Dema Grim (center) one of the members of the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association celebrates on October 10, 2013 after the Board of Appeals grants her group a rehearing of their appeal of Jack Spade's building permit. Photo by Daniel Hirsch.

The San Francisco Planning Commission has been looking at San Francisco’s restrictions against formula retail and will be proposing changes in May.

Those new guidelines, which are expected to be released in May, will try to steer a course between the outright ban on formula retail that many local merchants want and rules so loose that national companies could overwhelm the homegrown businesses that give San Francisco’s neighborhood retail districts their special flair.

“We’re trying to find the balance of what works,” said Kanishka Burns, the city planner overseeing the project. READ MORE 

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.

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