Closed for Business

Salaries in San Francisco are higher than just about anywhere else in the U.S., and the Bay Area’s economy is one of the nation’s fastest-growing. Overpaid tech workers compete to live in high-rise apartments that didn’t even exist a few years ago.

So with all this happy commerce, why do some parts of San Francisco look like ghost towns?

In some neighborhoods, storefronts sit vacant for years. A single block of Balboa Street in the Richmond District, a stretch of apartment buildings and single-family homes along the northern length of Golden Gate Park, has at least a half-dozen empty storefronts — and one of those has been vacant for