DataSF and scraping planning applications for my inner YIMBY
I am doing a series of blog posts diving into 400 Divisadero Street, a defunct car wash and gas station in San Francisco that they're trying to turn into apartments — and have been for over a decade without breaking ground. The reasons for the lack of (visual) progress is multifaceted, but to properly dive into it and explain the timeline I wanted to dig into the raw planning documents. They're widely available as part of SF’s PIM (Property Information Map), but I wanted to download them all locally for OCR, manually review them all, and process them with Claude.