Walk the corner of 9th and Irving on a Tuesday morning and you get two versions of the same block. On one side, a windowless building that used to be a Bank of America branch sits dark, the kind of blank frontage that makes a busy intersection feel emptier than it is. Thirty feet away, there's a line for matcha.
That gap, between a corner that can't lease and a storefront that can't keep up with demand, is the real story here. Everyone who walks this stretch already knows something has been filling in around 9th and Irving this year. What's less obvious is why the two hardest spots on the block have resisted every ordinary market signal, and why it took a private fund with neighbors as its only backers to start moving them.
The Corner That Wouldn't Lease
The old Bank of America building at 9th and Irving has no windows and has been vacant for years. Next door, the space that housed Reliable Rexall Pharmacy has been dark since the drugstore closed. Together they account for a real chunk of the dead frontage at what is arguably the Inner Sunset's most walked intersection, sitting at the exact spot where the N-Judah lets people off and the Sunday farmers market crowd passes through.
Neither space is hard to find. Neither is short on foot traffic. And yet both sat empty long enough that residents mostly stopped expecting anything to change.
What Actually Happened to the Hardware Store
Part of the reason the corner feels stuck traces back to a fire. Progress Hardware operated at 724 Irving from 1948 until 2023, when a fire damaged the space. The owners tried to reopen, with help from the city and a GoFundMe campaign, but the math never worked. The fire cost the business its insurance coverage, and the owners couldn't reach new lease terms with the landlord, according to Mission Local's reporting on the closure.
That address is now Therapy Stores, a gift shop chain founded on Valencia Street in 1994 that opened its Inner Sunset location in March 2026 as its first move onto the city's west side. Angie Petitt, who runs the Sunset Mercantile Emporium and organizes the monthly Inner Sunset Flea, put the loss plainly: a hardware store isn't something you can conjure by wanting it. "We can dream, but somebody's gotta do it," she told Mission Local.
It's a useful reminder before getting to the fund: money can lower the barrier to opening a storefront. It can't manufacture an operator willing to run the specific kind of business a neighborhood misses.
Neighbors With Checkbooks
On July 1, 2026, the nonprofit SF New Deal launched something it calls the Neighborhood Vibrancy Fund, and picked the Inner Sunset as its first neighborhood. The setup is straightforward. Private donors, described by SF New Deal only as Inner Sunset neighbors, pledged the money themselves. Grants range from $5,000 to $20,000 and will go to up to 20 small businesses for storefront activation, beautification, and technical assistance, according to the San Francisco Standard's coverage of the launch. Based on the grant range and business count, the total pledged lands somewhere in the low six figures.
SF New Deal's executive director, Simon Bertrang, framed the effort as an extension of the group's citywide mission, built on the idea that small businesses "really are the cultural and economic heart of our neighborhoods."
The model borrows from SF New Deal's larger Vacant to Vibrant program downtown, which used discounted rents and short leases backed by tens of millions in donor and city money to seed pop-up retailers in empty storefronts. The Inner Sunset version is smaller and more targeted. It exists specifically because the Bank of America building and the old Reliable Rexall space have refused to lease at any price the market has offered on its own.
What Was Already Happening Before the Money Showed Up
Here's the part worth sitting with. Several of this year's most talked-about openings predate the fund entirely, which means the corridor was already turning over before a single Vibrancy Fund grant went out.
- Tadaima, a matcha bar at 1248 9th Avenue, opened in late February 2026. It was targeted in a break-in shortly after opening, and regulars filled the shop again the very next morning.
- Grégoire, the French takeout counter at 9th and Irving, added sidewalk bistro tables and a café-style mural earlier this year.
- CORE40, a low-impact fitness studio, opened at 827 Irving.
- Pang, a new Chinese restaurant with a menu built around dishes like mapo tofu chip and dip, is under construction at 1309 9th Avenue in the former Dumpling Park space.
- Maggie & Mac's, a New American restaurant and bar from Scott and Caitlyn Morton of Momo's near Oracle Park, is aiming for a spring-to-summer 2026 debut at 1326 9th Avenue, in the space that used to hold Social Kitchen & Brewery.
None of that needed a grant. Rents in the corridor were already low enough, and demand strong enough, that operators with a concept and some capital were willing to bet on 9th and Irving without a subsidy. The Vibrancy Fund isn't why the block got busy. It exists for the two addresses that stayed dark even while everything around them filled in, which tells you something sharper than a general "comeback" story: this corridor doesn't have a vacancy problem so much as it has two very specific, very stubborn vacancy problems that ordinary market pressure hasn't touched.
The Pattern Underneath the Fund
The Vibrancy Fund isn't the first time Inner Sunset residents have paid, directly and out of pocket, to fix something the market wouldn't. Last year, the group Inner Sunset Park Neighbors ran a smaller pilot of its own, offering grants of up to $500 for storefront improvements like painting, planters, and anti-graffiti film. The Vibrancy Fund is the same idea run at ten to forty times the dollar amount.
The same habit shows up away from the storefronts. Over the past two years, UCSF has funded the planting of 42 trees along Irving, Judah, and Hugo streets and 9th Avenue, with Friends of the Urban Forest handling the ongoing maintenance. A volunteer named Annie Tahtinen leads a cleanup on the fourth Saturday of every month from 10 a.m. to noon, drawing more than two dozen people each time, a mix of seniors, families, and teens earning community service hours. It's a joint effort of the Inner Sunset Merchants Association, Inner Sunset Park Neighbors, and the Sunset Mercantile Emporium, with a grant assist from the Sunset Heights Association of Responsible People.
None of that is new this year. It's the same instinct the Vibrancy Fund just scaled up: when something needs doing here, a group of neighbors tends to fund it themselves rather than wait on a city program to get around to it.
What This Looks Like Over the Next Few Months
The Inner Sunset Flea, now in its 11th season, runs the second Sunday of every month through November on Irving Street between 9th and 11th Avenues, so the next two markets both fall inside the current stretch. The fourth-Saturday cleanups continue on their usual schedule. And the Vibrancy Fund's grant window stays open, which means the two anchor vacancies at 9th and Irving are still live questions rather than settled ones.
If you live within a ten-minute walk of that corner, the practical takeaway is simple: watch those two windows. A restaurant sign, a lease sign, or continued darkness over the next several months will tell you whether targeted cash can do what rent discounts and foot traffic alone couldn't. Either way, the rest of the block isn't waiting to find out. It's already moved on to bistro tables and a line for matcha.
If you're weighing a move within the Inner Sunset, or wondering what a corridor like this does to property values on the surrounding blocks, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these shifts block by block. The Freeman Group works across San Francisco's neighborhoods every day, and William Freeman is always glad to talk through what a changing corner means for your own plans. Let me guide you home.
