Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/12/08/san-franciscos-soul-destroying-bureaucracy-is-killing-small-restaurant-owners-trying-to-survive-covid.html
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doing their best to survive the pandemic by building “parklets,” which are sidewalk structures with tables and chairs
In my town those are called “streeteries”, which I like.
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One of the best things to come of this global horror, IMO. The US could do with a little more cafe culture.
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I suspect that the city of NYC partially funds San Francisco’s municipal bureaucracy in order to make its own cumbersome, intrusive and pettifogging apparatus look good in comparison.
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San Francisco may be rather (in)famous for bogging down small business owners, especially eateries, with bureaucratic bullshit, but on the other hand, the city rushed approval of these things to begin with so restaurants wouldn’t go under, and then it slowly settled in that these were going to be around for more than a few months, and they really needed to be compliant with various rules: ADA compliant, not blocking transit, not reducing visibility at intersections, not blocking access by emergency services, etc. All completely reasonable, and really just basic elements of living in a functional city, so if anyone built structures that don’t comply and now have to change them, it sucks for them, but it’s really necessary.
New York has had a lot of problems with poorly-designed outdoor structures restaurants built causing problems (e.g. harboring rodents and causing serious vermin problems). So I’m kind of surprised there’s not more demands being made of the designs for these structures to avoid things like that.
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Let’s not forget booze to go. The true silver lining of the soft apocalypse.
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San Francisco has and always be its own worst enemy.
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Having attended a few city council meetings in San Francisco, I can say there is an upside to the spaghetti bowl of red tape. Developers come in from out of town expecting to just shove their projects through, and when the council members put them in their place, they look like deer in the headlights.
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Because they haven’t greased the right palms 
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JWZ (Jamie Zawinsky), one of the old-school coders who wrote the first web browser, owns a club in SF and talks about this subject a lot:
He’s a fun writer, here are the posts tagged dnalounge from his blog
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Christ, what a buncha assholes. They should have given them time to adapt!
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Bingo. Getting a Hamburger like Ronald costs a lot of money.
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