It’s been an unprecedented, extinction-level time for small businesses across the nation. Moreover, new findings from Yelp reveal that some 5,000 SF area businesses have closed since the global health crisis started — with over 2,000 of them now permanently shut down.
San Francisco and other Bay Area metropolitans, like other corners of the country, continue to sit in an odd limbo between earlier lockdown restrictions and the everyday frivolity we all took for granted prior in the year. Most people are aware of the toll SARS-CoV-2 has taken on our local, state, and national economies — but concrete figures lend a certain level of reality missing with what-if scenarios. Case in point, fresh information from Yelp depicts a small business apocalypse hard to wrap one's left lobe around: 2,000 SF area businesses have gone the way of the dodo bird in just the past five months, with at least another 3,000 temporarily shuttered.
SF's budget is the most important piece of legislation we pass every year, but it doesn't receive the attention it deserves because it is an incredibly complicated process and an incredibly complicated document.
— London Breed (@LondonBreed) August 7, 2020
That's why we put together this explainer: https://t.co/WrVTmsZdFT
As reported on by the Chronicle, the popular website — which is also headquartered in San Francisco — that aggregates user reviews of businesses released findings that 2,065 businesses in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area are marked "permanently closed” on the platform with another 3,000 businesses described as "temporarily closed," according to Yelp.
Per Yelp, the greater San Francisco area is third on the list of total closures, sitting only behind Los Angeles and New York; Chicago and the Dallas-Fort Worth area came in at fourth and fifth, respectively.
Expectedly, businesses in neighborhoods synonyms with abundant tourist traffic — North Beach, Fisherman's Wharf, and, like we touched on this morning, Chinatown — are faring the worst. These numbers, too, are almost certainly to balloon with congress still at a stalemate with fleshing out the next stimulus rollout plan, which would include an injection of support to the expiring Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
And with no set date insight for when indoor dining can return to San Francisco, there aren't too many buoys on the horizon that may offer some support for the city's waning business landscape. A permit measure that's set to allow for an expansion of outdoor dining and shopping spaces will, however, appear on the November ballot; congress is still negotiating a new COVID relief package that's expected to both simplify PPP loan forgiveness — the most recent deadline to apply for it having just passed Saturday — and create a new round of PPP loans.
The unemployment rate in California was near as much 15 percent an in June, an almost four-fold increase over the same month a year prior; Trump's $400 enhanced unemployment benefit executive order is expected to go into effect in lieu of a congressional agreement on a new stimulus rollout, and the State of California is set to use funds to help meet the previous $600 weekly benefit that ended in July.
Related: New Report Says 370 Restaurants Have Permanently Closed In the Bay Area
San Franciscans Continue Leaving for More 'Comfortable Lives' Elsewhere as Rental Prices Plunge
Image: Wikimedia Commons (Taken in 2018)
