2011 Mission Street McDonald's
The McDonald’s at 16th and Mission was suddenly shuttered last night with employees being told that the restaurant’s lease for the 2011 Mission Street store had expired and that everyone would be transferred to other locations in the city.

And according to a plugged-in tipster, “there was some speculation the building owner did not want to enter into a new long term lease that might interfere with plans to sell the building or develop the property,” a property which sits directly across the street from the proposed 331-unit development to rise up to ten stories on the northeast corner of Mission and 16th.

The southeast corner of Mission and 16th, upon which the three-story Bruns Building was built in 1916, and one storefront of which had been leased to McDonald’s, is zoned for development up to 85-feet in height. No plans for the site, nor the newly shuttered storefront, have been submitted to the city.

85 thoughts on “Mission District McDonald’s Suddenly Shuttered”
    1. He’ll make the city a safe place for everyone who wants to be entitled to McDonald’s cheap inedible food, I just know it! He’s a man of the people!

  1. Awesome. So glad that there is one less McDonalds in the city. Hopefully now this corner of Bart will clean up. Get rid of cheap food..

  2. Pretty soon the entire Mission will have its windows covered in wood. I don’t think David Campos has the support of the new Mission to keep it in its current state. He loses a supporter every day.

    1. As much as I wish it were the case, his supporters seem as supportive as ever—at least based on what I heard on his recent KQED Forum discussion on the housing moratorium.

      1. Selection bias. KQED callers are highly activist and populist, and probably spend most of their day accomplishing very little outside of vocalizing complaints across mass media. I say this as a KQED member and listener.

    2. I think if you added it up, you’d count more new openings than closings in the Mission. It’s not a dying neighborhood, commercially.

    3. Hopefully it’s windows will be covered in reclaimed wood, with tea candles and Edison bulbs. Ooh, artisinal shuttering!

  3. They’re dropping like flies! Hopefully the one on Ocean Ave is next… that would be an excellent site for a mixed use development.

    1. I don’t know how successful mixed use will be there. Quite a bit of gentrification still needed. The area is too clos to CCSF. The new frozen yogurt shop closed in the Avalon rental complex despite being only a few steps from Whole Foods.

      1. You’re kidding, right? See my name link for the Chronicle’s recent write-up and take a walk around the area if you haven’t been in awhile. If anything, being close to CCSF helps tremendously. It’s mere blocks away from Balboa Park BART and there’s at least four major projects being planned or built on the corridor (plus the reservoir project, which is longer term.) Target has even given its vote of confidence. I have no doubt the froyo shop space will get filled soon, the developer is probably just charging a premium price for a newer retail space.

        1. I can confirm the froyo place was closed due to the planned minimum wage hikes. The owner moved his shop to another county. I hear he was jerk anyway.

          1. I drive by the neighborhood and am aware of the changes ie. new multi-family units on the corner from the McDonald’s and across the street from Whole Foods. If you drive a block further down, it isn’t so nice by Geneva. Also a block parallel from Ocean Avenue isn’t so nice. There are a lot of single story shops along Ocean between Target and Whole Foods. It will probably be another 5-10 yrs. before it is actually vibrant.

          2. I like the grilled chicken at El Pollo Supremo on Outer Mission more than the ones at Whole Foods.

            The $15 wage hike is going to make more low-end jobs disappear. Hence the drive towards more upscale food establishments and the cross-marketing of movie theaters and alcohol. Given high rents, lots of red tape, and increases in food costs, the low-end mom and pop shops aren’t going to survive the round of wage hikes.

      2. Isn’t FROYO basically 2011’s trend?
        Would the closing of a cupcake shop lead to a similar pronouncement?
        After one overcomes the delusion that a sugar-packed substance like FroYo is “good” for you, the stuff is almost universally pretty awful. IMO, of course.

  4. Excellent!
    To many crazy scenes & drug deal there.
    Clean up the Mission! This corner is disgusting. Thank goodness we have sane owners like this. All locals who are not in SRO’s will be pleased.

    Perhaps this owner also reacted to Herera’s fining the landlord of the McDonalds in the Haight. Shame on Herera.

    No doubt David Campos will come up with something ridiculous like forcing the owner to reopen McD’s because their historic or some crap. CAMPOS IS LOOSING SUPPORT EVERY DAY. Good riddance. Nov can’t come too soon.
    We want a new cleaned up Mission.

  5. I have nothing against McDo, except I end up picking up all the paper and plastic that contains their food stuffs.

    1. Try living close to a 7/11 close to the bar scene. $1 hot dogs containers littered all around.

  6. Campos will be in the Commie vs. Reality conundrum:

    PROs: MickeyD is an “evil capitalist corporation destroying the planet”
    CONs: MickeyD feeds the poor (dollar menu!) as well as provides jobs to the poor. It also offers a venue for drug dealers who are probably overwhelmingly anti-gentrification. This MickeyD will be replaced with something better therefore not what Campesino wants.

  7. There is a McDonald’s in the Stonestown Mall (where Happy Meals toys are given to children.) I was waiting to see a cop taser and arrest the little kids for violating SF law. Lots of SF State students eat there.

    McDonald’s is a victim of changing tastes and bad franchisee relationships. Other burger joints are doing very well ie. In and Out Burger, Shake Shack, Five Guys Burgers, etc. Key to running a successful fast casual place is focusing on a few menu items and be extremely good at those items. As soon as you overexpand the menu, it increases costs and dilutes your core.

  8. I understand you all don’t like Campos’ policies, but I don’t think it’s fair to vilify the man. He’s trying to ensure a voice for the less influential. It’s good to have equitable measure on such a complex subject as urban development. Let’s not oversimplify his efforts.

    1. His efforts are mostly wrong-headed. Why not support supervisors who understand economics and reality?

    2. well lets see what’s not to like about David Campos:

      – his actions have made rent higher in all his votes against property rights
      – he continues to hurt mom + pop landlords every month (the moratorium would be an ironic boom to them though)
      – he doesn’t understand supply & demand
      – he’s destroyed many TIC owners right of converting for another 10yrs
      – and those folks voting for him are often leaches (not all), voting to be subsidized in perpetuity by some other hard working tax-paying San Franciscan. Enough is enough!
      – Calle 24 is a joke and waste of tax payers time & money.

      The list could go on & on. So long Campos, you can’t get out of SF quick enough.

      New residents see right through him. He doesn’t benefit anyone but himself, and he’s doing a terrible job at that. Of course he actually quite nice to talk with in person which makes him a 2 faced politician, but mainly his politics stink for anyone who wants to work hard and get on here in ‘America’.

    3. There’s no need to vilify him, he’s doing it perfectly on his own already!

      His general attitude is precisely a never us-vs-them litany of oversimplifications and bad choices that we know always backfire in a capitalist environment such as the US. The “us” he loves are people that surround him and supported him, and nobody else. He has no interest in compromise and see everything he does as a small part in a wider anachronistic “revolution”. There’s a case to be made on how money can destroy, but he is fighting people who just want to make a living and have an already uphill battle ahead of them to be insulted and slowed down by their elected reps.

      He has no consideration for newcomers. He has no consideration for owners. He has no consideration for the hard-working middle class that is being squeezed out between the protected poor and the obscenely rich.

      Now one major problem for him is that the middle class is overwhelmingly Democrat and less and less willing to accept extremists who take their vote for granted. But the middle class is being kicked or bought out due to lack of housing and replaced with people who don’t give a hoot about social justice. That’s very sad, and the Nth unintended consequence of applying bad math to an easy problem.

    4. Campos is not “trying to ensure a voice for the less influential”. He’s just promising them bread and circuses to further his political agenda. And his initiatives actually make things worse for them, and for most of the rest of the city too. He’s a disaster, and the sooner Campos is gone, the better.

      1. Agree!

        Campos exhibits a behavior of a narcissistic sociopath. He doesn’t serve to people, people serve to his sense of grandeur. His “solutions” are oversimplified and populist BS like the laws of economics don’t apply to the Mission. His ideas hurt the most the same people he supposedly voices.

        The most exemplary to me is that when his rhetoric cannot sustain logic he resorts to playing a victim card. It’s big corporations against him, it’s wealthy investors buying the SF government, but not him. But it’s never his corrupt logic, or should say a lack of thereof.

      2. Campos uses the politics of fear and resentment to twist people to vote against their own economic self interest to keep he and his cronies in power.

        Just like the Koch Bros. do with T-Baggers. The right wing doesn’t enjoy a monopoly of sleazy politicians.

    5. Campos is a racist. He believes certain neighborhoods are only for Latinos, and says as much regularly.

        1. Attacking the poster is one thing, but can you comment on the message? Is it inaccurate to say the latino community has been very active in fighting the perceived gentrification? Using this accurate statement, can you deny Campos’ fight coincides with the Latino community actions against this gentrification? Now following this logic, can’t we state that David Campos wants the Mission to stay latino and therefore fight against what will bring non-latinos into the Mission (non-BMR condos, airbnb, market rate rentals)?

          Now using “racism” might be a stretch and must not be used lightly, even though the epithet is used very often to defend underprivileged communities, but if some communities are allowed to use “racist”, why aren’t other communities allowed to use the same word when the bias is applied the other way around? I feel that one way it’s “racism”, the other way it’s “defending our community”. But it looks and smells the same, imho.

          Am I missing something or am I oversimplifying?

    6. How patronizing to the middle and working class of San Francisco. “Hey, you make less than $75,000 a year, so you must have the same opinion as everyone else that does, too. All tens of thousands of you can be ruled by one man, because you’re all group think lemmings.”

    7. Sometimes the less influential viewpoint is so because it’s stupid. If Campos’ policies were in fact enacted it would not be doing the poor any favors. It’s all just half-witted symbolic obstructionism, so he can claim in his next election campaign that he has a record of opposing commercial interests.

    8. The best thing that anyone can say about Campos is that hes a termed out politician with no prospects for higher office who is more than happy to ride the wave of anger of a vocal minority of his constituency in an attempt for relevance.
      The moratorium will stop exactly ZERO people from moving into the mission. He’s a great example of the pitfalls of district elections: someone without enough savvy for citywide appeal.

    1. Do you mean “More housing = bad”? What do you suggest? Building a moat to stop people from moving in?

    2. Don’t worry, it’s just a closed McDonalds. It will be filled by a different store. The building will not change. This has no connection to any condos.

  9. I don’t know for certain but I don’t think the building owner is currently planning to tear it down and rebuild. I have heard the San Francisco School of Massage is planning on opening a massage studio in this building and am pretty sure they are signing a multi-year lease soon if not already.

  10. This is what gentrification really looks like. We keep debating rent control and affordable units, but none of that really matters. What happens is that outsiders come in and businesses set up to accommodate them, rather than the existing population, which draws more outsiders. When people say that they are being pushed out of their neighborhoods, it isn’t literally pushed out of their houses, it’s that the neighborhood is now geared towards a different type of person. Even someone buying a BMR in the mission is probably not looking to eat at McDonalds.

    Anti-gentrification efforts won’t work because the supporters don’t even know what they want and enforcing what they want is illegal and impossible. But this is why studies show that building new units can increase prices, opposite supply and demand. It’s just that not building units doesn’t stop the upward pressure in prices either.

    But shuttering McDonalds is gentrification on a scale that 100 Ellis evictions never could be.

    1. And a different kind of person would be bad how? Are there physical or cultural requirements that are needed to deserve the right to live in SF? Please enlighten us.

      1. I’m actually very pro-gentrification. The only opinion I espoused was that the anti-gentrification people have no clue what they even want and what they want is probably illegal, e.g. they really want economic and racial quotas for certain parts of the city. That’s absurd and it’s illegal.

      2. Also, I’m against rent control and prop 13 and tying health insurance to an employer, all of which are horrible for worker mobility. But with rent control and prop 13, very few people are being pushed out of their neighborhoods. What’s really happening is the neighborhood is changing and they don’t like it. The mission hasn’t been affordable to the poor in over a decade. The poor who can afford to live there are almost certainly under rent control or prop 13. So they aren’t being kicked out en masse, they just don’t like the changes.

          1. You don’t (are incapable of) interpret anything. You just look to identify whether “them” or “us.”

          2. san FronziScheme is one of the most thoughtful and insightful poster on SocketSite.

          3. Thanks Crankster 😉

            Orland, the “us-vs-them” might not be where you think it is. First most anti-rent-control and anti-crazier-than-though rules posters here are democrats, if you could believe it. And they are capitalists, which is not contradictory. But the leftist fringe that claims to be Democrat doesn’t like it one bit.

            As the moratorium vote proves, the activists have removed themselves from the mainstream. They are the one shouting down people who do not heed their desires, even though these desires are obviously not supported by a majority. To enforce their dominance on the political discourse they will “shame” moderates, accusing them of betraying the progressive principles, a technique that has been used by leftist extremists since the 1950s. Sometimes they will use race, but more often than not they will exploit the poor and the weak to advance their agenda. Just look at Chris Daly for an opportunist in Trotskyist clothes who moved to the ‘burbs when he overplayed his hand, failed at a business, and landed at a cushy position… That’s the typical revolutionary for you, and he was the poster child of the “us-vs-them” ultra-progressive fight.

    2. I fear you may be right, frog, as to the nature and effect of gentrification in spite the desire for change by addition. Only underscores, validates and makes more understandably reasonable the moratorium crowd’s POV.

    3. Interesting point, and it connects with the protest of the myriad sidewalk / streetscape improvements that the planning department wanted to install on Mission Street. However, if you look at eviction data, I also think many people are literally being pushed out. (Those numbers aren’t going to include informal arrangements, buyouts, etc.). When you say people “just don’t like the changes,” I would say that that they don’t like the threat of being forced out whether they lose their apartment through eviction, or a master tenant leaves, or they have a kid and need a bigger space or whatever. I can say without a doubt that as a renter who was forced to move after our landlord died and the property was sold (OMI), being forced into the current housing market is a nightmare.

    1. It would be nice to have multiple locations in SF so I don’t have to schlep to the closest Daly City one by the DMV office.

      Though I like to see a place offering exotic game burgers ie. bison, venison, caribou, etc.

    2. Never understood the fuss about In-n-Out. Even greasier than McDonalds and not any tastier. But hey, if you like bible verse references on your packaging, it’s the place to go.

      1. In-n-Out tastes like nostalgia.

        Now of course I have been converted to 5 guys… Best burger short of the luxury ones on the Strip.

  11. Just an opinion on politicians in general. Job One for all politicians is to get reelected. And the closer they are to their next election, the more pandering they become. If you look at their actions and behaviors through that set of optics, they actually begin to look logical – in a warped fashion. Now if you have a “safe seat” and no term limits (think Barbara Lee as an example), you can go to the far left of the democratic spectrum and still have no risk of not getting reelected. Campos lives in the world of term limits and is always looking out for his next meal (aka, elected position).

  12. Does anyone remember when McDonalds sued McDharma’s in Santa Cruz over the McD name? Well McDharma’s did settle with McDonald’s and they’re now called Dharma’s but wouldn’t it be great karma if Dharma’s moved into that location? Given that the new condos are coming that would be a great addition if only for the entire kharmic experience.

  13. Is this the New Mission you all are talking about. White privileged people, who are hateful and come with the colonial attitude bred in them to clean up the neighborhood and dress the natives, strip them of their culture and language and if they don’t like it they could just leave. Because we know whats best for everyone.

    1. Do you actually believe what you wrote? San Francisco is a desirable city and that raises prices. The people who can afford those prices tend to be college educated professionals, of all races.

        1. Vile bile? We might not be reading the same posts. Or maybe you have issues with people discussing REAL ESTATE on a REAL ESTATE blog. Yes some people like Real Estate, live from it, want to understand it to better master its potential, all sorts of things that are related to the market of housing things.

          If your thing is social justice and people’s revolution, then there are better places to find a kindred spirit.

    2. Only “just leave”…. At least that’s more enlightened than the genocidal 19th Century European mindset.

      1. Moving is an inconvenience that is faced on a daily basis by a portion of the population. It’s not genocide. Genocide is when a particular people group of people are singled out and murdered methodically. That is not exactly the same thing as renting a U-Haul and finding a new favorite place to buy lunch in a different neighborhood or city.

        1. And doesn’t your insensitivity towards the dismantling of a community today shed light upon how tens of millions were so blithely dispatched in centuries past merely to facilitate another “migration? “

          1. I still haven’t fully recovered from the plight of my Neanderthal ancestors who were overrun out by those stinking homo-sapiens. Me and a few fellow Neandies are planning to call for compensation. Never forget!

  14. I hereby decree that all McDonald’s in the city and county of San Francisco shall exist in food truck form only! And that there shall be a McDonald’s food truck within 8 blocks of every citizen. Proclamation concluded.

    1. Ha. I was living in a rural town when it got its first McD. People were ecstatic. “Starkville is going places” read the newspaper. “We no longer have to drive to Tupelo for a Big Mac”.

      1. MOD. I felt the same way – grew up in a small town in Alaska. When McD came to town, it was a big event.

        1. I remember when Noah’s Bagels and Boston Market came into town…all I thought was wow, this town is about 30 yrs. behind the times.

  15. Wow.. The closure of McDonald’s at 16th & Mission made DRUDGE REPORT today. DRUDGE links to a Mike Sugarman report on the channel 5 webpage. That’s a whole lotta traffic for KPIX.com No doubt they’re lovin’ it .

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