Current Today is bcdW Magazine's daily newsletter — one story, one city, read through the eyes of the world.

We launch today in test flight. Each edition takes a single real story from one of our cities and asks: what does this mean for someone living somewhere else entirely? What ideas travel? What collaborations become possible?
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For several years, the dominant story about downtown San Francisco was told in empty windows. Storefronts that had once housed bookshops, restaurants, and boutiques sat vacant along Powell Street and the corridors around Union Square, their dark interiors a shorthand for everything that had gone wrong with the city's post-pandemic recovery.

San Francisco's response to that problem has been, in its best moments, surprisingly elegant.

Mayor Daniel Lurie's "Vacant to Vibrant" program, backed by a partnership with JPMorganChase, works like this: the city identifies vacant storefronts in high-footprint downtown corridors and offers them to local entrepreneurs as pop-up spaces at reduced cost. The businesses open. If they work — if they draw foot traffic, if customers return, if the neighborhood feels different — they're offered the option to sign long-term leases. The temporary becomes permanent.

The results have started to compound. Al Pastor Papi, a taco operation that began as a beloved street vendor, has opened its first brick-and-mortar at 232 O'Farrell Street. Nooworks, a Mission-based women-owned fashion brand known for artist-designed prints, has launched a downtown presence at 236 Powell. Paper Son Cafe, Koolfi Creamery, Hungry Crumbs, and Studio Aurora have all signed long-term leases after graduating from the program. In Yerba Buena, approximately nine new businesses opened in a single quarter.

"Every time a new business takes over a vacant space, it breathes new life into our commercial corridors," Mayor Lurie said.

What San Francisco has discovered, under pressure, is something that cities rarely find by choice: that the most durable way to fill an empty storefront is not to attract a national chain, but to give a local entrepreneur the lowest possible barrier to try. The pop-up is not the destination. It is the audition.

And once a neighborhood has enough businesses that started as auditions, it starts to feel like a neighborhood again.

(Sources: SF.gov, SF Examiner, CBS San Francisco — March 2026)

New York — New York's version of this problem is well-documented and largely unsolved. Manhattan's commercial vacancy rate has remained stubbornly high in neighborhoods where rent levels make the pop-up math impossible without subsidy. What San Francisco's Vacant to Vibrant model offers NYC is not a template but a question: what would it look like to treat a vacant storefront as a public resource rather than a private liability? The city's strategic use of JPMorganChase as a funding partner — rather than a government grant alone — is the detail worth studying. Private capital, public coordination, local entrepreneur. That triangle is replicable.

Seoul — Seoul has been wrestling with gentrification-driven vacancy in neighborhoods like Seongsu and Euljiro for years. The city's instinct has been regulatory: rent stabilization agreements, landlord covenants, tenant protection policies. San Francisco's instinct is different — it accepts that vacancy exists and designs an on-ramp through it. Both approaches are incomplete on their own. A city that combines Seoul's structural protections with San Francisco's entrepreneurial on-ramp might actually solve the problem. Neither city has built that combination yet.

Medellín — Medellín's Ruta N has been running something structurally similar for years: providing below-market space to early-stage startups, with the expectation that successful companies graduate to commercial rents and anchor their neighborhoods. The difference is that Medellín's model targets technology companies; San Francisco's targets neighborhood retail. The underlying logic — reduce friction at the point of entry, let the market validate from there — is identical. Medellín's retail districts could run the same experiment that its innovation districts already have.

Dubai — Dubai's approach to commercial real estate has historically been to build new capacity rather than activate existing vacancy. The model works when the city is expanding; it creates problems when growth slows and supply outpaces demand. The Vacant to Vibrant logic — use existing vacancy as an asset rather than a liability — is available to any city willing to see its empty storefronts as infrastructure waiting to be programmed. As Dubai's newer residential neighborhoods mature and their commercial strips begin to show the first signs of vacancy, this is a playbook worth having ready.

Amman — Downtown Amman's commercial streets have their own vacancy problem, though it reads differently: here, the empty spaces are often the result of landlords holding out for tenants who never arrive, rather than businesses that failed. The San Francisco model — where the city acts as broker between the landlord and the entrepreneur, absorbing some of the risk on both sides — is directly applicable. What Amman needs is not the capital (the spaces are cheap) but the coordination infrastructure that tells a landlord and a local entrepreneur that the city has their back if they try.

Tel Aviv — Tel Aviv's Florentine and southern neighborhoods have been running an informal version of this model for decades: artists and entrepreneurs occupy cheap spaces in unfashionable areas, activate them, and eventually get priced out by the gentrification they created. San Francisco's Vacant to Vibrant attempts to formalize and slow that cycle — to let the local entrepreneur stay in the neighborhood they made interesting. Whether it works long-term depends on whether the long-term leases actually hold. But the intention — to make the pop-up a pathway rather than a prelude to displacement — is the most honest version of this conversation any city has had.

Your Next Opportunity Is Already Happening — Just Not Where You're Looking

The deal, the partner, the market, the project — it's out there. bcdW connects people who are ready to move with the places, people, and ideas that are ready to receive them. Business opportunities, revenue, partnerships, projects worth joining. Read the magazine that finds the connection before you do.

→ Read bcdW Magazine

Where Will the Olds Live When Everything Changes? We're All Getting There. Today's Old Is Tomorrow's Ours.

We are getting older. All of us. Faster than we planned, longer than we expected, in cities that were never designed for this. Climate is changing everything — heat, water, food, safety. And at the same time, the oldest generation in human history is growing larger, living longer, and asking a question no city has fully answered yet: where do we belong in all of this? Sim Eternal is the project building that story — not as a warning, not as a policy paper, but as a living narrative about the future city told by the people who will live in it the longest. The olds are not the problem. They are the point. And this city is theirs.

→ Visit Sim Eternal City Project

Current runs on one city, one story, every day. But the map is still being drawn.

We are looking for contributors who live and work inside the cities they write about — one story from your city, told the way only a local can tell it. We are also looking for readers who want to add their voice to other cities' stories — benchmarking, similar cases, collaboration ideas, a connection worth making. If a story from Medellín reminds you of something happening in your city, tell us. That response is the whole point.

Right now we are building across the Americas and Asia. But the dream is longer than that — from America to Afro-Eurasia, local to local, city to city, one real connection at a time.

More stories. More cities. More continents.

If you have one, send it.

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