He spent $200,000 trying to open an S.F. ice cream shop, but was no match for city bureaucracy

Jason Yu’s dream of selling ice cream in San Francisco has officially melted, turning into a sticky mess he just wants to forget.

Yu was featured in this column in October after spending 16 months and $150,000 trying to open Matcha n’ More at 20th and Valencia streets and having little to show for it. He became a symbol of San Francisco’s overly bureaucratic and expensive process for opening small businesses and a reason for voters to pass Proposition H on the November ballot to make it easier for future small business hopefuls.

But sadly, there will be no grand opening for Yu and his ice cream shop — and no sweet ending to his bitter tale. After another six months and another $50,000, Yu has abandoned his plans. And as for Prop. H? It passed, but only two small business owners have received expedited permits in the four months since it went into effect.

“This became a nightmare project,” Yu told me recently, saying he might open a business elsewhere someday. “For sure I will not try to do anything in San Francisco. It just doesn’t make sense.”

You know what else doesn’t make sense? Yu, a 30-year-old San Francisco native and father of two little kids, now has a huge debt to pay off with nothing to show for it.

The space at 3591 20th St. looked exactly the same on Tuesday morning as it did when I met Yu there six months ago. It’s still a long-vacant former restaurant with butcher paper taped to the windows, security gates locked up and trash dotting the area outside.

“That just broke my heart,” said Sharky Laguana, president of the city’s small business commission, when I told him of Yu’s decision. “There’s absolutely no reason it should cost that much to open a business in a place that’s been vacant for that long. It’s outrageous.”

Yu’s plans sounded sweet back in late 2018 when he decided to open a shop serving green-tea-flavored soft serve ice cream. He spent several months searching for the perfect space and landed on the 20th Street site in June 2019, signing a lease for $7,300 a month. He hired an architect to draw up plans to upgrade the electrical and plumbing systems, build a front counter and install kitchen equipment. He planned no structural changes or modifications to the building’s exterior.

Sounds pretty simple, right? Nope. Nothing’s simple in San Francisco.

Yu submitted plans to the Department of Building Inspection in November 2019. Then the Planning Department required him to notify neighbors within 150 feet, allowing any one of them to object. And one of them did — a competing ice cream shop. That meant Yu had to hire a lawyer and brave a hearing at the Planning Commission.

The June 11 hearing featured 64 people — mostly friends of both ice cream shop owners — offering their opinions on the great ice cream face-off. Because apparently everybody in San Francisco has way too much time on their hands.

Yu won approval, but then got stuck in the city’s never-ending web of securing permits. The Department of Building Inspection’s online permit tracker shows Yu faced 15 hurdles to secure his permits including getting the sign-off from a host of departments. The last to weigh in was the Department of Public Health, which said in December its review was complete, but that Yu owed more money in permit fees before the department could give the OK.

That’s when Yu started having second thoughts. Even after spending $200,000 on rent, an architect, a lawyer, equipment and fees, he’d still need to pay at least $120,000 in construction on his space. And he knew he’d have to hold his grand opening in the middle of a pandemic when capacity is still limited.

Was it even worth it? He finally decided it wasn’t.

It made him particularly angry that his cousin was able to open a nail salon in Daly City in just a fraction of the time he spent on Matcha n’ More. She’s painting nails after a few months of effort, but he never did scoop any ice cream.

“We were so hyped up, so energized and we had so much excitement to start this project,” Yu said. “But it faded away.”

SOURCE:

sfchronicle       https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-ice-cream-shop-hopeful-sees-dreams-melted-by-16116082.php