicator. the used vehicles, which is my industry, as you noted as sort of a side mention s as much about a lack of supply of

vehicles due to worldwide semiconductor shortage and what have you. but restaurant are historically very narrow margin businesses and labor is the margin and they have found untapped reserve efficiencies and they have been able to do more with less. we have seen that with the qr codes on men use and some of that, but what i think i am waiting for is noticeable inflation on restaurant pricing and i think that would be the clearest indicator that we have a significant labor shortage and there is no more room for the

ownership of the restaurants to absorb that cost. and they have to pass it to the customer. >> that is one thing you might see. and it also might account for the fact that we're still seeing restaurants not opening to the rate and the cost of labor can't make it work. >> commissioner dickerson, thank you for being patient. >> commissioner dickerson, excuse me, mr. president, i don't know if you would like to take down the power point. >> sure. >> so that -- thank you. >> thank you, commissioner dickerson. i am done, thank you. >> commissioner: no worries. as i was waiting, my question actually, well, the question that i had has been answered. but just to make a comment in

reference to the restaurant owners and the labor cost is definitely affecting them. there is a pendulum. there is not as much high traffic adds it used to be. to find people to work at the rate it was a year ago is very hard to find. to the costs of labor and supplies. and i see and hear people say that i have work catering gigs,

but i don't have people to work at the rate that i can pay. that is some of the language i am hearing. commissioner, our job here as advocates for the small business community, we have to find new ways to want to open and existing businesses to stay in business. and this approaching to me where there is nowhere left to give.

and some have chosen to exit the industry completely. and yet there is not enough elasticity -- i am not sure if i am saying that right. >> commissioner: elasticity. >> president: thank you. in food pricing that it's actually becoming a constraint on jobs, right? as you're talking about, commissioner dickerson. so i think we have to start thinking about seriously pushing and advocating for the city to

collect is self-defeating. ted, i don't know if you are following my point here, but there is a point where i guess to use an analogy, you can charge rent so high that nobody wants to rent from you and now you have no income at all. and we may be looking at a place where the city is entering a position of making less money no matter what in terms of the tax revenue and what are you willing to trade. and go ahead. >> i don't know if i have a direct comment on that specific trade-off to trade-off tax

revenue and hire lower wage workers is particularly challenging because you don't move back to san francisco if you are a restaurant worker and you moved away the way you might if you were living in houston and maybe you moved away and now you are moving back to work there. and housing is so expensive here. the solution is before the pan dem sick to tap into labor that lives outside of san francisco. we talk about transit like it is the office worker mode of transportation, but it is not. work ores on all of the east side transit rely on bart. it is important for hospitality and other industries and not only office workers. >> i completely agree and that should also be on the radar.

to be the chicken and egg and no sustainable traffic without good option. it seems like you seed the egg before the chicken and start with good transit and build from there. is that your take on it as well? >> and with the increasing transit will pay economic dividends. commissioner zouzounis? >> commissioner: thank you for your presentation. i have a question. i know we discussed how closures is a hard metric to put our

finger on with a lot of commercial sale activity throughout the last year, and you have data on that and if you feel like that is an indicator of anything. that goes to comparing data on if there are businesses that are being out their building as an indicatorover them staying. if there is any data that is relevant or to capture those ideas. i think we have and we are

tracking in our office and the commercial property sales because they may have implications for our property tax base. we're starting to see hotels longer term and i wouldn't overstate how much that is happening. and there is a lot of uncertainty now related to commercial property and commercial property valuation. that is something that we're tracking closely. this is with the 2020 tax rent

returns to commercial rents and how the rents have changed across the that is something we are watching the we are trying to track the commercial market as we can. commissioner ortiz-cartagena? >> ted, as always, appreciate the presentation. very thorough, informative. my constituent si and the latinx and undocumented are data hidden. i want to take the time that correlation that the data and we

are not on matrix that is why it is so important and to tell everybody that the the data reflects that and this is an eye opener so future administrations can see that investment in affordable housing and that we provide in the city you need more of because you are seeing the effects in your presentation and your data that reflects

that. >> commissioner, you are right in terms of what we don't have data and we are guessing about how many people have moved out of san francisco even from census data, which is as you point out doesn't cover everyone. and we're not even going to have census data for 2020 until we see data like the wages and we can't track that. thank you for your comments about our report.

the net migration numbers that show we are back to pre-pandemic levels and at least it appears to show that we're kindover back to normal with net migration. and we are not seeing as you pointed out elsewhere a big decline in residential rents. >> well, i have seen the with the recovery in some rents, rents are still down 15% from where they were in 2019.

with the things coming back and we still have a ways to go. and again, the population data, i mean, the estimates that have come out so far are from administrative data with a bit of lag in it. and we will have to see. we won't have to wait several months until we have a sense of where we really were. and in the depths of the pandemic and a bit longer to find out where we are. we don't have the ind ka ier tos of where we are and this is the report of what we do have and who we can trust. >> do we have any sense of -- so to go off memory here, but edd data that i have seen locally and even broadly in california and construction is still strong in terms of the number of jobs

out there. is that correct to say? >> if i recall correctly, i haven't looked at the central breakdown in a couple of month, but it was close to normal. so i guess, of course, i am thinking about policy decisions with the job linkage fee. and i am wondering if is it time for a follow-up to look at some of these policys? i guess let's start with this question. has construction on new office space, i would imagine, is completely stopped? >> i think this is not an environment where people are going to find it favorable to build new offices. >> right.

and that is that we might want this stuff some day. again, i think that the construction is important part of the economy. and the economic boom times and in a period of what looks like entering the weak demand,there is less to do. and that begs the demand for other questions. and clearly looking at the long running crisis and never letting a crisis go to waste. what are the policy opportunities here? we talked about vice president zouzounis mentioned rightfully so about helping businesses get into owning their buildings and

that are the pragmatic things to help set the stage for a stronger small business sector in the future? >> well, i would just sort of point to the areas that the data are pointing to and staying and likely to be problems that will be with us for a while. i think that this disconnect and that seems to be a growing disconnect that is of concern. and i don't think people have been reminded enough or have in their minds enough how important small business is. we talk about in different ways. obviously a major source of employment for people who live in the city about half of all the jobs in the city. and also is the dominant share of jobs in other areas of the city. most of the large employers are

either in downtown or are major institutions, hospitals, universities and a few areas. in most of city, the job opportunities are small businesses. and the city isn't set up or planned for people to meet their retail entertainment shopping needs in the local neighborhood. you can't get to the mall without small businesses in the neighborhoods. people talk in the real estate world talk about why people love san francisco and tourists talk about why they love san francisco. it's the neighborhood. small businesses are vital to the experiences that residents and visitors value. if you don't have that, you don't have willingness to pay

for housing and construction workers and the tourism draw. it connects to really every dynamic, every part of the city's economy. you can't be attracted to tech workers who have to decide if you want to live in new york or london or barcelona or san francisco. so it is very important to the vitality of the city. >> i think we can all agree with that. and then have you given any thought to what kind of low-hanging fruit with respect to policy changes that can give us more visibility into minority employment, business closures, demographics of who is leaving,

stuff like that? is there stuff that -- i mean, a lot of times it is just a question of introducing a check box some place or what is the low-hanging fruit there that you have seen or, is that, we can really do a lot? >> that is an interesting question. to go down some of the things that you mention, minority employment or who is leaving, these are things that we will eventually know about from state and federal data resources and our wills come out after the one that we're waiting for so i don't think that is a low-hanging fruit? but there is certainly things that the city already regulates. and that i don't think we have the data set about. for example, do businesses need

to file something when they reopen? and to clarify with someone that they are occupied again? i don't think if there is a vacancy tax clock and if businesses have to stay stop that block because now we are operating again? that would be nice to know more about small businesses and what we have now is a bunch of businesses with a business registration and how many are taking up space and neighborhoods? we really need to have a sense of that. those are things that the city regulates that we can somehow grab that data and make a data set from. that would be helpful. >> and brings up a point i remember which is most new employment in the united states, most net new employment, comes

from small businesses. and in part because these large institutions are generally not expanding it at a measurable rate or fairly incremental in the scheme of things. when somebody opens a new business, boom, there's five new jobs or 10 new jobs. and at scale that has a significant impact on employment overall. so what this makes me think about in my own business is reservation records as luck would have it i write the code that operates the business, and so generally wherever the database record is created there is a time stamp to record the last time we touched this record

or how did we touch it? there could be the opportunity to have the policy city wide of creating the standardized way of approaching data across all these different departments so that, for example, if the business was closed and to complain about something in front of it and planning and filed a permit with the master data set that could be helpful and what the that is with the

cities and the various types of the that is the gold standard and they are going to run the credit card stuff. to figure out the way for the city to get the product that we want there, that could be very helpful to policy makeers. >> i couldn't an i degree more and the chamber of commerce has put out exactly that data u but it was discovered or one of the cards that wasn't super common. >> all right. unless there is any other commission for the commissioner, we have taken up enough after

your time. we appreciate the time to visit with us, as always. and the points you raised here are also sharing throughout the small business community and it will help make everybody in this sector adept at navigating the crisis. with, that let's check and see if there is any public comment. >> currently there is no one for public comment. >> seeing none, public comment is closed. ted, thank you so much for your time. we really appreciate you and everything you do for the city. i am always rooting for you. >> thank you, commissioner. thank you for your time. >> okay.

bye. bye. next item please. >> item number three is general public comment. this allows members of the public to comment on matters within the small business commission's jurisdiction but not only on today's calendar -- but are not on today's calendar and suggest new agenda items for the commission's future consideration. president t matthew, are there any callers in the queue at all? >> there are not. >> president: okay. seeing none, public comment is closed. next item. >> clerk: item four is the director's report. this is an update and report on the office of small business, small business assistance center, department programs, policy and legislate ifr matters, and announcements from the mayor, and announcements regarding small business activities. so commissioners, i will first just make note in regards to an announcement from the mayor as the city and the mayor has

created the resiliency fund for small businesses. and last friday the mayor had an announcement, press event, from the resiliency fund the $4.5 million that was allocated to that grant program was distributed to 560 businesses and commissioner ortiz-cartagena, you may have been in attendance, and if so, it would be great to hear about it more during commissioner reports. so 560 businesses received grants between $5,000 and $25,000. they have not completed issuing the grants and are anticipating and expecting to award a little over 700 businesses.

in addition, the update for the venue fund since i am talking about grants. this week is the final week for any of the applicants who do think they qualify to get in the final documents. we currently have 63 applications -- or 63 applicants that have met the guidelines to receive the grant. and reminder that 37,000, roughly 50 -- roughly $37,50 # o out of the 84 applicant. there is 21 applications, but applicants that are still working through the proornsd so by the end of this week, we -- and working through the process and so by early next week because they have the full day on friday, july 30, to get their information in, but we'll know early next week the final total

and outcome thereby. and i want to express my appreciation to richard for being so diligent and working really closely with the businesses to really help them meet the application criteria. hopefully you have seen the emails that i sent out this morning. that you do now have someone filling the position, your position, as the commission secretary policy analyst. and carrie burnbach. very happy about that. she will be starting on monday, august 23. so the future or the light at the end of the tunnel is definitely in sight. and of course, i want to thank all the commissioners who spent their time going through the interview process, particularly

to commissioner huie and ortiz-cartagena who held a marathon interview session with six candidates. i really want to extend my appreciation to all of you weighing in and i think we have a really great candidate coming to full this position. so, last week -- last meeting i noted about the add back and what some of the budget enhancements and one of the budget enhancements was a $500,000 add back to the legacy business program. so we did not know or i did not know the last meeting just what the intent of those $500,000 were intended for for the legacy business program. we have met with the three

primary supervisors advocating for that funding. supervisor peskin, supervisor chan, and supervisor ronen. the staff has broken out that we have $100,000 going to help fund a position to help us with the application process and also help with doing our outreach for the simplification of saying this to the equity owned businesses as they are the racial equity special committee identified that we do have some significant gaps in certain areas in our legacy business program and businesses that are missing from -- not missing but

not on the registry. and this position will be also helping in that particular area to increase the number of our equity businesses on the to go to grants to be distributed as one-time grants to the legacy businesses. and again, a little bit of a concern that we are having to do another grant because in issuing the grant we don't have the position fill sod this will sort of further delay the application process. but we are looking to set the

grant program so that it is distributed as quickly as possible. it will not be too complicated in terms of the application process. and rick and i will be working on what that looks like and likely at the next commission meeting, we will provide you with a report with how the funds will be distributed. and i think one of the key points that i do want to say is that there is some confusion because we did have the business assistance grant program. i know that i and rick have had conversations with the full commission about the initial program and that the way it was designed with proposition f was a very unwieldly program in

terms of, one, not just in terms of it escalating obligation, financial obligation, if it were to be fully funded and our inability to modify how the grant program is to be enacted because it was created by the voters. so i do -- we can have further discussions on this, but i want to emphasize that there was funding to help back fill and that funding couldn't -- and that that -- that the amount of money needed to back fill that program. we will be looking at that grant

program and moving forward, as long as we continue to look at, i think, the rent stabilization program is a program that needs the legacy business program needs and needs and the needs and the intention of what the program is about which is retaining the businesses. movering forward, hopefully having this new position in place even though right now we only have it funded for one year is that i think there are other meaningful programs that we can work to design to design and implement that will have -- that meets the intent of the program. and from rick and my perspective

will have a greater impact, so if there are conversations that are being had with you about the need for these business assistance grants, i want to encourage you to just know to support the office and our need to have some space to establish other more meaningful programs. that isn't just cash out the door one or two times. and while we know it is covid and businesses do need some funding but when we take a look at if we equitably distribute this and the 286 businesses that are on the registry is about

1,000 to $1300. so it's a short-term gain for some of the businesses. and the small amount of money. and for the program, we need to look at more of the long-term trajectory of what we want to create with this program and establish some really much more mature and programs that have a greater long-term benefit for our legacy businesses. and really help elevate the stature of the program not only within san francisco but nationally as well. so that's enough said with that. then some other updates are i just received notification today from kevin true with the department of environment on the crb. and a letter has been sent out

by calrecycle saying they are no longer going to be charging the inlieu fees. and that is good news moving forward, and we'll continue to work on the issue of the charges that businesses experienced around the in lieu fees and fines that are retroactive. and then i am very happy that you had the opportunity to have this time with ted to really have that substantive conversation about what the city is doing and tracking, and so in preparation for next week or next meeting on august 9, we will have director sokus here to talk about her goals and visions

with oewd. and then she -- the mayor recently tasked director sofus and oewd to help track the economic recovery work with the recommendations from the economic recovery task force. and so to expect the conversation much kind of what sort of -- what sort of transpired towards the end of the meeting or what are things that we can do to track around small business and look at that economic recovery. ted is part of those meetings. so that conversation that you had with him will help him because he is a part of working with oewd on this. and so i am really excited for director sofus to have this conversation with you on how we want to track and measure our

economic recovery from a small business perspective. and then just to also think about what our sort of standard metrics that we want to be able to track and utilize. not only just as we're in recovery but moving forward to keep track of the health and maintenance of our small business economy. and as director sofus said is she really wants to work closely with you. [please stand by]

i really appreciate the amount of time you took with him. and, with that, i'm trying to see if there's i did send you last week it was introduced. and so supervisor stefani is looking at doing some amending

to the signage for the planning code. you will hear that at the august 23rd meeting which will be carry's first meeting and your former commission secretary analyst donavan will be presenting on that, so that will be fun and then supervisor peskin which goes in after the closure of a laundry mat. so i'm hoping that we'll be able to hear that as well. so those are the key pieces of legislation that i had to

inform you of. with that, that will conclude my report and i'll take any questions should you have any. >> president laguana: i don't see any questions. i did have a question about the grants. they think the final number is going to be over 700. >> director: yes. >> president laguana: and which grant is this referring to? >> director: this is the sf resiliency grant. >> president laguana: which has been in process for quite awhile, right? >> director: it was launched at the same time as the new grant. >> president laguana: oh, it was? got it. how much was this one? was it $4 million? >> director: $4.5 million.

>> president laguana: okay. and very exciting news looking forward to having our commission secretary again. that will be good. okay. i don't see any other questions. so, matt, do we have any public commentors on the line? >> there's no one on the line. >> president laguana: okay. seeing none. public comment is closed. next item, please. >> director: next item is item number five. this is commissioner discussion and new business. it allows the president, vice president, commissioners to report on recent small business activities, make announcements that are of interest to the small business can you want and make inquiries to the staff and allows commissioners to introduce new agenda items for future consideration by the commission. this is a discussion item. >> president laguana:

commissioner ortiz-cartagena. >> commissioner ortiz-cartagena: thank you, mr. president. like our director was saying, the mayor came out to specificallytwenty-fourth street and we awarded four grants to four businesses in the neighborhood and it was just great. and through my nonprofit, i helped several businesses fill out this grant and kudos to the mayor and her team. the grant was really easy to fill meaning that equitable by lowering all the barriers to fill stuff like this out, you make it equitable. i just want to give a shout-out to her mayor, her team, and our former director joaquin taurus was out there and, man, it was just awesome. it was easy and the money got to the people. over 80% of the grants awarded so far have been to minority women owned businesses. that's how it should be and it's working and i just want to once again thank the mayor. >> president laguana: that's great. um, yeah.

absolutely. and, nice to see your quote in the press release on that as well. great quote. okay. anybody else? vice president zouzounis. >> vice president zouzounis: this isn't the new business item or -- >> president laguana: they're combined. >> vice president zouzounis: okay. good. thank you. i think piggy backing off our conversation earlier, i would love to see for new business at one point, i know we have a backlog, but i just want to put it out there, i would love to see any reports on small side acquisitions programs that the city has right now whether that's a direct through oewd or

whether it's through one of the funded partner organizations that came through in rfp that's helping with small businesses being able to acquire their buildings. i would also love to see any new data on city vendors. i think that could be an indicator for us if there's small businesses getting their local business enterprise certification so that they can be a vendor with the city. so any contrasting data that's new could be an indicator that i'm interested in reviewing as well. those are just the two things that i wanted to mention. >> president laguana: sorry. go ahead, director. >> director: commissioner. thank you, mr. president. commissioner zouzounis, make sure you mention that at the next meeting with director sopis as one of the indicators that we should be tracking and monitoring. i'll mention it too, but it

should just to reiterate that because it is one our l.b.e.s and our vendors who do business with the city as an area of small business that both o.s.b. and oewd do not give a lot of attention to. so yeah. okay. thank you, mr. president. and i'll go back to you. >> president laguana: of course. i was just going to say, you know, i have a lot of interest in this area and i wonder it if there's, you know, given how critical sba usually is in business owners getting financing for buying their properties, i wonder, commissioner, if perhaps we could have somebody from the sba come and make a

presentation on the 4a loans. i think i'm forgetting what they're called. >> vice president zouzounis: yeah. there's 7a loans and 504 loans i'm happy to do that at the end and put a little time going over the working capital loans if that's what you're asking. >> president laguana: i was thinking something closer to the top of the hour and if you feel qualified to do it, that'd be great, but i think the business community would, you know, thinking about, again viewing the crisis in opportunity it seems like it's possible that commercial real estate values may either be going down or may be low, you know, at some point presumably

they'll come back. so now's the time for somebody to buy. how do we help a business who might not be imagining to have the money to do that. >> how do we help them -- wait a second, no, you do have this opportunity and it's doable, you can do it, we can make this happen. it'd be. you know, i'm considering that for my own business as well. >> sure. yeah. i'm happy to work with our director to see if that's something we can schedule and i'm happy to make that presentation or do it in tandem or bring one of my colleagues to do it. >> president laguana: yeah. and i'll say also in a related note with director focus coming in that you guys have heard me before talk about the employer retention tax credit which

gives me an awful lot of tax credits. so my goal and commissioner ortiz-cartagena, you may be interested to know about this and i think you would be also a really important partner in this conversation, i mean shgts all of you, really, but with respect to what you were just talking about, you know, i have found i'm fairly sophisticated as far as business center goes. i've built my own accounting system and yet this is so complicated, i wouldn't even dare try to figure this out and it requires really specialized expertise to pull off which

obviously inherently is going to disadvantage any vulnerable community, any vulnerable population. anybody who english is a second language. most i would say of our small businesses are not going to have the resources to do this. i spoke to one small business and as i talked to them, they went and talked to their accountant and the account says that's too hard. how is anybody going to access this there's 100,000 small businesses in san francisco alone, but nationwide, only 30,000 across the entire

country. so i have made it one of my little side quests here to see if i can persuade some large enterprise accounting firm to, you know, be willing to put in an rfp and then perhaps the city can issue some kind of grant or create some kind of program to help fund this and my idea was simply i'm paying about $150 an employee, but the tax credit is 5,000 an employee in 2020 and $7,000 an employee per quarter so that's a pretty good investment. so when the city issues a grant for $5,000, i mean, i'm happy we're doing that. we could issue a grant for

$1500 and potentially unlock $300,000 in tax credits. that's an incredible return on investment. so i've been saying to the city, this is just a huge opportunity and san francisco should own this zone and we should be trying to help every single business that's hung on to their employees. avail themselves of this and, if necessary, we should pay for it for the work to get done because the benefits are so huge and so massive and have -- i mean, there's no constructive difference between giving somebody $100,000 and saying they don't have to pay $100,000 in taxes. it winds up being the same thing i can either give it to you or say you don't have to pay the bill, but either way you're $100,000 richer than before, so this is just a huge

opportunity and i think it would have huge impact on particularly our smallest businesses and especially businesses with a second language. i just think it's something that we have to make happen. so i'm going to talk about it every meeting and keep you guys thinking about it and you can talk to the people in your community about it and maybe something will bubble up here that will help us really make a difference in the small business community. so that's all i've got. should we see if there's any public comment?

matthew. >> there's currently no one in queue. >> president laguana: thank you. so seeing none. public comment is closed. next item, please. >> director: right, next item, sfgov tv, please show the office of small business slide. >> president laguana: we will end with the reminder that the small business commission is the official public forum to voice your opinions and concerns about policies that affect the economic vitality of small businesses in san francisco and that the office of small business is the best place to get answers about doing business in san francisco during the local emergency. if you need assistance with small business matters, continue to reach out to the office of small business. >> director: thank you, president laguana. item number six is adjournment. this is an action item. do i have a motion to adjourn?

>> i move. >> director: thank you. and a second >> seconded. >> director: a motion to adjourn by commissioner ortiz-cartagena, seconded by vice president zouzounis. commissioner adams is absent, [roll call] that motion passes four to zero with three absent and the meeting is adjourned at 6:18 p.m. thank you, commissioners. >> vice president zouzounis: thanks everyone. >> president laguana: bye you guys. >> have a good night.

>> we worked very hard with the san francisco venue coalition, the independent venue alliance to advocate for venues. put this issue on the radar of

the supervisors and obviously mayor breed. the entertainment commission and the office of small business and we went to meetings and showed up and did public comment and it was a concerted effort between 50 venues in the city and they are kind of traditional like live performance venues and we all made a concerted effort to get out there and sound the alarm and to her credit, maybe breed really stepped up, worked with matt haney, who is a supervisor haney was a huge champion for us and they got this done and they got $3 million into the sf venue recovery fund. >> we have represented about 40 independent venues in san

francisco. basically, all the venues closed on march 13th, 2020. we were the first to close and we will be the last to reopen and we've had all the of the overhead costs are rent, mortgage, payroll, utilities and insurance with zero revenue. so many of these venues have been burning $1,000 a day just to stay closed. >> we have a huge music history here in san francisco and the part of our cultural fab lick but it's also an economic driver. we produce $7 billion annual' here in san francisco and it's formidable. >> we've been very fortunate here. we've had the department of emergency management and ems division and using part of our building since last april and aside from being proud to i

can't tell you how important to have some cost recovery coming in and income to keep the doors open. >> typically we'll have, three to 400 people working behind the teens to support the show and that is everything from the teamsters and security staff and usualers, ticket takers, the folks that do our medical and the bar tenders and the people in the kitchen preparing food for backstage and concession and the people that sell key shirts and it's a pretty staggering amount of people that are out of work as a result of this one verne you going tarkanian. it doesn't work to open at reduced capacity. when we get past june 15th,

out of the into the blue print for our economy we can open it it 100% and look at the festival in full capacity in october and we're just so grateful for the leadership of the mavor and dr. coal fax to make us the safest ♪ america and this is been hard for everybody in san francisco and the world but our leadership has kept us safe and i trust them that they will let us know when it's safe to do that. >> a lot of people know about america is military stuff, bullying stuff, corporate stuff. when people like me and my friends go to these foreign country and play music, we're giving them an american cultural experience. it's important.

the same way they can bring that here. it sounds comfy buyia, you know, we're a punk band and we're nasty and we were never much for peace and love and everything but that's the fertilizer that grows the big stuff that some day goes to bill graham's place and takes everybody's money but you have to start with us and so my hope is that allel groups and people make music and get together because without out, hanging together we'll hang separately, you know. >> other venues like this, all over the place, not just in the san francisco bay area need to exist in order for communities to thrive and i'm not just talking about the arts communities, even if you are here to see a chuckle bucket comedy show and you are still experiencing humanity and in specific ways being able to gather with people and experience something together. and especially coming out of the

pandemic, the loss of that in-person human connection recovering that in good ways is going to be vital for our entire society. >> it's a family club. most our staff has been working with us for 10 years so we feel like a family. >> what people think of when they think of bottom of the hill and i get a lot of this is first of all, the first place i met my husband or where we had our first date and i love that and we love doing weddings and i expect there to be a wedding season post 2021 of all the make up we haddings and i hope that many people do that because we have had so many rock ep role weddings. >> i told my girlfriend, make

sure you stand at the front of the stage and i can give you a kiss at midnight. at this got down on one knee at the stroke of midnight. it wasn't a public thing, i got down on one knee and said will you marry me and is he she had are you [beep] kidding me and i said no, i'm dead serious and she said yes. we were any time homicideel of the show. we just paused for new year's eve and that was where i proposed to my wife. this is more than just a professional relationship it's more than just a relationship from a love of arts, it's where my family started. we'll always have a special place in my heart. >> venues, you know, represent so much. they are cultural beckons of a

city. neighbors can learn and celebrate and mourn and dance together. venues and arts and culture are characterized as second responders to crisis and they provide a mental health outlet and a community center for people to come together at and it's the shared history of our city and these spaces is where we all come together and can celebrate. >> art often music opens up people to understanding the fellow man and i mean, taz always necessary and if anything, it's going to be even more necessary as we come out of this to reach out and connect with people. >> we can sustain with food, water and shelter is accurate and does anybody have a good time over the last year? no. >> san francisco is a great down. i've been here many years and i love it here and it's a beautiful, beautiful, place to

be music and art is key to that. drama, acting, movies, everything, everything that makes life worth living and that's what we've got to mow proteasome no san francisco and that's what is important now. [♪♪♪]

. >> president yee: of the 26 neighborhoods we have in west portal, it's probably the most unique in terms of a small little town. you can walk around here, and it feels different from the rest of san francisco. people know each other. they shop here, they drink wine here. what makes it different is not only the people that live here, but the businesses, and without all these establishments, you wouldn't know one neighborhood from the other. el toreador is a unique restaurant. it's my favorite restaurant in san francisco, but when you look around, there's nowhere else that you'll see decorations like this, and it

makes you feel like you're in a different world, which is very symbolic of west portal itself. >> well, the restaurant has been here since 1957, so we're going on 63 years in the neighborhood. my family came into it in 1987, with me coming in in 1988. >> my husband was a designer, and he knew a lot about art, and he loved color, so that's what inspired him to do the decorations. the few times we went to mexico, we tried to get as many things as we can, and we'd bring it in. even though we don't have no space, we try to make more space for everything else. >> president yee: juan of the reasons we came up with the legacy business concept, man

eel businesses were closing down for a variety of reasons. it was a reaction to trying to keep our older businesses continuing in the city, and i think we've had some success, and i think this restaurant itself is probably proof that it works. >> having the legacy business experience has helped us a lot, too because it makes it good for us because we have been in business so long and stayed here so long. >> we get to know people by name, and they bring their children, so we get to know them, also. it's a great experience to get to know them. supervisor yee comes to eat at the restaurant, so he's a wonderful customer, and he's very loyal to us.

>> president yee: my favorite dish is the chile rellenos. i almost never from the same things. my owner's son comes out, you want the same thing again? >> well, we are known for our mole, and we do three different types of mole. in the beginning, i wasn't too familiar with the whole legacy program, but san francisco, being committed to preserve a lot of the old-time businesses, it's important to preserve a lot of the old time flavor of these neighborhoods, and in that capacity, it was great to be recognized by the city and county of san francisco. >> i've been here 40 years, and i hope it will be another 40 yeararararararararararararararr