Let’s start with the ice cream.
On June 11 of last year, in the eighth hour of its weekly meeting, the San Francisco Planning Commission heard the case of Garden Creamery v. Matcha n’ More. The owners of the former ice cream shop alleged that the entrepreneurs behind the latter ice cream shop had lied on their planning application to open up in a long-vacant retail space in the city’s Mission District and asked that the planners review their application.
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So far, not much of a scoop in a city famous for petty bureaucratic skirmishes. But because this was 2020, the typical meager audience at the commission meeting had been replaced with the whole San Francisco phonebook. The calls came and came, as locals duked it out over chain stores, gentrification, the pandemic, and ice cream.
Owners of SF building allowed to convert into condos despite claim of displacing 100-year-old tenant
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Looking to move? The pandemic is pushing people out of Bay Area cities into the suburbs
A new report suggests more homeowners are looking to relocate in part due to the pandemic. According to real estate firm Redfin, a record number of people in the last two months searched to move away from big metropolitan cities like San Francisco and into suburbs and smaller towns.
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) - The owners of a six-unit San Francisco residential building got permission from a state appeals court on Friday to proceed with a condominium conversion, a case that got widespread attention over a 100-year-old woman s efforts to stay in one of the units.
Building where 100-year-old woman was evicted can become condos - San Francisco Business Times bizjournals.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bizjournals.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For Jen and Kristi Maxwell, 2020 was the year they began living the dream.
The couple, who married in 2008 (when Kristi took Jen s last name), had the same vision: to open a neighborhood-centric business that would add value to the community. The specific idea of opening a pet-related business was Jen Maxwell s, who learned about pet health and nutrition while working at Pet Food Express.
In late November, they opened the doors to Maxwell s Pet Bar at 1734 Church (between 28 and 29th St.) a storefront previously occupied by a dog groomer, VIP Scrub Club, which closed last year and had been owned by a lesbian couple, Sage Cotton and Lancy Woo. (The Maxwells said that they don t identify as lesbian or queer because they don t like labels. )
Myrna Melgar is a lot of things. Elected in November to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, she’s a first-time office holder; the first Latina elected to the board; an immigrant from El Salvador; a descendant of Jewish scholars; a mother; the child of an engineer and a communist militant; and a part of the local Jewish community.
And she says that unique combination is what makes her go.
“That’s like my whole shtick,” she told J. recently, speaking about efforts to bring disparate groups of people together to focus on shared concerns.
“Sometimes in this town we wear our identity, in terms of who’s progressive, who’s moderate, this or that, in ways that are not collaborative, that are more antagonistic,” she said. “And because I’m used to walking in different worlds, I’m also used to engaging with people and finding what we have in common rather than what we disagree on.”