Mission street - gov’t destroys business

I live in San Francisco.  A far Left city that hates cars and hates business even more.

Somehow, the people who start businesses are blind to the anti-business milieu that we live in. Fortunately.  Only when their companies are large enough to attract the Lefty hate do they do anything. They leave and take their companies with them.

Let me help you understand how this hatred works. One way it works is sheer blind inconsiderate ignorance.

For the next four months, Mission Street is being torn up over an eight block area that is the center of low income San Francisco commerce. All the buses are being rerouted and most street parking is unavailable.

This is a problem that my good friend Peter Sherrill (photo on right) and I discussed for many years, many years ago.

Back when BART was being built in the 1960s Peter was working for the the government transportation agency and was asked to estimate the amount of lost business when the same part of Mission Street was closed for five years. What Peter found was that the loss of business was so great that the future value of BART, our underground rail system, could never earn back an amount to offset that loss.

The 1965 Mission St. commerce never recovered after the hole had become a subway.

New digging is now going on in the center of San Francisco for a new subway line but I have not calculated the cost, knowing it can never be recovered in the social benefits of the new subway. The actual route of the new subway is a farce, in itself, going from nowhere to nowhere.

But the Mission Street damage is calculable.  I assume that most businesses pay rent equal to or less than 10% of their gross revenue and the average rent on Mission Street is $100 per street front foot.

That is roughly 7000 street front commercial footage.  That comes to gross revenues of $7 million a month for the area being torn up. Times five months of direct suppression of business of 60% and an assumed loss of business for a year of 30%.

The total loss of business is $30 million.

What kind of street improvements could be done to Mission Street that will ever give it a return of that amount of money?

Nothing. The government is incapable of understanding the blind ignorant damage it does.

I reiterate my basic position: government only metastasizes. We must somehow learn to stop it or understand how damaging it is.