Sign of the Times (Credit: Rachael Myrow/KQED)

As a reporter, I was impressed with MissionLoc@l's close study last year of one commercial strip in San Francisco. Then, it was Mission Street. Now, the student journalists from UC Berkeley are aiming their curiosity at Valencia Street.  If you're a fan of Planet Money, you may have caught a recent interview with University of Chicago economist Raghu Rajan in which he argues that national economies (e.g. Japan, Germany) should make more of an effort cultivate domestic consumption instead of relying so heavily, so unsustainably,  on spendthrift nations like, ahem, the US. It's interesting to ask whether local economies should think along the same lines.

In the case of Valencia Street, I wonder how many restaurants the local population can sustain ... even with the generous help we get from tourists.