The Yoshi's SF Saga

The formerly premiere jazz club of SF known as Yoshi's SF is done, which was sad news to me and I felt that it was not given a fair chance to fight for its survival. Oh well, as an outsider I could only find out so much from the media, like this article from SFWeekly. The whole Fillmore district redevelopment and jazz preservation project started in 1995 was supposed to be the way the city made amend to the "original" 1950s redevelopment that chased away black residents, businesses and the vibrant jazz scene. Yoshi's SF which opened in 2007 was probably the "crown jewel" of the project. I saw Yoshi's SF as a more up-scaled version of Yoshi's Oakland (i.e., jazz and Japanese food) with higher price tags on admissions and dining (and I predicted the top-tier, bigger name jazz musicians will have their shows in SF in place of or in addition to Oakland and made more money) I was wrong on the money part though. The ownership had spent a lot to make the place looked that good (more than twice of the original estimate) Unfortunately, opening in 2007 was bad timing: people cut spending during the financial crisis. Even though Yoshi's brought in $9-$10 million or more a year, it's still not profitable after paying down all its debts and covering more than $60,000 per month in rent, taxes, and maintenance charge. Like other businesses started with money from the redevelopment agency, it had problem paying back the loan and needed more money to bail them out. Some owners of these businesses complained the agency didn't provide enough help. On the other hand, critics of the redevelopment agency claimed that there was insufficient oversight on how the agency handed out the money. Anyway, some fingers were pointing at the musical genre (i.e., jazz) as a cause of the failure: the city surveyed local residents and claimed that interests in jazz were not high (which I don't think it's that relevant: there were jazz fans all over the SF Bay Area who would come to the Fillmore district when there were great jazz shows) Even branching outside of jazz couldn't save it's original majority owner (co-founder of Yoshi's Oakland) from losing Yoshi's SF to the "new" ownership group (formerly minority owners who were the builders and landlords of the place) Not sure if Yoshi's is paying less rent now. Oh yeah, as part of the deal, 5 million dollar of the debt to the city was forgiven. (Did anyone say sorry to the SF tax payers?) Actually the deal itself is quite complicated and I found some details here.

RIP Yoshi's SF. Long live Yoshi's Oakland (I hope)