It Only Took Six Years to Open a Fast Food Restaurant in San Francisco

If you’ve been a regular Hot Air reader for a while then this story will not come as a shock to you. Simply put, it’s almost impossible to build anything in the bluest city on the West Coast.

Four years ago the SF Chronicle did their own analysis of building permits in the city and found that, on average, it takes more than two years to get a permit for a single-family home.

The typical applicant currently waits a staggering 627 calendar days before obtaining a full building permit from the city to construct a multifamily housing project, and 861 days before gaining the same approval for a single-family residence, the analysis found.

“Most cities have timelines where it’s like a few weeks. San Francisco is like a few years,” said Corey Smith, executive director of the Housing Action Coalition, an advocacy group that has pushed to cut permitting times.

And of course city projects are just as difficult to get done, which is why it costs over a million dollars to install a public toilet in a space that already has plumbing. The cost had little to do with the construction and a lot to do with the maze of bureaucracy set up by the city.

An architect will draw plans for the bathroom that the city will share with the community for feedback. It will also head to the Arts Commission’s Civic Design Review committee comprised of two architects, a landscape architect and two other design professionals who, under city charter, “conduct a multi-phase review” of all city projects on public land — ranging from buildings to bathrooms to historic plaques, fences and lamps.

So with all that in mind, you won’t be shocked to learn that it took a Filipino fast food chain six years to open a new restaurant in the city. The chain is called Jollibee and they have a very dedicated group of fans. The chain just won a Reader’s Choice Award for the best fast food chicken for the third year in a row.

Jollibee has secured the top spot as the No. 1 Best Fast Food Fried Chicken in the U.S. in USA TODAY’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards for the third consecutive year…

The win marks another major accolade for Jollibee, which was previously named The Best Fast-Food Fried Chicken by Eater in 2022 and Best Chain Fried Chicken in America by Thrillist in 2021. 

Everyone loves tasty fried chicken, so why did it take the chain, which has 1,800 stores worldwide, about six years to open one in San Francisco?

The journey to opening this location — which replaced a Payless ShoeSource at 934 Market St. — was one of Odyssean twists and turns. Jollibee filed its first permit in November 2020, aiming to open by 2023. The date got pushed back year after year until, for a while there, the company stopped giving a timeline at all(opens in new tab).

The red tape Jollibee encountered included having to prove that four rooftop machines, among them a heat pump and condensers for a freezer and cooler, were in line with the city’s noise ordinance; getting a sign-off from the Historic Preservation Commission for minor exterior changes to the building; working with PG&E to add underground utility lines; and coordinating with BART over crane operations.

Everyone involved sounds appropriately embarrassed about the delay, starting with the mayor.

“It’s unacceptable that it took six years. And it’s why from day one we’ve been trying to slash the red tape, cut the bureaucracy, get more permits online. 80% of permits right now are done in 30 days or less. Many of them can be done online,” Mayor Lurie said…

Supervisor Danny Sauter, the new representative of the district where the restaurant now is, says the permitting process used to be a labyrinth of departments.

“This was, believe it or not, a historic district. And so, there was almost a year of going back and forth between the business and city departments to understand, is this in the district, is it not? What does that actually mean? And that’s a clear example of; we can’t put up with that nonsense in the figure,” he said.

Katy Tang, director of the city’s Office of Small Business, gave an interview in which she admitted the delay was “ridiculous.”

Tang, whose department works solely with small businesses and wasn’t involved in the Jollibee permitting saga, said Jollibee is an “extreme case” and outlier. She pointed to a number of city- and voter-approved efforts to streamline permitting and reduce headaches for small businesses that have taken effect since the height of the COVID pandemic…

Tang acknowledged the delay and said it’s been challenging to merge all city departments into one system.

“You can imagine all the legacy systems. We don’t want to break old systems while we’re going to a new one. So there has to be some level of staging or phasing in of different permits,” she said. “But I would say that as a result of PermitSF and physically being in one building, we are collaborating so much more.”…

Still, she emphasized that there’s more work to do. “We don’t want a reputation that we are a difficult place to get permitting done,” she said. “We really want to encourage innovation and creativity. It’s a constant state of improvement.”

I have bad news for Katy. The city already has that reputation for being an impossible place to build anything and that reputation was well-earned. The city really has made some efforts to improve but in San Francisco’s case even cutting the delays in half would still mean delays measured in years not weeks. So don’t expect any miracles in the city by the bay.

The whole interview with Katy Tang is here. I have this cued up to a question about why it takes so long to get anything built in the city. She offers a hypothetical about trying to open a coffee shop, but what I notice is that if the space was previously a coffee shop, the permit would be quick. But if it wasn’t, if you actually have to do some plumbing and electrical work which has to meet city codes, forget about it. In other words, you’re fine in SF so long as you don’t need to build anything, which is exactly the reputation she says the city is hoping to avoid.

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