Property crime choking S.F.’s dining business
It felt like deja vu for Dave Martin as he watched silent security footage of an individual breaking into his San Francisco bar in June.
Within the first 16 months after it opened, Pine Tar Grill, Martin’s San Francisco Giantsthemed business on Folsom Street filled with sports memorabilia, was burglarized three times. The final incident was caught on camera, showing a person breaking the glass of the front door at around 4 a.m. to steal cash, sportsrelated bobblehead toys and computers, Martin said.
Repairs cost thousands of dollars and were
a big factor in his decision to close the bar last month.
“To balance everything out when it comes to the costs, I would have had to charge like $85 for a cheeseburger,” said Martin.
Martin’s story isn’t unique in San Francisco. Running a restaurant carries high operating costs in the best of circumstances, but tack on expenses related to burglary and vandalism, and owners like Martin say survival seems all but impossible. Property crime rates have actually declined in the city over the last year, but reported incidents may tell only part of the story. Breakins take an emotional toll, which smallbusiness owners say is a deterrent to expanding in the city.
Concerns about restaurant property crime came to the fore as an Instagram post from San Francisco bubbletea chain Boba Guys made the rounds recently. Coowner Andrew Chau wrote last week about a breakin at the Boba Guys location in the Mission District, the third such incident this year.
San Francisco “is a shell of what it used to be — I’m a local, son of a retired Muni bus operator and Pacific Bell call center representative. I’ve seen this city transform into Gotham, and it makes me sad. It’s time for radical solutions that think long term,” Chau wrote. Chau did not respond to requests for comment.
The post drew similar stories in comments underneath it. Churn Urban Creamery, which opened in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood roughly three months ago, wrote that the business already had a breakin that resulted in broken glass, which the ice cream shop had to repair.
At a special September hearing of the city’s Land Use Committee on restaurants’ challenges, one restaurant owner called San Francisco a “nonviable market” because of the difficulties of doing business.
At the fine dining destination Nightbird and its adjoining bar, Linden Room, in Hayes Valley, chefowner Kim Alter said it isn’t unusual to find crowbar marks on the doors of her building from people trying to break in after hours. She recently spent roughly $6,000 to install a new security system to deter property crime and $15,000 installing gates over her doors. Such expenses are pushing businesses away from the city, she added.
“No one wants to open a restaurant in San Francisco,” said Alter, who wants to expand in the city but isn’t sure it’s currently a good idea.
Despite the recent highprofile incidents that stirred business owners’ alarm, official data show breakins falling. Over the first nine months of the year, there were 3,475 reported burglaries in San Francisco, according to CompStat data from the San Francisco Police Department. It’s a significant drop compared with the same period in 2018, when there were 4,375 burglaries in the city.
In an email, San Francisco police spokesman Adam Lobsinger attributed the decrease to efforts by the department to “increase the number of uniformed officers working on patrol, on foot beats and in plainclothes capacity.”
“The SFPD recognizes that property crime is not limited to just one neighborhood or one police district,” he said.
But even if things are improving, the problem is still dire. FBI data from 2017 showed San Francisco had the highest percapita property-crime rate among the 20 biggest U.S. cities.
Laurie Thomas, a board member of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association and the owner of Terzo and Rose’s Cafe and the recently shuttered Rose Pistola in North Beach, said some business owners choose not to report every incident. Sometimes they don’t bother because the cost of repairing the damage is less than the insurance deductible, or they don’t think filing a police report will result in any action.
“The more pressing issue is the physiological and emotional damage breakins have on a staff,” she said. “When this happens often, these places can feel unsafe. Female servers and bartenders carrying cash from tip outs, they all worry,” especially if they are closing the restaurant.
Boba Guys on 19th Street is on a bustling restaurant strip that includes fine dining stalwart Lazy Bear, Instagramfriendly Cuban spot Media Noche and Anthony Strong’s Italian destination Prairie, just a few doors away.
Strong, who opened Prairie a little more than a year ago and has lived in the Mission District for 14 years, said crime in the area is actually not as bad as it once was.
“We still have a lot of opportunity to push it further and make things better in this area,” he said. “But it’s definitely an added frustration for a small independent business. It can be disheartening when this happens over and over, because it’s already expensive to operate in this city.”
When Martin recalled the June breakin at the Pine Tar Grill, what sticks in his mind wasn’t losing the computers or bobbleheads. Instead, it was a conversation he had with a police officer who viewed the footage of the breakin, who told him that he recognized the person in the video and that he had been arrested multiple times, Martin said.
“As a business owner,” Martin said, “that’s just really hard to hear.”