Let’s start with the ice cream.
On June 11 of last year, in the eighth hour of its weekly meeting, the San Francisco Planning Commission heard the case of Garden Creamery v. Matcha n’ More. The owners of the former ice cream shop alleged that the entrepreneurs behind the latter ice cream shop had lied on their planning application to open up in a long-vacant retail space in the city’s Mission District—and asked that the planners review their application.
Advertisement
So far, not much of a scoop in a city famous for petty bureaucratic skirmishes. But because this was 2020, the typical meager audience at the commission meeting had been replaced with the whole San Francisco phonebook. The calls came and came, as locals duked it out over chain stores, gentrification, the pandemic, and ice cream.