It's one thing that we've been maxed out or priced out by San Francisco's insane rental market — but now it's screwing with our very first cat cafe.
In sad news reported by the San Francisco Business Times, KitTea's Courtney Hatt says they'll need an additional $100,000 to open a cat cafe in Hayes Valley.
"We felt the lease was a little too expensive in the beginning, but then it turned out to be the best one we found," Hatt says. "Unfortunately, the lease went up (while we were looking at other locations) because the market changed."
This week, KitTea sent an email to people who already donated to its crowdfunding campaign asking for more help: “Unfortunately, due to the amount of money the landlord would like as a guarantee, combined with additional build-out we’d need to do to pass code from the health department, we estimate that we need an additional $100,000 before we can sign the lease and begin construction.”
KitTea has raised $63,303 to date and is now also seeking angel investors to push the project forward.
Meanwhile, over in Oakland — where rents are merely crazy, but not insane — Cat Town Cafe is speeding toward a September opening, as SFist previously reported. Cat Town Cafe signed its lease at 2869 Broadway in July and is currently turning the 2,200-square-foot space into a coffee bar-meets-cat playground, where all of the shelter kitties will be available for adoption. If it opens before KitTea, which looks likely, Cat Town Cafe will be the first full-fledged cat cafe in America.
