While city voters mull an ‘empty homes’ tax for November, let’s consider how the commercial version is rolling out. — John Yelding-Sloan is offering a 50 percent discount on rent, but no one is calling. The ground-floor commercial space in his three-story Hayes Valley building has been vacant since the last business there closed in January 2020. It’s not for lack of effort. He has spent an additional $10,000 over…

With naughty selfies and Star Wars props, the bar will witness the revival of an old tradition Sunday. — Long before its shops sold $19 salads, Polk Street had a reputation. It was gay and illicit. In 1970, the pride flag didn’t exist, and the Castro was still coming out of the closet. (Harvey Milk didn’t open his shop, Castro Camera, until 1972.) …

To bolster his new bill, the city’s progressive stalwart leans on two studies. The authors say their work is being grossly misrepresented. — For decades, San Francisco has suffered from sky-high rents and a shortage of available housing. But now California is mandating that its cities and towns build more homes, and the state’s top cop says he’ll enforce it. …

Some state money, once a ‘cookie jar’ for builders, is now harder to tap, just as the city must add tens of thousands of new homes. — If all had gone well, 130 low-income families in San Francisco would have moved this summer into new homes that are walking distance from major BART and Muni lines, two grocery stores, and a high school. …

A higher tax on real estate is raising millions of dollars. It’s not going to solve our affordability crisis. — In the thick of San Francisco’s housing crisis, a recent tax increase is raising cash meant to build more housing. But the distance between the spirit and the letter of the measure behind the tax has put it at the center of City Hall’s feckless politics about growth. November 2020’s…

The Alexandria, once a draw on Geary, has sat empty for years. Affordable housing is the latest idea to flop there. How does this movie end? — The curse of the pharaohs has plagued 5400 Geary Boulevard since 2004. The Alexandria Theater, once guarded by sphinxes and Ramses heads, sits abandoned along the busy commercial corridor, gathering graffiti along with garbage, cobwebs, and soot. Behind the curtains, in the bureaucratic bowels of the city’s building and planning…

A jack of many trades sleeps under Highway 101 and keeps falling through the cracks of what appears to be a heated market for construction. — On the first Saturday of March, Jorge Florencio Sierra Mendoza’s paycheck bounced. He’s owed $3,780 for roughly four weeks of construction work that he did for a contractor based in Millbrae, south of San Francisco’s airport. …

If you think the shortage of homes is a crisis today, wait till the Big One hits. Retrofits are going well but will only take us so far. — There is a 72 percent chance that a magnitude 6.7 earthquake or higher hits the Bay Area in the next two decades. That means more than a fifth of San Francisco’s housing could be damaged or destroyed in a matter of minutes. In a city already mired in a housing…

This Op Ed was narrated to Adam Echelman as part of the Humanity in Action Alfred Landecker Democracy Fellowship. By Tania Evora Every child should have their own computer. When the pandemic hit, I suddenly became a full-time remote-working mother of three while working to get my Bachelor’s degree at…