We’ve been telling you about the Mission restaurant boom all year, and two weeks ago the Chronicle tallied up all the restaurants on three blocks of Valencia Street in the last two years (that’d be 16th Street to 19th Street) and came up with 1,000 new seats. Of course, a quarter of those are at the convention-center-sized Amber Dhara, but we digress. Now Uptown Almanac reports that both the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association, and their counterparts on 24th Street, are looking into ways to stop the madness, if only for the good of daytime retail and foot traffic, which are hurt by having a surplus of businesses only open at night. The Valencia merchants are bringing a proposal to the Planning Commission via Scott Wiener which would impose a one-year moratorium on new restaurants and set up a Special Use District that would require extra permitting for new restaurants. “It’s not change that we’re against,” says Jefferson McCarley of Mission Bicycle. “But there are a variety of concerns with so many high-end dinner-only restaurants opening up at such a high rate.” [Uptown Almanac]
