Net formation by area
| Area | Open | Closed | Net |
|---|
Select a row to filter every panel. Corridor coverage is 41.7% of the panel — areas without one are absent, and they are not a random sample.
Monthly openings and filed closures
Categories entering and exiting since 2023
Registration gap distribution — genuine changes vs business continuity
Three cities
| City | Spells | Active |
|---|
San Francisco and Los Angeles record tenancies. Chicago records licences that expire and renew, so its tenancies are reconstructed and its closures are not directly comparable.
San Francisco only — the 41 analysis neighbourhoods, which are the same names the registry publishes, so no crosswalk sits between the polygon and the number. Corridors are not mapped: DataSF publishes no geometry for them, only the name string, so they stay in the tables above.
Hover a neighbourhood for its counts.
Of the commercial spaces trading in January 2015, this follows every one that later lost its registered tenant and asks how many had a new one by a given point. Spaces still without a registered tenant are counted, as censored observations, rather than dropped — which is what separates this from the medians below.
Share re-let, by time since the tenant left
Bars are 95% intervals. 182 days is the Commercial Vacancy Tax's statutory definition of a vacant space, which makes it the one horizon with a legal meaning rather than a round number.
| City | Vacancies | Re-let | By 182d |
|---|
San Francisco re-lets faster than Chicago and Los Angeles at every horizon, and the intervals do not overlap at 182 days. That ordering is the claim; it survives counting the spaces that never re-let.
Median registration gap among spaces that did re-let
| City | Filter | Succ. | Median |
|---|
Restricting each city to assessor-recorded commercial use. Filtering cuts LA's median sharply and SF's moderately, while raising Chicago's — consistent with the first two registries being diluted by home businesses, and Chicago's licence registry already skewing commercial.
Taking each county assessor's list of commercial parcels and asking the business registry whether anyone is registered there. This is not a vacancy rate — registration is not occupancy — but it is checked against an independent source that fails in a different way.
Parcel state, by city
Does anyone file building permits there?
| City | Odds ratio | z | Reads as |
|---|
apn, Cook pin — while the
occupancy test joins by address or by distance. So if an unmatched
parcel were really occupied and merely missed, permits would still
reach it by key and its rate would match. A null here is evidence of
join failure, not an absence of evidence.
Odds ratios hold the assessor's own parcel type fixed (Mantel–Haenszel). The crude comparison overstates the gap: a parking lot is rarely registered and rarely permitted, for one reason rather than two.
The question San Francisco cannot answer. Chicago's category is a licence type the city assigns, so it is present on 100% of handovers including closed ones — against 7.8% in SF, where the category is self-reported and decays.
Most common transitions · = same category, > a change
| From | To | n | Median |
|---|
Where a space is re-let to the same trade, it re-lets fast
Each point is an exiting licence type. Specialised fitout the next same-type tenant can use is an asset; specialised fitout nobody else wants is a liability.