24th Street leads Mission District’s uneven post-pandemic recovery
24th Street is outpacing the Mission’s other commercial strips because local shoppers kept spending there. Valencia, Mission and 16th streets are still lagging.
24th Street is pulling away from the rest of the Mission’s commercial corridors, and the difference is showing up in the cash register counts. Mission Local’s analysis of quarterly sales tax data from January 2018 through December 2025 found that 24th Street is the neighborhood’s top-growing business strip, while Valencia Street and Mission Street remain comparatively flat and 16th Street is only slightly up.
That gap matters because it points to recovery that is happening block by block, not all at once. The pattern on 24th Street suggests a corridor supported less by one-time destination visits than by repeat neighborhood spending, the kind that comes from local shoppers who keep coming back for groceries, meals, errands and other routine purchases. In other words, the block appears to be benefiting from loyalty as much as from broader economic improvement.
The sales-tax figures also provide a clearer view than a snapshot month or a single burst of foot traffic. San Francisco’s city sales tax rate stood at 8.625% as of January 2025, combining state and district components, which makes quarterly receipts a useful proxy for retail activity. Over a seven-year stretch that includes the pandemic shock and the uneven rebound that followed, 24th Street stands out as the Mission corridor with the strongest growth trajectory.
That has larger implications for how San Francisco thinks about neighborhood recovery. Urban-policy researchers have long treated commercial corridors as barometers of neighborhood health, job access and small-business equity, and the Mission’s split recovery fits that framework. A thriving block can mask deeper weakness nearby, and a single winning corridor does not automatically lift Valencia Street, Mission Street or 16th Street. Each strip appears to be moving on its own timetable.
The contrast is especially notable given how long Mission merchants have been working through pandemic damage. In August 2021, Assemblymember David Chiu met with 12 local business owners at Silverstone Cafe on 24th Street to discuss the hardships of running a business during COVID-19. Nearly five years later, that same corridor is the clearest evidence that neighborhood shoppers, more than big-picture recovery talk, are deciding which Mission blocks are actually bouncing back.
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