Update 2/26/25: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to end the Accessible Business Entrance program on Tuesday, shifting the city’s focus from local enforcement, which had never been implemented, to education and outreach about state and federal standards.
Magan Li used to lie awake at night thinking about the tripping hazard created by a large step leading into her store on one of Chinatown’s steep streets.
Li’s shop sells items for traditional rituals like funerals and ancestral ceremonies. When she took over the storefront in 2007, she reached out to multiple contractors and architects, hoping to pave over the steps to make her store more accessible.
Each time, the answer was the same: The city wouldn’t approve the project because the pavement would obstruct the sidewalk. But years later, Li was told she might face fines for failing to meet a local accessibility requirement because of the steps.
Today, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is expected to vote to eliminate that local requirement and the associated Accessible Business Entrance program — after having postponed enforcement six times. Around 7,000 businesses citywide are noncompliant or have not reported their status, despite some going to great lengths to comply before the city’s penalties hit. Disability advocates called rescinding the ordinance an overcorrection and expressed concern that scrapping the program would create an expectation for property owners that deferred requirements might be discontinued anyway.
The ordinance requires the city to push property owners to remodel the front entrances of public-facing businesses that are inaccessible to people who use mobility devices.
The rule was introduced in 2016 in response to a wave of accessibility violation lawsuits targeting San Francisco’s small businesses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, one law firm brought another slew of suits, many of which city officials said were fraudulent. Proprietors often settled because they couldn’t afford legal counsel to fight the cases in court. The ordinance was intended to head off lawsuits by pushing businesses to proactively make entrances, one of the most frequent subjects of complaints, accessible.
Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman argued that enforcement at this point would direct significant city staffing and resources toward going after small businesses already struggling to comply.
“At least some of these businesses and property owners are, frankly, extremely sympathetic cases,” Mandelman said during a Land Use and Transportation Committee hearing.
Many local business owners said businesses struggling with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic could face another major financial setback if the city fines noncompliant businesses.
“If we insist on compliance, we are just going to usher more small businesses out of business completely, and the gains in access are in many cases fairly marginal,” said Sharky Laguana, former president of the city’s Small Business Commission.
Disability advocates countered that the city already offers affordable ways to make improvements, including a grant program for accessibility renovations, but business owners have not fully utilized them.
Walter Park, a disability advocate and member of the city’s Access Appeals Commission, which evaluates cases of noncompliance with accessibility standards, favors further extending deadlines and changing the ordinance rather than eliminating it.
“If we’re moving towards completion and success, it doesn’t matter if it takes three more years,” he said. “Accessibility is an issue that’s not going away.”
Disability advocate Arnie Lerner expressed concern that the city backtracking on its role in advancing accessibility could undermine its credibility.
“Why should owners and tenants adhere to mandatory requirements and make upgrades if the department isn’t enforcing them?” he asked during a November hearing on the proposal before the city’s Building Inspection Commission.
Anni Chung, president of Self-Help for the Elderly, which serves the senior citizens in Chinatown, said many business owners are willing to make improvements if they can get help doing so.
But those solutions must be flexible, she added. “You cannot have one size fits all.”
Existing resources have not reached everyone who might be eligible. Business owners told a Board of Supervisors committee in February that in some cases, what seemed like a simple fix often turned into months of waiting for inspections and approvals from multiple city agencies.
Lerner and Park, the disability advocates, cited another bureaucratic breakdown: The Department of Building Inspection was not consistently referring cases to the Access Appeals Commission, which is tasked with assisting applicants who find that upgrading their entryway is not feasible.
“If DBI had forwarded them to us, we could have found an affordable solution,” Lerner told the Building Inspection Commission.
For Li, the Chinatown merchant selling ritual items, navigating the process to secure a hearing before the commission and explain her case feels nearly impossible to do on her own. “For those unfamiliar with the system, let alone those who don’t speak English, they have no idea which departments to go to,” she said in Cantonese.
In his proposal to rescind the ordinance, Mandelman wrote that instead of enforcing it, the city should focus on better outreach and educational materials for business owners.
In Li’s case, the nonprofit organization BeChinatown helped her apply for an exemption, explaining that adding a ramp would be structurally infeasible not just for her store but also for her neighbor’s. With the help of the organization, she also installed a loud doorbell near the shop’s entrance to alert her when customers approach.
Despite these measures, she worries she’s still vulnerable to lawsuits claiming she is violating federal law. Accessibility regulations cover myriad details and meeting more of them could mean sacrificing space for her large inventory, which is the key to keeping prices low and staying in business.
“I know how to serve them when customers in wheelchairs come to the store,” Li said. “But if you asked me if my store is compliant, I honestly don’t know.”
Editor’s Note 2/25/25: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Magan Li’s name.
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