The recently shuttered KFC site on the northwest corner of Duboce and Gurerro, a block south of Market Street on the northern border of the Mission, is on the market with a $1.548 million price tag.
The basic 1,552-square-foot building and its parking lot sit on a 4,499-square-foot parcel at 200 Duboce Avenue which is zoned for development up to 65 feet in height, not including any potential bonuses. And the development of housing on the site is not only permitted but encouraged, above a ground floor commercial space (with “special emphasis on neighborhood-serving businesses”) and off-street parking discouraged (“in order to preserve the pedestrian-oriented character of the district and prevent attracting [additional] auto traffic”).
We’ll keep you posted and plugged-in.
This might be a suitable location for a Saitowitz Maximum Security Prison franchise, as it’s just within the boundaries of the Brian Spiers Development.Sociopathic Construction Neighborhood District Market St Corridor.
What positive, loving comments…
Thank you, I appreciate the warmth…
“Saitowitz Maximum security prison franchise”. I laughed out loud.
“pedestrian-oriented character of the district”
lol, 1.5 blocks from a freeway exit.
the only non-homeless pedestrian traffic is 10pm+
Another one bites the dust in Upper Market for the better. Next up, hopefully, are the corner lots (Pet Food Express and the union building on Market and Duboce) which are similarly horrible uses of land. Does anyone know the latest on the Lucky 13 lot? Upper Market is filled with these underutilized lots and large, single story commercial buildings. With these very generous bonus densities, hopefully they drop like flies in the next cycle.
And unfortunately, there are more than a few approved but stalled or idle projects within a few blocks. Hoping that all of these dormant projects start moving again this year.
My guess is that most projects are on ice until ~2027
i think we need at least 4 rate cuts before these start to move in earnest
Speaking of which: Expected Value of Rate Cuts Drops
I agree that single story fast food joints are a horrible use of previous land, but the wonderful thing about late capitalism is that what I and others like me think doesn’t count for anything and I have no say in the matter. What matters is the opinion of someone willing to work up a pro forma for a business and take it to a lender for a loan, and what that lender thinks about the prospect of getting paid back.
I’m personally okay with the new state law that took effect Monday boosting the wages of fast-food workers in the state to a minimum of $20 an hour, even if it results in more fast food restaurants closing down (I don’t expect that to be a material result; California has added 142,000 jobs to the fast food industry since minimum wage started going up in 2015). The workers at those places negatively impacted can get jobs elsewhere. There are too many fast food restaurants in the Bay Area, in general and too much capital is devoted to it.
The cashier is going the way of the Dodo bird in this country (already mostly gone in places like Korea), and that’s generally a good thing for all parties. The economy will evolve, just like they did for call operators and bank tellers.
Only if you eliminate folks paying with cash. I can pretty easily imagine using an LLM-driven chatbot to replace the human being taking your order at a kiosk or drive through (I am not saying that the specific KFC site discussed in the above post on Duboce had a drive through) in the near future. What I can’t imagine happening in that same time frame is some type of android taking your filthy, creased bills, validating that they aren’t counterfeit, counting them and giving you back your change through a window while you’re behind the wheel. Maybe fast food franchisees will figure out a way to force their customers to order only via a smartphone app and pay electronically, but I don’t see that going over well with many people that patronize fast food joints in person (that is, not utilizing delivery services).
We’d also have to see some pretty revolutionary advances in robotics before human cooks could be replaced.
Last time I read about the topic, there were more humans employed as bank tellers than in the years prior to ATMs being widely deployed. Call operator jobs today are plentiful, they’ve just been outsourced and offshored to countries where labor is less expensive. The point is, the economy doesn’t evolve anywhere near as fast as information technology does.
I think Apple Pay, debit/credit cards with chips and NFC payments are going to steadily take over, but yes, I agree, there will be a need for one cashier for a while. I think it will become 80% giant iPad ordering screens quickly, and one human cashier to the side for everyone else. It’s already happening. Robots are coming for burger flippers, too, but agreed, that will take a while as well.
No need for an LLM-driven chatbot. A simple touch screen kiosk will do. They might even come up with face/mood scanning to predict the most satisfying meal for the customer. As for handling paper currency and returning change, this has already been solved decades ago – vending machines. But phone/electronic payments are here and rising and vendors will force this upon people whether they like it or not. Fully articulated robotic digits are here – and they are an order of magnitude faster, more ambidextrous with a longer and wider range of motion – up to 270 degrees.
Not that it matters much, San Francisco mandates that merchants accept cash. Support for this form of payment is going to stick around for a while. Opposite trend in Oakland: No such mandate, and they’re ditching cash as fast as they can – prominent example: the bars at the Fox stopped accepting cash a year ago.
@Daniel – Not exactly sure what the intent is behind mandating cash acceptance. What if the merchant doesn’t have the required change? It imposes an additional overhead (albeit small) to resolve this requiring additional cash allocation. Is it planned obsolescence by way of progressively onerous overhead?
The big strategy behind electronic payments is increasing the velocity of liquidity. The circulating speed of cash/material backed currency system is significantly slower than electronic currency system which can under optimal conditions move at close to speed of light (network). And is highly fungible and extremely elastic. CBDC is an inevitability because of our dependence on technology. Its already in place, it’s just not called that – yet.
Around 5 percent of U.S. households remain unbanked, the vast majority of which are lower-income, minority and disabled households or individuals that don’t have access to bank/credit accounts and can only transact with cash.
CBDCs are likely to have interesting effects on the “city” civilization construct. Fundamentally, the “city” exists as it facilitates capital exchange, flows and allocation. And FIRE (finance insurance real estate) jobs manned by humans are downstream of this ‘city’ process. Network removes the need for classical/physical city requirement. Compute nodes located anywhere in the world (optimized for cost of energy and real estate) can perform/and are performing the same tasks without the overhead, inconsistency, moral bias of human input. Will be interesting years ahead, I think.
“What if the merchant doesn’t have the required change”
I know, right? Makes one wonder how businesses have been able to scrape by for the last several thousand years.
@two_beers – Velocity of liquidity and speed of debt expansion are highly correlated with and critical causal factors for technological progress. The moral dimension of those processes and the progress outcomes is a different discussion. Personally, I am a neo-luddite. And my choices are limited to how much technology I don’t want to use – but the speed of and technology development itself/the evolution of a highly technology dependent society is beyond my control.
Barter->Material Backed Currency->Simple Banking->Fractional Reserve Banking->Central Reserve Banking->Cross National Digital Banking – we are here ->Global Digital Banking.
We can still barter but the “system” has evolved to make such practice inefficient/dis-incentivize/disallow it – either by design (to facilitate taxation) or as an artifact of requirement of faster capital flows or both.
cave_dweller,
You’re arguing from the established but very likely inaccurate anthropological paradigm of a relatively smooth, linear progression of economic systems. Graeber, Wengrow, and others demolished and are continuing to demolish that paradigm, based on new (and revisited) archaeological evidence.
If you’re comfortable with having hallowed shibboleths ripped to shreds, read Debt: The First 5,000 Years and The Dawn of Everything. Granted, their ideas aren’t mainstream anthropology, yet, but there’s a growing body of evidence to support them. “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
@two_beers: I support Graebers views. This debt bubble is eventually going to blow. Though, if it does at this stage (in the near future 10-25 years) it is going to result in unimaginable carnage and destruction. Simply because the current “growth” in the last 70+ years is also the driver behind population growth (and attendant ecological destruction). I think, “they” are betting the farm on AI with the hope that AI driven productivity can fund UBI till that point population returns to “equilibrium”, and while decrease in population/consumption doesn’t upset the economics of scale that would still be required even at equilibrium, where equilibrium is that size of population/consumption that stops and reverses anthropocene extinction (blah!).
All of this technological excess is the consumption scale required to justify further development of AI. Kind of like how porn made internet feasible in the initial days. And how crypto hodling funded advanced silicon development needed for AI.
All of this global cartel banking, currency control, speeding up capital flows are to delay the inevitable. I don’t know what else could explain GFC/Covid bailouts/handouts. And the delay is not without costs – disappearance of Mom & Pop retail, job losses, economic pressures, unaffordable housing, mass migrations, increased competition for resources, entrenching hierarchies etc., Like the great cities of past that have risen and fallen – San Francisco too will have its chapter in history.
We are in a hurry for future and I don’t know why!
cave_dweller,
Not to get too far astray from the post at hand, and I’m not sure which type of debt you’re alluding to (public and private debt being two very different things), but even, say, a multi-trillion dollar derivatives blow-out could be resolved (instead of being merely reblown. again.) if the political will existed to manage it. My bigger fear is the refusal of western oligarchs to share any of the spoils of either resource extraction or gains to productivity with either the citizens of their own countries or the rest of the world will lead to “unimaginable carnage and destruction” in the form of world war long before rising seas/dried-up rivers or the debt bogeyman come knocking. 35 years of unipolar hegemony is crumbling before our eyes on a daily basis, which wouldn’t even be a bad thing, except the sociopathic ruling classes of the unipolar world won’t voluntarily give up one shred of their perceived due. Which I think I means war before the west loses what remains of its rapidly slipping military edge (which is arguably already gone)…Good times!
(Now back to the post at hand…😀)
[Editor’s Note: Emphasis added.]
“Upper Market is filled with these underutilized lots and large, single story commercial buildings. With these very generous bonus densities, hopefully they drop like flies in the next cycle.”
Why must every cent of potential profit be squeezed out of every square inch of land as fast as possible? God forbid we let future generations have a say in how to put one square inch of land to its best use.
I’d be fine with a government-developed and operated apartment building that runs at breakeven, perhaps a 20% discount to market rates. I’d be fine with a lot of things here. I just think everyone is better off – literally everyone – if Pet Food Express was the ground floor tenant in a 10 story building rather than sitting on a lot by itself. More people would have a home (including affordable units), developers make money (broader economic growth), Pet Food Express gets more customers, the city gets more tax revenue (beloved PDR workers making 150K for the city), the neighborhood gets more residents shopping, we get new trees and infrastructure upgrades. It’s a win across the board. I’d like to see this happen over and over and over again.
You want density? This place was a KFC AND a Taco Bell at the same time! 🙂
I’d have no problem with a KFC/Taco Bell duo returning on the ground floor of a newly constructed ten story residential building at this location. However, does the city consider it to be a “neighborhood-serving business?” My guess is no.
Restaurants are neighborhood-serving businesses and formula retail uses are not prohibited on this parcel.
if you want real density, how about a combined KFC/Taco Bell/ In-n-out/McDonalds/Burger King/ Jacks
Ugh. The only reason that the KFC/Taco Bell combination was possible is because Yum! Brands, which was spun off from Pepsi in the late nineties, owns both chains. In-N-Out Burger is privately owned and doesn’t do franchising, which in the case (famously) of McDonalds, is really just a business strategy to capitalize real estate, the food is secondary.
My favorite reference to this area a few years ago
‘KFC Heights…’
lol
the Planning Department is currently proposing to upzone this site to 85′.
Cool! We can never have enough unaffordable, vacant studios and 1BRs! Nor enough unaffordable, vacant condos seeking the greater fool! Either way, the ground floor is certain to be an unaffordable, vacant, wide-but-shallow footprint fronted with cold, dark glass. I can’t wait until the next business cycle- I want it now!
Mst people would prefer housing over a shuttered KFC…
Most bankers, builders, landlords, and sales agents would prefer unaffordable vacant studios, 1BRs, and condos over a shuttered KFC, to help speed up gentrification, even though that type of speculative and utterly superfluous “housing” is a horrible, short-sighted use of scarce land.
fify.
As if a drive through Kentucky Taco was some sort of cozy neighborhood cantina adding warmth to the locale.
As a landlord, I agree 100%. SanFrancisco, don’t build additional housing. The last thing I need is additional competition through more supply.
C’mon, man. Won’t someone please think of the children?!
If you’re holding “market-rate” housing, than additional “market-rate” housing might put some downward pressure on rents. However, as all the readers of this blog know, that downward pressure works very slowly (“real estate is sticky on the way down”), and business cycles often turn up before the downward pressure ever works its way into asking prices, so supply gluts often don’t even lead to lower prices. Contrary to the favorite refrain of economic illiterates everywhere, there’s nothing simple about the theory of supply & demand.
Also, even if additional supply were added to your market, you benefit in the long-run from the upward pressure on rents induced by gentrification in your market. You might not admit to the effect of gentrification on real estate, but surely you won’t deny the work of mainstream economists on the “network effect”?
As a landlord, if you had the only “market-rate” building in a dumpy neighborhood and you didn’t the competition from nicer buildings, you probably wouldn’t be a landlord for very long.
“Unaffordable and vacant” – Care to tell us what the vacancy rate is for San Francisco?
It might work for owner occupier with SBA loan who wants to run the family business. When ready to retire he can sell to developer. High vehicle, high visibility location. Corner site signalized location. It will sell if priced right.