Kate Robinson wants people to know the Tenderloin is "the coolest place to go out," she told Yahoo News. As executive director of the Tenderloin Community Benefit District, she's been saying some version of that for most of this year, usually while standing next to a mayor or a philanthropist at a ribbon cutting. The claim is testable right now, in a very specific way, on a very specific two-block stretch of Larkin Street.
Walk that stretch this month and you'll see two kinds of change moving at two different speeds. One is everywhere: new lighting, cleaner sidewalks, a fresh gate bolted onto a storefront that's been there for years. The other is rare: an actual new business, doors open, lights on, a line if you're lucky. As of this month, only two of the six storefronts that received city grants this year to open on or near Larkin Street have actually opened.
According to Mission Local, Sheba, a Middle Eastern clothing and specialty-goods shop, held its opening event September 18 at 318 Turk Street. Niebla, a Mexican-owned bookstore and coffee shop, held its official grand opening the day before, September 17, at 374 Golden Gate Avenue. Both businesses came through San Francisco's Storefront Opportunity Grant, a program that pairs financial support with a signed long-term lease, typically three years, and grants in the range of $50,000 to $100,000 depending on the business.
Niebla had been open informally for weeks before the grand opening, part of a soft-launch pattern that seems common for these grant recipients: get the doors unlocked, work out the kinks, then hold the ceremony once things are running. Sheba followed a similar path. Neither business waited for a press conference to start serving customers, which is worth noting only because the next four businesses on this list have not had that option yet.
The rest of this year's grant recipients on the corridor are still finishing build-outs. A Mission Local report lists four businesses still in progress as of late September:
Business | Address | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Tender Noodle | 721 Larkin St. | Fast-casual noodle shop from Inmy Chi, owner of two Sunset District restaurants and partner at Sai's on Columbus Avenue, as reported by Mission Local | Build-out in progress |
Ruru Kitchen | 448 Larkin St. | Coffee shop and alcohol-free "healthy bar" from food-truck operator Francisco Bastidas, in the former Naan N Curry space, as reported by Mission Local | Build-out in progress |
Reggie & Maude's | 460 Larkin St. | New bar from the owners of Outta Sight Pizza, expanding into the corner space at Larkin and Turk | Build-out in progress |
Tender Heart Thrift | 683 O'Farrell St. | Thrift store, one of dozens of citywide recipients of the city's vacant-storefront funding | Build-out in progress |
According to Mission Local, manager Kevin Huang said Tender Noodle plans a short menu built around four noodle soups priced around $6.99 with add-on proteins. He described the concept as "a really simple, simple menu." An earlier timeline had the shop targeting a July opening. It's now late September and the doors are still covered.
Reggie & Maude's carries the most local color of the four. The name comes from Reggie Gamble and Maude Spencer, two women who ran a Tenderloin operation in 1917 and, according to local historian Randy Shaw in BeyondChron, resisted an effort to shut the district down that same year. Naming a new corner bar after them is either a wink at the neighborhood's long memory or a genuine attempt to root a brand-new business in a hundred-year-old story. Either way, the bar hasn't opened yet.
None of this means the grant program isn't working. It means the gap between "received a grant" and "cut the ribbon" is longer than a press release, and right now four of six recipients are still living in that gap.
The visible investment on Larkin Street this month isn't coming from the new businesses. It's coming from a separate initiative aimed at the old ones.
As The San Francisco Chronicle reported, in late January Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen announced a $5 million donation to the Tenderloin Community Benefit District for what's now called the Larkin Street Revival Project. As The San Francisco Examiner reported, the money is funding roughly 20 decorative security gates, backlit and laser-cut, for existing businesses along the corridor, plus daily sidewalk pressure-washing (up from once a week), new facade and pathway lighting, and an expanded street ambassador presence. The first phase covers the two blocks between Golden Gate Avenue and Eddy Street, with plans to extend south into Little Saigon, the stretch of Larkin and Hyde between Turk and O'Farrell that the city officially named for its Vietnamese-American business community.
As The San Francisco Examiner reported, one of the first businesses to get a gate is Hello Sandwich & Noodle at 426 Larkin Street, run by Hang Nguyen, who has operated there for eight years. Her new gate is bright green and backlit, part of the same rollout that will eventually reach roughly 20 storefronts on the block. Larsen, whose wife Lyna Lam is Cambodian and who has said the couple used to eat regularly at Little Saigon restaurants before the pandemic hollowed the area out, framed the logic behind the gift bluntly in The San Francisco Examiner: "You can't have a successful San Francisco without a successful Tenderloin."
The Storefront Opportunity Grant and the Larkin Street Revival Project are not the same program, even though they're stacking on the same three blocks at the same time. One is seeding new tenants into empty spaces. The other is protecting and lighting the storefronts that never left. A resident walking the corridor today is far more likely to notice a new gate on a business that's been there for years than a new sign on a business that just moved in, simply because the gates are ahead of schedule and the openings are behind it.
That gap between announced and visible shows up elsewhere on the corridor too. As BeyondChron reported, the Tenderloin Museum's planned expansion, which is set to triple its exhibition space and add a new wing on San Francisco's boxing history, was supposed to break ground this summer. A plumbing failure at the Cadillac Hotel in late June flooded the museum's floors and walls, pushing the timeline back until a water-redirection system can be installed. The expansion is still happening. It's just not happening on the calendar anyone published in the spring.
None of this is a story about whether Larkin Street is coming back. City planning's own survey work, folded into the Tenderloin Community Action Plan, put storefront vacancy on the corridor at roughly 20 percent as of the plan's release, and the city's Office of Economic and Workforce Development cited a similar figure, about a quarter of storefronts, in describing why the grant program targeted this stretch specifically. Filling even a handful of those spaces changes what the block looks like at 6 p.m.
But the useful thing to know this month isn't the vacancy rate. It's the sequence. The safety and beautification money arrived first and is already installed, gate by gate, block by block. The retail money arrived around the same time and is still working through permits, buildouts, and soft launches, two doors open, four still to go. If you're gauging the corridor by what's visibly new, the honest answer right now is: new lighting, new gates, new pressure-washing schedule, and exactly two new businesses you can walk into.
If you own property along this corridor and you're weighing how streetscape investment like this tends to show up in a building's value over time, the Bonn Webb Team puts together complimentary, confidential valuations for owners across San Francisco's commercial and mixed-use blocks, Larkin Street included.
Compass Commercial
1699 Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco CA 94109