A new dataset from some researchers who are studying the recovery of various cities' downtown cores, post-pandemic, suggests that while SF still lags way behind New York and other cities in terms of daytime, mid-week foot traffic, people are now frequenting bars and restaurants in downtown SF almost at pre-pandemic levels.

The new data comes from the University of Toronto's School of Cities, which has been tracking cellphone data in addition to real estate and other data to track the relative recoveries of multiple cities. The data looks at where cellphones move and then stay clustered at various hours in the day and night, and as KPIX reports, they've found that on some nights, downtown San Francisco is back to 94% of pre-pandemic foot traffic.

"We're measuring stops, that means we're able to look at people who are actually doing something – so it's actually activity downtown," says Dr. Karen Chapple, professor emerita at UC Berkeley and the Director of Toronto's School of Cities, speaking to KPIX.

When it comes to tracking the changes that have occurred to office work because of hybrid schedules, Chapple adds, "It's a moving target, which is why we have to keep studying it. It is still in flux."

This clustering of more people at night may be thanks in part to city- and non-profit sponsored activations like the Vacant to Vibrant program, and to recent conventions like the RSA Convention — which are likely to cause an uptick in activity at downtown restaurants and bars.

But even up at John's Grill, near the otherwise beleaguered Union Square, owner John Konstin has been telling various media outlets including KPIX that he had one of his best years for business in 2023. "Our sales have gone up, actually, here at John's Grill," Konstin said.

The area has also seen a few new openings in the last nine months that are attracting attention and foot traffic, like Chotto Matte on Stockton Street, and Four Kings on Commercial Street at the FiDi edge of Chinatown. New nightlife venues like The Dawn Club debuted in mid-2023 in the hope of waiting out the current slump and bringing more people to lower Market Street.

The Chronicle reports today that office vacancy in SF's downtown remains at a record high level of 36.6%, and by that metric, the city continues to lag way behind others in the recovery — and clearly has far more workers who have not returned to traditional 9 to 5 in-office schedules.

But SF's Chief Economist Ted Egan isn't too gloomy about the future, even if the recovery is going to require extra patience. "I think the story from a year ago hasn’t changed much," he tells the Chronicle. "I don’t expect that to last forever. The region has kept up its share of venture capital and is a leader in artificial intelligence, and that bodes well for the future of tech here."

And remote-work expert and Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom tells the paper, "Five years from now things should be back close to pre-pandemic trends... [But] I’m long-run positive on the city with the highly educated population nearby, connections to world-class universities, fantastic weather and Asia exposure... Yes, San Francisco has taken a knock, so ‘doom’ is appropriate but not ‘loop.’ Things are down but the city will recover, and indeed San Francisco is the classic boom-and-bust city."

Related: SF Chronicle Now Seems to Regret Amplifying the 'Doom Loop' Narrative It Heavily Amplified

Photo: Denyz Nevozhai

San Francisco can't shed the "doom loop" narrative — and some events are leaning into it.

It's no "Doom Loop Walking Tour," but music festival producer Goldenvoice apparently liked the "doom loop" moniker so much, they’re starting a new festival named after it.

It’s a small, one-night festival at the Regency Ballroom, on Friday, March 15, with a 5-artist lineup, per the Chronicle. The diverse lineup includes electronic pop artist Yeule from Singapore, hyperpop singer Jane Remover from New Jersey, bedroom pop artist Quannnic from Florida, shoegaze band Midrift from Northern California, and alternative band Blimp from Los Angeles.

And even though Goldenvoice produces Coachella and Portola, this new Doom Loop all-ages show won’t cost anywhere near those ticket prices. Tickets range from $30-$45. You can check it out on the Regency’s website.

It’ll come right at the close of the 31st annual Noise Pop Festival, which has hosted a bevy of shows throughout San Francisco from February 22 to March 3, with acts ranging from Bone Thugs-N-Harmony to Snail Mail to the Mountain Goats.

Feature image via Goldenvoice.

In a surprising turn of events, Garrett Doty, the 25-year-old unhoused man accused of brutally attacking former San Francisco fire commissioner Donald Carmignani with a metal pipe back in the spring, has been found not guilty on all charges.

The widely-reported incident, which occurred on April 5 near Magnolia and Laguna streets in San Francisco's Marina District, left Carmignani with a fractured skull, broken jaw, and multiple lacerations to his face and head, not to mention added flames to fire of SF’s “doom loop” narrative. But shortly after the news broke, more details emerged about the case: Carmignani had an alleged history of aggressive behavior toward unhoused individuals.

Those allegations apparently came out in court: Doty alleged that the former fire commissioner had, on multiple occasions, used bear spray to target homeless people in the area, per KTVU. Carmignani’s lawyer reportedly denied this on his behalf, but he failed to appear to testify and defend himself in the case, as we previously reported. As the Chronicle reported,  his lawyers did not want him to testify on the stand. He had even reportedly invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination during a prior preliminary hearing when questioned about the sprayings.

Doty faced charges of assault with a deadly weapon, battery with serious bodily injury, and assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury, per the Chronicle. Despite the severity of Carmignani's injuries, the jury reportedly ruled in favor of Doty, accepting his claim of self-defense.

The defense reportedly argued that Carmignani's aggressive behavior and refusal to testify undermined the credibility of the prosecution's case. Reportedly, a crucial piece of evidence was a surveillance video showing Carmignani approaching Doty first. A witness also reported hearing Carmignani threaten to stab and kill Doty, because he was near Carmignani’s parents’ home.

In another twist, Carmignani's ex-mother-in-law reportedly testified under subpoena in May 2023, supporting Doty's claim that the former fire commissioner had used bear spray on unhoused individuals multiple times.

But still, some SF residents had supported what they called Carmignani's "vigilante" justice at the time. Others called out the aggression against the homeless population. But now that the case is over, will it still be a right-wing talking point?

Feature image via Unsplash/Carson Masterson.

A small-scale campaign that seems to be part PR and part event promotion, dubbed WeLoveSF, is seeking to upend the "doom loop" and drug-crime narratives that have dominated media coverage about San Francisco all of this year.

"If the city wasn't facing a number of very real challenges, I wouldn't be here today," says WeLoveSF creator Cassidy Zerrer, speaking to KPIX. "I totally acknowledge that, but I do think it's important to tell the other side of the story, and so often our negative — our less favorable — moments are shared on social media or by the broader media. We're here to show the many very, very positive things that happen in our city every day."

The campaign, which has a website here, consists of a social media presence and some events, including a recent one they hosted at the bar Nightingale on Kearny Street. Owner Doug Dalton tells KPIX that there was a big turnout, making it the bar's biggest night of the week.

Dalton, whose group Future Bars opened Nightingale just a few months before the pandemic began, also recently opened The Dawn Club on Market Street, which is a splashy new jazz venue and whiskey bar.

WeLoveSF is on Instagram and TikTok, and Zerrer encourages others to tag the campaign in their reels showing the bright sides of San Francisco.  

"As the city faces many challenges in its time of need we believe this unified message of optimism creates immediate change and strengthens our community," the website reads.

"Changing San Francisco's image is easy," the group says on Instagram. "Do what you love in the city we love and post with the hashtag #welovesf."

This campaign comes on the heels of an ad campaign being sponsored by SF Travel, which is aimed at telling people in major metropolitan markets outside of the Bay Area that there's still reason to come to — and, more importantly, plan conventions in — San Francisco.

The first ad from that campaign is below, featuring SF drag queen Lady Camden, among other happy residents.

Also, not connected to the WeLoveSF campaign, there's an event dubbed "I Heart SF" at Off the Grid Fort Mason on Friday, September 1, which is meant to be a celebration of the city and foodie "pep rally," featuring SF drinks (Irish coffees, Tommy's margaritas), and classic SF food from the likes Boudin Bakery and the Gold Mirror.

So get out there and show SF some love!

Continuing their mea culpa over all that "doom loop" coverage they've done for several months, the San Francisco Chronicle has a piece today where they — finally! — get SF's own Chief Economist Ted Egan to weigh in with his sober opinion on the matter.

The Chronicle had the audacity the other week to publish a story in which they pretended that they were keeping all the "doom loop" coverage at arm's length and taking it with a grain of salt themselves, and sounding the alarm over how the national media had run with it like mad.

Now, sheepishly, after enabling the likes of Good Morning America and CNN to tell a sensationalized narrative not entirely based in fact about San Francisco's inescapable demise as a great American city, the Chronicle has gotten Egan on the record to state some plain economic facts — there's also a new city report out on the state of the city economy. And Egan says, "doom loop" talk is "premature," and that would be more appropriate if people were still fleeing the city en masse.

First off, as SFist previously reported — on the very same day, March 30, that the Chronicle ran their first big "doom loop" article — the exodus of city residents slowed considerably last year after the first year of the pandemic, from 6.3% to 0.4%. And could likely even turn around when we get the Census estimate numbers for July 2022 to July 2023, which we won't see until next spring probably.

The Chronicle's writers couldn't even have known that figure when they had their "doom loop" piece ready to run — and they were still referring to the 6.3% population decline, which happened between July 2020 and July 2021.

Looking at the stability of people heading into offices in SF for the past six months, Egan tells the Chronicle "the worst of remote work seems to be behind us," even if this means that the new normal is going to be a lot of office vacancy downtown for a bit here. Egan foresees that if office rental rates continue to drop, eventually some companies will bite and vacancies will go down — and surely there are some employees stuck traveling to offices on the Peninsula who'd rather just be going into downtown SF by BART or Muni, and their managers would like them in the office more.

One interesting fact that Egan shares with the Chronicle, San Francisco sales tax data shows that the city collected $33 million in sales tax in the first quarter of 2023 — which is 89% of where it was in the first quarter of 2019, at $37.1 million. And that's up from $30.6 million in the same quarter last year, with the Financial District showing an 11% gain year over year.

As Egan tells the paper, "It’s not sliding down. It’s just a really slow recovery."

According to the city's report, apartment rents have been flat since February, remaining about 10% below 2019 levels.

Domestic air travel through SFO the last month or so has been at 93% of 2019 levels, and international travel reached 93% a couple months back. And Egan also points to SFPD crime statistics, which are basically flat compared to last year, with some types of petty crime down in the first half of the year to date. Assaults are down slightly as well, contrary to what Elon Musk and his friends think — and both assaults and robberies are down compared to the first halves of 2018 and 2019.

Retail vacancy, we should note, is an SF problem that began well before the pandemic, leading to supervisors putting a vacancy tax on the ballot to address it — and as CNN has reported recently, downtown shopping centers like the Westfield are suffering in other cities as well.

The other dark spot, besides office and retail vacancy and, of course, transit ridership, is depressed tourism — which, again, will likely be further depressed by the media's obsessive "doom loop" and drug coverage. We heard this morning from SF Travel that, despite some convention cancellations next year, the Moscone Center is looking at being 93% booked in 2028 on the current schedule. That's a whole five years from now, but maybe things will improve sooner than that, convention-wise, if hotel rates and other costs get slashed. SF's problem used to be that it was one of the most expensive cities to hold a conference in in the country, so... maybe there's some improvement to be done there.

Whether or not we've hit bottom when it comes to retail and office vacancy, we shall see. Summer travel should hopefully give a boost to some businesses — and hopefully European and Asian tourists haven't all heard the negative stories quite so loudly. Still, somebody should really be telling them, over and over, to stop leaving luggage unattended in cars while they park at popular tourist spots. This goes for many major cities, including, unfortunately, ours.

Related: SF Chronicle Now Seems to Regret Amplifying the 'Doom Loop' Narrative It Heavily Amplified

Top image: People line up to ride on a Cable Car in front of an empty retail space on May 11, 2023 in San Francisco, California. San Francisco's downtown continues to struggle with keeping retail and commercial properties rented following the COVID-19 pandemic, and lags behind all major cities in the U.S. and Canada. Downtown San Francisco has an estimated 18.4 million square feet of available real estate. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

While the national media can't seem to get enough of the narrative that pretty, popular, once-thriving San Francisco is in the thralls of a drug- and crime-fueled nightmare, city officials keep trying to remind everyone that violent crime is actually pretty low here. Not so in St. Louis, where the downtown is even more deserted, and actually dangerous.

St. Louis has spent years among the country's most violent spots, with a homicide rate that is either the highest or one of the highest of any major city. But like in San Francisco and New York, the pandemic emptied out St. Louis's downtown core, and like in San Francisco, workers have been very slow to come back to their offices. And the picture has been bleak for years and growing bleaker.

Kevin McDermott, an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has written a guest essay for the New York Times this week pointing out that while San Francisco has become "the national poster child of a city on the verge of a dreaded 'doom loop,'" the media has largely ignored the woes of second-tier St. Louis, which was losing population even before the pandemic began.

Part of this inattention may simply be that St. Louis's heyday as a midwestern hub and immigrant melting pot happened around 160 years ago, when San Francisco was just taking shape in its first boom. St. Louis had its population peak in 1950, when it was the country's eighth-largest city, with a population larger than SF's is today, 856,796. By 2019, that population had fallen to just over 300,000 and has since fallen further — and once-major employers like Anheuser-Busch and TWA have either disappeared or shrunk their rolls significantly in recent decades.

In other words, like Detroit's, St. Louis's "doom loop" is old news at this point.

But McDermott also points to the fact that St. Louis hasn't been much of a fixture in Fox News coverage and the like, because "St. Louis’s significantly more dire problems don’t neatly fit that conservative-media narrative" that is usually applied to San Francisco.

Basically, Republicans would like everyone to believe that liberal policies and lax law enforcement are always the biggest culprits in urban woes. But Missouri's legislature is Republican-dominated, and they have gone to great pains to counter every effort that St. Louis's Democratic city leadership has taken to limit the prevalence of guns.

"Virtually anyone can walk around [St. Louis] with a gun, with no state-mandated background check and few state-level restrictions, and there’s next to nothing the police can do about it until the shooting starts," McDermott writes.

McDermott goes on to point out that while the national media was breathlessly covering the San Francisco stabbing death of tech executive Bob Lee — for the ten days between his death and the revelation that his suspected killer was a fellow tech-employed acquaintance — some actual random violence was occurring near dailiy in St. Louis.

"On the day Mr. Lee died, the driver of a getaway car involved in a violent store robbery in St. Louis County allegedly caused a crash that killed another driver. St. Louis police that day also found a body rolled up in carpet and plastic in a parking lot. The next day, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed on the city’s troubled north side."

St. Louis has a progressive mayor and progressive district attorney, who are regularly blamed by the legislature for being anti-cop and being too soft on crime.

But while defunding the police might not be the answer in a place like St. Louis, they are simultaneously dealing with economic equalities, drugs, and the kinds of larger societal problems that often lead indirectly to criminal activity.

At least California has a $15.50 minimum wage, and the state hasn't tried to undermine San Francisco's local policy, which is set to go up to $18.07 on July 1. St. Louis had to get a referendum passed to skirt the Republican-led effort to reverse its $11/hour minimum-wage policy — statewide it was $7.65 per hour until just a few years ago, until voters approved a hike $12 per hour that began in January.

When making an honest living isn't possible, as it basically isn't at $8 an hour, you're going to see more criminal activity and more dependence on welfare. But saying things like that is incredibly controversial in Republican halls of power, where for decades the party platform has basically been that handouts are bad, but so are livable wages, and everyone should be able to own guns, shoot anyone who looks suspicious, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps without any help.

The Times piece doesn't even touch on the scourge of fentanyl, which may not be quite as prevalent yet in St. Louis as it is in San Francisco — but overdoses are the #1 cause of death among 18- to 44-year-olds in Missouri, and the numbers have been climbing steadily.

Fentanyl is everywhere now, and fentanyl-related deaths are rising everywhere — in Texas they're up 500% since 2019, for example.

And, just to drive this point home: A bunch of other American cities are struggling post-pandemic, and this narrative about San Francisco as being somehow exceptional is getting tired. A study of cellphone activity in urban downtowns from December 2022 to February 2023 found that Minneapolis, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Portland, Oregon saw just slightly more activity than San Francisco did, but they are still hovering around 40% of their pre-pandemic activity levels.

Chicago also has a major downtown mall that is half empty, where a Macy's jumped ship on a flagship store two years ago.

So, there are your talking points for the next time your mom or Fox News-loving uncle asks you why the hell you're still living here.

Previously: SF Chronicle Now Seems to Regret Amplifying the 'Doom Loop' Narrative It Heavily Amplified

Photo: Tiffany Cade

The San Francisco Chronicle is standing like a kid who cried "Fire!" amid a rush of sirens and chaos asking what all the fuss is about, as it has a front-page story today about the ramifications of the "doom loop" narrative the paper itself amplified.

While the Chronicle has spent the last few months jumping on the "doom loop" bandwagon and even finding new angles on it wherever they could, a story today by longtime reporter Carolyn Said makes only the slightest acknowledgement of her newsroom's role in promoting this narrative. The story quotes SF business figures like Rodney Fong, CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, who's appalled at outlets like CNN and Good Morning America that have done recent hit jobs on the city.

"They're making stuff up," Fong says. "It is absolutely unfair."

Those of us who've lived here long enough know these boom and bust cycles pretty well, and we know that SF has, historically, always bounced back. That seems to be Said's ultimate point in the Chronicle piece. It's just a little late in the game given how the Chronicle has essentially spearheaded the campaign to declare that the sky is falling, that all is lost, and San Francisco is circling the drain.

The bottom of the Chronicle piece lists a bunch of headlines from other outlets and only one from the Chronicle itself — this March 30 piece that either helped introduce or singlehandedly introduced the term "doom loop" to the local vocabulary.

The piece points to Nellie Bowles's June 2022 piece in the Atlantic about our "failed city," pegged to the recall of Chesa Boudin, which itself was a bit sensational and personal — one of an entire genre of pieces that SFist has called out over the last few years, the basic gist of which are "I had to move out of San Francisco and let me proselytize about how it is terrible now and it's the liberals' fault."

The problem is that once the Chronicle joined the chorus, it kind of opened the floodgates for the likes of CNN and ABC News to do their own hot takes, and thus we have the national tidal wave of news stories about San Francisco's woes.

As Said points out, all this negative media coverage is hugely damaging to the city's post-pandemic recovery, given that we need tourists and conventions to come here, and the situation on our streets has been somewhat exaggerated — yes, downtown and the Tenderloin can look kind of bleak, but some of these streets we're talking about haven't seen better days in decades. Should tourists be wandering around mid-Market after dark? Probably not! But should they have been doing that 10 or 12 years ago when Twitter moved in and the fortunes of the city were brighter? Nope!

There may not have been the fentanyl crisis a decade ago, but open-air drug-dealing, opioids, heroin, methamphetamine, and mental health crises were daily features of many of these blocks, including Sixth Street, Jones Street, and the area around Seventh and Market 10, 15, and even 20 years ago.

Things are exacerbated now, to be sure, by the lack of workers downtown, but it's not exactly dead around the Westfield mall on any given weekday. The mall owner sees the big picture when it comes to American retail, especially malls in urban settings, and that is why it is backing out of the market broadly and told investors it was doing so a year and a half ago. The Chronicle didn't put that fact front and center, but instead went with the headline, "Westfield giving up S.F. mall in wake of Nordstrom closure, plunging sales and foot traffic."

Commercial real estate agents, who will be key in helping downtown turn around, need the media to stop being quite so frenzied in its rush to declare SF "doomed."

"When you get news article after news article, it starts to make people scared,” says Marisa Rodriguez, executive director of the Union Square Alliance, speaking to the Chronicle. "Anyone thinking about: ‘Is my next destination going to be a place I'm reading so many negative stories about,’ will probably think twice, and that’s not OK. If you were going to open a business, sign a lease, but keep getting a barrage of negative news stories about the area, would you have cold feet or second thoughts? Of course, that’s human nature."

At least now that Good Morning America is sending Matt Gutman out to stand on mid-Market Street in the early morning darkness to say that he's been told it's "too dangerous" to stand closer to the Westfield mall, the Chronicle can see that some of this is bullshit. And there's blood on their hands now, too.

Would such a dangerous and "failed" city have been able to host hundreds of thousands of Pride revelers this past weekend without anyone getting hurt or, like, stabbed with a fentanyl needle?

The New York Times picked up the narrative in early June that SF's neighborhoods are thriving while downtown "flounders." The Chronicle has tried to stay positive here and there, though this piece in early May painted a pretty grim picture about downtown office and hotel vacancy. And sure, it's hard to put a positive spin on a mall owner and a hotel owner writing off the city — though in the case of the Hilton owner, that could still be a negotiating tactic.

Maybe SF's busts will always be national news the way our booms are. And in being one of the country's "special" children — a city seen as quaint and darling and pretty that shouldn't, unless something is terribly wrong, have the same crime and drug problems as other places — our failures get the clicks and eyeballs that the media wants. The "San Francisco is on fire" story will always sell papers, as they say, even if the size of the blaze has been exaggerated.

But the Chronicle maybe should get its priorities straight the next time someone says "doom loop." We don't actually want to scare everyone off, do we?

Previously: It Will Always Be More Profitable/Clickable to Shit On San Francisco, So People Will Always Do It

Photo: Ameer Basheer

Another bit of bad news for downtown San Francisco arrived Monday morning with the revelation that the investment firm that owns the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 hotels is walking away from its debts and giving up hope on a return of SF's convention market.

Virginia-based REIT Park Hotels & Resorts has opted to cease payments on a $725 million loan, as the SF Business Times reports today, essentially surrendering over 2,900 hotel rooms and hospitality facilities to its lender. This includes the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, which is San Francisco's largest hotel, occupying an entire city block, and one of the country's largest hotels outside of Las Vegas.

Park Hotels & Resorts is also giving up on the 1,024-room Parc 55, citing the continued debt burden of the two hotels on its portfolio, and multiple factors that have made the SF market less desirable for their business.

"After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market," said Park Hotels CEO Thomas J. Baltimore in a statement. "Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges, both old and new: record high office vacancy; concerns over street conditions; lower return to office than peer cities; and a weaker than expected citywide convention calendar through 2027 that will negatively impact business and leisure demand."

As the Business Times notes, this marks a shift from three months ago, when Baltimore and another hotel group CEO visited personally with Mayor London Breed and expressed some optimism about the future of the business travel market.

The two hotels, as appraised in 2016 for the current loan, were worth a combined $1.56 billion. So it's a significant move that Park Hotels would walk away from debt that is less than half that amount — and as one analyst tells the Business Times, "it says that they are not optimistic that the business travel or convention and meetings business is going to return soon to downtown San Francisco."

Part of the economics of SF hotels, the Business Times notes, is the historic competition between leisure tourism and business travelers, especially the previously robust convention schedule, which meant lower vacancy rates throughout the year and higher-than-average room rates.

This also seems to point to the possibility that room rates will slide as well.

Hotels across the city have been changing hands with some frequency in the last decade, and the latest news does not mean that the Hilton or the Parc 55 will necessarily close.

JPMorgan Chase, which recently took over SF-based First Republic Bank, will become the new owner of the hotels and may now seek out a buyer at a fire-sale price.

Last week, SF Travel, the city's tourism outfit, launched a new ad campaign aimed at reviving the city's image in the minds of convention-planners, specifically.

Less than a decade ago, San Francisco enjoyed one of the highest hotel occupancy rates in the country, hovering around 84% in 2015. That slid in the next few years and tanked in the pandemic, but SF Travel said occupancy was back up to 62% in 2022 — which is similar to what it was around the dot-com bust two decades ago.

The agency noted that 35 events scheduled at the Moscone Center this year are set to account for 700,000 room-nights at hotels.

Previously: SF Tourism Board Launches New Ad Campaign to Sell City as Still Quirky and Fun

Photo via Trip Advisor/Hilton

Chilling bog-box retailer Wal-Mart plans on opening four Neighborhood Market grocery stores in the Bay Area at sites in the South Bay and East Bay. The morally-questionable company will unleash stores in San Jose, Pleasanton, Hayward, and San Ramon. Godspeed, anyone selling food their zones of destruction, for you are doomed.

"The latest Walmart Neighborhood Market slated for the Bay Area is headed for a onetime Safeway store in southwest San Jose at Westgate Mall," Delia Garcia, a spokeswoman for Walmart West, explains to Oakland Tribune, adding that the company will open "Neighborhood Market groceries in Hayward at a onetime Circuit City site, in Pleasanton at a shuttered Nob Hill Market, and in San Ramon in an empty building at Country Club Village Shopping Center."

All together, the four stores "should create about 300 new jobs," with pay going at $12.69 an hour.

[Oakland Tribune]

Now we've got all these rumors swirling that Head Coach Nolan II will be fired after this latest underwhelming showing.

American Football Spectacular's New York American Football Giants correspondent Joon Lee has some ve specific opinions about Nolan and the state of the Niners:

Don't have much to say, so I will make a connection between the 49ers and NYG through one common thread: Mike Nolan.

"The "rivalry" that once was in the 1980s and early '90s is all but dead. The 49ers have been in a long state of decline and mediocrity ever since the cheating Eddie D and Carmen "I am a salary cap genius" Policy left and the Yorks took over.

I guess John York was taken in by Mike Nolan's interviewing skills -- impressed by his articulate, confident tone of voice and commanding demeanor. But let's examine Nolan's performance as a Defensive Coordinator. Nolan was brought into the NY Giants' organization as D Coordinator by Dan Reeves, who took over from the bumbling Ray "I take umbrage" Handley, a f__king disaster, and worst personnel move made by the late great Giant GM George Young.

Nolan's first year with the Giants was a near-mutiny by the Giants defensive players, who were used to an attacking, "I'm going to kick your f__king ass, and let you know I'm going to kick your pussy ass" style of physical, intimidating brand of defense. Nolan instead, played a more passive, bend-but-don't-break, read-and-react defensive style. Nolan, as today, was an obstinate know-it-all who wanted players to adapt to his style, rather than utilizing the talents he had and fitting a system to fit those talents.