Bar Part Time owner: Neil Mehta gaslighting about Fillmore land grab

Billionaire venture capitalist Neil Mehta wrote in the San Francisco Standard last month why he and his business partner, Cody Allen, have purchased almost two city blocks of the upper Fillmore neighborhood commercial corridor, only to ramp up rents of several beloved legacy small businesses, leading to the closure of one and imminent displacement of another.

The problem with Mehta’s words are that they ring hollow because they were published the same day that Steve Amano, owner of the 46-year old family-owned legacy business Sushi Ten-Ichi was forced to turn in his keys into his new landlord.

Amano was never given an opportunity to extend his lease. He wasn’t even give time enough to find a new location and keep his workers employed, all the while other Mehta properties sit vacant. Several other restaurants have been closed under Mehta’s ownership and several rent-controlled tenants have reached out to the Board of Supervisors to say they have also been pressured to accept buyouts. This all came on the heels of Mayor London Breed’s citywide neighborhood rezoning proposal, which specifically incentivizes the lucrative redevelopment of otherwise intact neighborhoods, while downtown continues to sit vacant.

Like the controversial California Forever project, which has spent over $900 million since 2017 to buy up land in Solano County to build an exclusive city, Mehta purchased the land through a series of anonymous LLCs, and then only launched a public relations campaign after the purchases were revealed. Mehta has asserted that his actions are in the name of charity and he intends to create “the Y Combinator for restaurants” — but neglects to mention it at the cost of displacing beloved neighborhood small businesses that did not get bailouts during the pandemic but hung on to serve the neighborhood.

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