San Francisco, CA
Explore: How will S.F.’s rezoning affect your neighborhood?
The buildings most likely to be affected by San Francisco’s new upzoning plan are those where apartments and multi-family housing already sit, according to an analysis of the plan by Mission Local. Single-family homes, meanwhile, are likely to see very little change.
The newest, amended version of the plan to make the northern and western parts of the city taller and denser, which was announced by Supervisor Myrna Melgar and Mayor Daniel Lurie on Thursday, would no longer affect some 84,000 units of rent-controlled housing.
Mission Local’s map of that proposal, which will go to the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee on Monday, showed that 33 percent of multifamily units would see even higher and denser zoning. These are in buildings currently zoned for apartments, many of which have commercial storefronts on the ground floor.
The low-lying areas of neighborhoods like West Portal, Forest Hill, the Sunset, and the Richmond, meanwhile, are unlikely to see drastic change outside of commercial and transit corridors.
See how the new upzoning plan affects your neighborhood. Switching tabs shows the kinds of parcels affected in the amended plan.
Just 13 percent of single-family homes and condos in the plan would be upzoned. The large majority of those units would remain as-is: They were already allowed to be up to 40 feet tall before, and will remain at 40 feet if the plan passes.
That’s by design: The upzoning plan has focused on increasing heights along commercial streets and transit lines, including Geary in the Richmond, Judah in the Sunset, and Van Ness in Nob Hill.
If you don’t live in a single-family home or condo, your building is more likely to be impacted. Multifamily residences — a category that includes apartment buildings — are located along transit and commercial corridors far more frequently. They are more than twice as likely to receive height limit increases in the proposed changes.
That’s true even under the amendment that would exempt any rent-controlled buildings with three or more units, the majority of multifamily housing in the plan.
All buildings, regardless of type, will be subject to “density decontrol,” however. That lets developers build any number of units on a single lot, as long as height limits don’t exceed those in the plan and design standards are followed. Effectively, that means no more exclusively single-family zoning.
And businesses? Since many exist on commercial corridors, 84 percent would be upzoned.
That has some business owners, like the owner of Joe’s Ice Cream on Geary Boulevard, worried.
Sean Kim’s building was bought in 2022 by an architecture company. The firm then met with the Planning Department to discuss potentially redeveloping the site to add housing atop what is currently a single-story commercial building housing the ice cream shop.
Kim fears that his lease won’t be renewed when it expires in three years, forcing him to either relocate or close the business.
“Probably, once we’re displaced, we cannot come back,” Kim said with a sigh.
Relocating is extremely costly. If Kim can find another building that already has the freezers and grills needed for ice cream and burgers, he thinks it would cost between $100,000 and $200,000 to move. If the building doesn’t already have that infrastructure in place, it’s more like $500,000.
Kim and other business owners worry that building owners will have an extra incentive under the new upzoning to let commercial leases expire and then sell their properties for redevelopment. Taller buildings would let developers profit more.
The Planning Department, for its part, said development tends to occur on vacant commercial buildings and lots, not ones with profitable businesses that pay rent.
Planning staff explained that the upzoning focuses on commercial and transit corridors so that new housing is transit-oriented and more environmentally friendly. With housing near transit and businesses, residents can walk, bike, and bus more, and drive less.
That will ultimately help small businesses, staff said. “Locating new housing on or near these corridors means more vibrancy, more foot traffic and more customers for our local small businesses, especially over the long term,” Planning Director Sarah Dennis Phillips wrote in an email to Mission Local.
District 7 Supervisor Melgar, who introduced the rent-control amendment, is also concerned. She introduced the “Small Business Rezoning Construction Relief Fund” to give funding for small businesses displaced and impacted by neighboring construction, though it’s unclear how much the city will be able to afford.
Kim is worried it won’t be enough. A grant of around $10,000, for instance, “doesn’t even help one month,” of relocation, Kim said.
Tenant advocates, meanwhile, are also worried about displacement. Though rent-controlled buildings with three or more units will now be removed from the plan, two-unit buildings, plus non-rent controlled apartment buildings, are still included. Advocates say building owners may displace tenants in order to redevelop their property.
“The stress that it causes is so extraordinary,” said Joseph Smooke, an organizer with the Race and Equity Coalition. “You get this feeling of hopelessness. Your whole life is built around how you commute to work and where you get your groceries.”
The worry about the zoning changes comes after the state weakened cities’ ability to control demolitions in 2019. While the city used to be able to unilaterally decide whether to issue a demolition permit, now a series of objective criteria have to be laid out for developers to meet.
The criteria are written in Supervisor Chyanne Chen’s separate ordinance, and include the building being free of inspection violations and the landlord having no history of tenant harassment or wrongful eviction.
Once demolition permits are acquired, developers must notify tenants about their rights, hire a relocation specialist, pay the difference between the tenant’s old and new rent for 42 months, and, once the new building is complete, offer any low income tenants a unit in the new building for at least the same rent as before (or a condo at a below market rate price).
The Planning Department emphasizes that demolition of existing housing has been extremely rare. Since 2012, the department said, an average of just 18 units a year have been demolished, 11 of them single-family homes. This is 0.00004 percent of the city’s 420,000 units.
Or, as one market-rate developer put it: “If you’re a developer and you can have two buildings, one is vacant and one you’re going to have a fight with tenants that’s going to drag out for years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which one would you do?”
Methodology
The San Francisco Planning Department provided the latest zoning files, from Sept. 30 2025. We joined this dataset with another one on property assessments from the Assessor Recorder’s office. This allowed us to gather more information about the properties on each parcel affected by the zoning changes. When we joined both datasets, a very small portion of the rows did not match (0.37 percent).
We isolated parcels eligible for rent control by including the following: Buildings built before or during 1979, with more than one unit, from selected class codes (that include apartments, dwellings, flats and exclude condos and TICs). This does not necessarily mean those parcels are currently tenant occupied – there is limited data on how many buildings have rental units that are rent controlled. For the amended plan, the same parameters apply but for buildings built before 1979 that have at least three units.
To run calculations about change in existing height limit compared to the proposed ones, we excluded parcels that fall under several zoning classifications (representing 0.3 percent of parcels — 310 of 92,744). On the map, these parcels are shaded light gray.
San Francisco, CA
Person stabbed at SF Carnaval festival, in critical condition
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A person was stabbed at the annual Carnaval festival Sunday afternoon in San Francisco’s Mission District, according to the San Francisco Police Department. The stabbing happened around 3:15 p.m. in the area of 19th and Mission streets, which is part of the festival’s parade route.
Police arrived at the scene and located a victim suffering from an apparent stabbing, SFPD said. The victim was then taken to the hospital where they are suffering life-threatening injuries.
A suspect was later arrested near the area of 24th and Mission. Police said the suspect’s identity and charges are currently pending.

The parade took place between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. The stabbing took place roughly an hour after the parade’s scheduled conclusion.
The Carnaval festival is a free event that aims to “celebrate the beauty of Latin American, Caribbean and global traditions through the streets of San Francisco,” event organizers wrote.
SFPD said that anyone with information about the stabbing is asked to contact the department at 415-575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with “SFPD.”
No other details were immediately available.
San Francisco, CA
People We Meet: For Arieann Harrison, eco-activism is in her DNA
Attend any neighborhood meeting in Bayview-Hunters Point, whether it’s put on by tenants groups, the neighborhood’s air protection program or the Hunters Point Shipyard’s citizens advisory committee, and you are bound to come face to face with Arieann Harrison.
Harrison, the CEO of the Marie Harrison Foundation, an environmental justice nonprofit named after her mother, is a formidable opponent to anyone with a key interest in projects that could pose a health risk to her neighbors.
That’s because Harrison has skin in the game.
Harrison lost her mother in 2019 after a long battle with lung disease. She had never been a smoker. Although it has not been proven, Arieann Harrison blames the Hunters Point Shipyard, a toxic Superfund site where her mother worked in her youth.
Later, as an adult, Marie Harrison tirelessly advocated throughout the 1990s for a transparent cleanup of the site, and fought on behalf of environmental concerns throughout the neighborhood.
Her efforts eventually helped lead to the closure of the Hunters Point Power Plant, which prior to 2006 spewed pollution over the neighborhood.
“I guess you could say it’s in my DNA,” said Harrison, when asked why she decided to turn to activism herself.
But it wasn’t an automatic calling. “I’ll be the first person to tell you,” Harrison said, sitting in Bayview’s Southeast Community Center, “I didn’t want to be nothing like my mother and father.”
As a teenager, Harrison had a taste for rebellion. At night, she would climb out of her bedroom window and change her clothes in the dark to follow the Bayview-Hunters Point-born, all-Black heavy metal band Stone Vengeance to their next gig.
“I was an angry kid,” said Harrison, who now laughs about it. “When you’re young and carefree, you don’t give a shit about anything.”
Harrison’s first love was for music. While following the band, she played her own music, writing lyrics and playing the keyboard in now-closed holes-in-the-wall across San Francisco and Oakland.
“It was a wild time,” Harrison said, recalling one memory in which she dared a member of Stone Vengeance to dive headfirst — in his leather pants — into a lake in Golden Gate Park.
“It got scary fast. It was so dark, we could just hear splashing,” said Harrison. “But it was so fun, we went back the next weekend.”
But when Harrison went to her first social-justice meeting at City College, it fit like a glove.
“I grew up in those rooms,” said Harrison, whose father was also an activist and a member of the Black Panther Party. “And I grew up with the notion that you had to do something.”
Harrison worked as a case manager in Bayview for decades, never moving from the Hunters Point waterfront, and often taking care of her younger sisters and brothers while her mother worked to gather evidence that the U.S. Navy had botched its cleanup of the shipyard.
When her mother died in 2019, Harrison was left with a very large shadow. Neighbors who knew her mother will often stop her in the street, including during Mission Local’s interview, exclaiming how they knew her mother.
“Hey, I know you!” called out one Bayview resident. “I knew her when she was just a little girl,” he said. “I knew her mother very well.”
But her fear, she said, is that one day her mother will be forgotten.
“I don’t want us to just be memorialized in pictures and street names,” she said, sitting in the community center’s cafe, in which murals of community activists are plastered over the walls. “I want our children to see the fruits of all that she’s done.”
The year after her mother died, Harrison hosted an Earth Day event. “Kids came from everywhere,” said Harrison. “There were so many kids, they covered it from the air to the ground.”
Harrison started the Marie Harrison Foundation in 2023, working with children in Bayview and across San Francisco to teach science and environmental justice.
“I wanted to see it through,” said Harrison. “I wanted to make sure that what she started did not end without a greater outcome.”
The foundation has also worked to pressure industries to reduce truck traffic and air pollution in the neighborhood and has worked to hold the U.S. Navy accountable at the shipyard. She’s also started a scholarship in her mother’s name.
When she watched her kids march into City Hall and towards the mayor’s office on Earth Day in 2019, Harrison stood back, in awe.
“I almost broke inside,” said Harrison. “Someting in me broke. I just thought, this is why. It’s like my mom’s spirit was with me, and I haven’t stopped since. And I won’t stop until we get the desired outcomes that we need.”
San Francisco, CA
The Store Cats of San Francisco
There is a specific kind of joy that only a store cat can deliver. You go in for a tallboy or a bag of cat litter (the irony is not lost on anyone) and you leave having made eye contact with a sphinx asleep on the register. It costs nothing. For a few seconds, the city is just a warm animal ignoring you, and that is enough.
In 2022, the designer and transit gadfly Chris Arvin did the civic work nobody asked for and everybody needed: Arvin mapped them. “San Francisco Store Cats,” stars next to the particularly friendly ones, a polite note reminding you not to wake the sleeping ones.
Four years later, we wanted to see who was still on shift, and so did San Francisco. A single thread on r/sanfrancisco, started by a tourist hunting a bodega cat for their kid, turned into a sprawling, lovingly argued census of who is still working which counter. Arvin, the map’s own maker, showed up in the replies to admit it was overdue for a refresh. We took that as an assignment.
What follows is bigger than the original; the thread handed us dozens of cats with names and corners, so we tracked down addresses for the ones we could and sorted everyone by how sure we are. Most turned up in recent reports, this week’s thread especially, though we’re trusting those accounts rather than having staked out each counter. A few we are still taking on the 2022 map’s good word. One is gone, in a way that became, briefly, the whole city’s argument with itself. And the newest is a flower-market cat who survived a five-day catnapping the same week all of this blew up.
‘; Catu2019s name not recorded
‘; ‘ + (s.cat ? s.store + ‘ ‘; Neighborhood‘ + s.hood + ‘
‘; Store type‘ + s.type + ‘
‘; ‘; ‘ + s.note + ‘
‘; Approx. location
‘;
if (!s.cat) html += ‘
html += ‘
‘ : ”) + s.street + ‘
html += ‘
html += ‘
html += ‘
html += ‘
if (s.note) html += ‘
if (!s.exact) html += ‘
if (s.link) {
html += ” + esc(s.linkLabel || ‘Visit’) + ”;
} else if (s.status === ‘memoriam’) {
html += ‘Gone, not forgotten‘;
}
html += ‘
‘;
return html;
}
var markers = CATS.map(function(s){
var icon = L.divIcon({ className: ”, html: ”, iconSize: [22,22], iconAnchor: [11,11], popupAnchor: [0,-11] });
var m = L.marker([s.lat, s.lng], { icon: icon });
m.bindPopup(popupHTML(s), { closeButton: true, autoPan: true, autoPanPadding: [24,24], keepInView: false });
return { marker: m, data: s, on: false };
});
function visible(s){ if (!state[s.status]) return false; return true; }
function render(){
var shown = 0;
markers.forEach(function(o){
var show = visible(o.data);
if (show && !o.on) { o.marker.addTo(map); o.on = true; }
else if (!show && o.on) { map.removeLayer(o.marker); o.on = false; }
if (show) shown++;
});
document.getElementById(‘cat-count’).innerHTML = ‘Showing ‘ + shown + ‘ of ‘ + markers.length + ‘ cats’;
}
var chipWrap = document.getElementById(‘cat-chips’);
Object.keys(STATUS).forEach(function(key){
var st = STATUS[key];
var chip = document.createElement(‘div’);
chip.className=”chip ” + st.cls + ‘ on’;
chip.innerHTML = ‘‘ + st.label;
chip.addEventListener(‘click’, function(){ state[key] = !state[key]; chip.classList.toggle(‘on’, state[key]); chip.classList.toggle(‘off’, !state[key]); render(); });
chipWrap.appendChild(chip);
});
document.getElementById(‘cat-foot’).innerHTML =
‘Sources: Chris Arvinu2019s 2022 u201CSan Francisco Store Catsu201D map, a May 2026 ‘ +
‘r/sanfrancisco thread, ‘ +
‘SFGATE, the S.F. Chronicle, plus 2024u20132026 listings. Cat residencies change over time.’;
render();
function fix(){ map.invalidateSize(true); }
setTimeout(fix, 200); setTimeout(fix, 800);
window.addEventListener(‘resize’, fix);
}
if (document.readyState === ‘complete’) initMap();
else window.addEventListener(‘load’, initMap);
On the color codes: Green (“reportedly around”) means the cat turned up in a recent account: this week’s thread, a recent review, or some other 2024-to-2026 sign. Cats are old, or wander, or get whisked off in a stranger’s Honda, so a green pin marks a recent mention, not a guarantee the cat will be there when you are. Amber means the cat was on Arvin’s 2022 map and didn’t resurface, so visit on faith. A single ember-red pin is for the one we lost.
Still on patrol, reportedly
Number Five at Grace Nursery, inside the San Francisco Flower Market, 901 16th St (Potrero Hill).

Number Five is a round-faced gray cat who has supervised the wholesale flower market for three years, the fifth pet of florist Grace Su; the name nods to the Chinese tradition of birth-order nicknames, and, she has said, to Chanel No. 5. He patrols the vendor stalls like a floor manager who suspects everyone is slacking.
In May 2026 he was scooped off the floor in the middle of the pre-Mother’s Day rush and driven across the Bay Bridge by catnappers. His admirers found him five days later, perched on a forklift in an Emeryville warehouse, and the police brought him home. He came back a little skinny and a little jumpy, but he came back.
Dogg at George’s Market, 702 14th St (Duboce Triangle).
A senior gray tabby; Arvin’s writeup and George’s regulars both call her “she.” She’s getting on in years, so she’s out front less than she used to be, but she remains a sweetheart, and people in this week’s thread were still checking in on her. There’s a tribute to her on the storefront mural.
FuFu at S&S Grocery, 1461 Grant Ave (North Beach).
A white cat with blue eyes and a job, which is lying in wait near the door to ambush passing dogs. Reviews still mention him doing exactly this, so the post appears to be filled.
Keanu at O’Looney’s Market, 588 Haight St (Lower Haight).
A goofy orange cat who guards the front in the afternoons, then heads out on neighborhood walkabouts, so he’s hit or miss. The visiting family whose post kicked off this week’s thread came looking for him and missed him; the owner tried to track him down anyway. Arvin’s map listed him as “Kiano,” but the block calls him Keanu.
We noted another kitty at this location, per Yelp.

Alex at S&A Liquor, 98 Sanchez St (Duboce Triangle).
A neighborhood favorite a half-block from Duboce Park; the kind of cat people post about just to say they love him.
Toasty & Meow Meow at Seven, 2345 Irving St (Outer Sunset).
Um this may be a couple of cats the writers of this actually saw. At least one of them. Seven is a home-goods store, not a corner store, and it still keeps a couple of very sweet cats. On Arvin’s map the pair was Toasty (who got a friendly star) and Meow Meow; the current cats may have rotated, but cats there are.
Lilly at Michaelis Wine & Spirits, 2198 Union St (Cow Hollow).
The cat of a wine and spirits shop open since 1986, which is a deeply correct place for a cat to be. She looks like she has a great time there.
Mojito at California & Lyon Market, 3100 California St (Presidio Heights).
A friendly cutie who hops onto the counter for pets, a short walk from the Presidio and the Palace of Fine Arts.
Whiskey & Tequila at New Star-Ell Liquor, 501 Divisadero St (NoPa). Whiskey is gray, Tequila is orange.
Reportedly, Tequila was briefly catnapped and came home. Neither is out front all the time, so you take your chances.
Buffy at Buffalo Whole Food & Grain, 598 Castro St (Castro).

A playful kitten, about six months old, brand new to the beat.
Not pictured but still on patrol, reportedly:
- Shadow at Randa’s Market, 3131 16th St (Mission). Reported in this week’s thread as Randa’s cat now, in the months after KitKat. Same counter, same corner.
- Cinnamon at Stewart’s Market, 2498 Sutter St (Lower Pacific Heights). A corner-grocery cat at Sutter and Broderick.
- Cookie at Oak Fair Market, 999 Oak St (Lower Haight). A tabby holding the counter on the Alamo Square edge; one thread regular went and said hi mid-conversation, then reported back.
- Tiger & Bella at Hing Fung Trading Co., 717 Vallejo St (Chinatown). Tiger is a very friendly orange cat; Bella is around too, if you’re lucky. A herb-and-dry-goods shop near Stockton.
- The Amro Market cat at 2901 Van Ness Ave (Marina). A very friendly cat at the corner of Van Ness and Chestnut.
From the 2022 map
These were on Arvin’s map and didn’t come up in this week’s thread, so we can’t promise they’re still on shift. Worth a look, but go in hopeful rather than certain.
Chucky and unnamed kitty at Flora Grubb Gardens, 3rd & Jerrold (Bayview).
The resident cat at the city’s prettiest plant nursery, which means Chucky lives somewhere that looks like a magazine spread and almost certainly does not appreciate it. On their Instagram, we’ve noticed two kitties. One is orange.
Boots at Hey Neighbor Café, 2 Burrows St (Portola).
A white-pawed cafe cat who was once pictured on the shop’s own website wearing his crown sideways, as a king does. We’ve seen mentions of shop dogs at Hey Neighbor nowadays. This Instagram post from 2022 says Boots had been traumatized.
Not pictured, but also from the 2022 map:
- The Sun Sun Trading cat at 1226 Stockton St (Chinatown). A cat among the ginseng, dried seafood, and Chinese remedies of a Chinatown trading shop. No name on record.
- Ruby at Amity Market, 3350 Taraval St (Parkside). White and button-nosed, way out where the avenues run quiet and the fog wins most arguments. A later addition to Arvin’s map.
In memoriam
KitKat at Randa’s Market, 3131 16th St (Mission).
The most famous of all of them, and the reason this map reads a little differently in 2026 than it did in 2022. KitKat was a tabby that Randa’s took in as a stray to keep the rodents down, and over six years he became the opposite of pest control: the reason people came in. Customers brought him toys, blankets, food. He was a “particularly friendly” star on Arvin’s map.
In October 2025, KitKat was killed by a Waymo outside the store. The neighborhood built a memorial at the door. For a couple of weeks he became the face of every feeling this city has been holding about robotaxis and tech and who gets a say in the streets, and then he became what he’d always been, which was a cat somebody loved. Randa’s Instagram bio still reads “Remember KitKat.” We do.
More sightings worth chasing
The Reddit thread turned up more cats than we could pin to a name and a verified address. Treat these as leads, not promises: the corner store at Central and Hayes, where someone once met a cat named Coco; Dad & Son Market at Fillmore and Lombard, said to keep two; a Chinese dry-goods store at Broadway and Stockton with three young cats; Unimart at 8th and Howard, where a mother and two kittens hang around; Larkin Corner Market, whose cat is shy about office hours; Key Food at Fillmore and Oak, which has both a cat and a dog named Major; and a maybe-cat in a corner store at 22nd and Guerrero. And one that isn’t a store at all: Lamont, who holds court at Pop’s, the 1937 dive bar at 2800 24th Street. Not a bodega cat, but a beloved one.
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic. He is proud stepmother to a senior kitty, Xena, who is warrior princess of San Francisco’s Forest Knolls neighborhood.
The Bold Italic is a not-for-profit media organization, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. We operate under a fiscal sponsorship of a 501(c)(3).
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