Can Your Vote Change the City?

As the City focuses on its economic recovery, it plans to bring back the “Shop and Dine in the 49” campaign this holiday season to challenge San Francisco residents to spend at local businesses. The campaign will kick off with “Shop Small Saturday” on November 26, the largest buy local day during the holiday season. With over 90,000 small businesses in need of support as we emerge from the pandemic, every bit of foot traffic helps—even a one percent increase in local retail sales adds around $100 million in economic impact to the City.

As the city that famously rebuilt and reinvented itself after various booms and busts, city officials now have the arduous and unenviable duty of directing San Francisco out of its post-pandemic lull. Marketwatch detailed this onerous task by analyzing how the City got to this point and determining the obstacles keeping it from returning to its pre-pandemic success. In addition to the City’s longstanding housing and homelessness issues, the exposé highlighted how a downtown in complete disarray, a Frankenstein tax system falling short of projections, and legislators failing to take the downtown recovery seriously might jeopardize San Francisco’s hold on being the epicenter for tech.