The Monday San Francisco Examiner had a wonderfully detailed
report on a man charged with running a prostitution ring. First, this is the kind of reporting that
has made the S.F. Examiner the official newspaper of San Francisco. All the
‘connected people’ I know now read the Examiner.
Second, this sheds some light on the magnitude of the San Francisco prostitution revenues. Young Joon Yang, who ran a ring of 40 apartments, in the Golden Gateway complex, was paying $65,000 a month in rent. I would guess he was working with 40 women.
Here’s my calculation:
Ordinary businesses pay 5-7% of gross on rent (standard for retail and restaurant ‘percentage’ leases.) That means his prostitution business was earning roughly $10 million a year. That further means his workers were grossing about $250k each. That $250k matches figures I have for the few call girls I knew in the late 1970s, updated to current dollars.
I now make a wild assumption: Young Joon Yang was providing
service to less than 5% of the total call girl and bordello market. If it were more than 5% he would have been
easily spotted.
That means that prostitution in San Francisco earns roughly $250 million a year.
The relevant data you may need to know about prostitution is
that the classic sex research findings breakdown revenue earned in different
types of prostitution into 90% call girls, 5% bordellos and 5% hookers (hookers
are prostitutes who work on the street).
It is reasonable to estimate the number of call girls (and boys) in San Francisco at 1,000 based on Young Joon Yang's operation.
Hookers are the visible form of prostitution but they earn a very small part of the revenue. The rough number of hookers in San Francisco is 2,500. That is the same number that are arrested and booked in the city every year. About an equal number of hookers are booked more than once compared to those never booked in a year. Hookers probably earn $50 million a year.