What began as a temporary COVID-era street closure is now being treated as something permanent. Recent public records show that District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood directly requested and drove the City’s initiation of a Public Life Study on Hayes Street, with the Planning Department leading the technical work in coordination with SFMTA, SFCTA, and the Supervisor’s own office. This is not a minor administrative step. It is a coordinated, interagency effort to evaluate and potentially lock in the future of a neighborhood corridor. But the way this effort has been structured reveals a clear failure of governance and process discipline.
Meanwhile the closure itself remains officially temporary (weekend-only, 18-hour windows through November 2026), yet the $410,000 Public Life Study, funded by restricted Prop I freeway-removal dollars, is already scoped around the assumption that the shared space stays closed.
What the records show
The study did not emerge from a clearly defined public decision. Instead, records indicate that:
- It was directly requested by Supervisor Bilal Mahmood.
- The City had to amend an existing transportation funding program just to make it eligible.
- Approximately $410,000 in restricted Prop I funds (originally tied to Octavia Boulevard) were quietly reallocated.
- Multiple agencies — SFMTA, SF Planning, and the Transportation Authority — are now executing it.
This did not originate as a standard, neutral agency-led evaluation. It followed a different path entirely.
The disconnect
The study has been presented as an objective effort to assess existing conditions. But the sequence matters. By the time the public became aware of it, the study had already been initiated, scoped, coordinated, and funded.
That is not how a neutral starting point typically begins.
What’s missing
At no point in this process was there a clear, open decision on the fundamental question: Why should Hayes Street remain closed — and what prevents it from being reopened? Hayes Street is a functioning neighborhood business corridor adjacent to underutilized public spaces. That baseline question — the condition everything else depends on — was never put back on the table. Instead, the current effort is structured around studying and designing from the assumption that the closure continues.
What this means
This is no longer just a temporary program evolving over time. It is a process already underway to build policy and future design around an existing condition — without a clear public decision to support it. It is also a clear waste of restricted Prop I dollars originally intended for Octavia Boulevard projects — on a politically steered study that was never a grassroots issue to begin with. Meanwhile, the existing weekend-only 18-hour closure has already proven harmful and contentious for nearby businesses and residents. What makes Supervisor Mahmood believe that extending it to 24/7 is the right path forward?
Questions that remain
These questions expose the lack of transparency and process discipline:
- Why was the reopening of Hayes Street never formally evaluated?
- Why was the scope and direction of this study approved without public input?
- Why is the study being positioned to influence future permit decisions when no public decision on the closure itself has ever been made?
- Why are restricted transportation funds being applied to advance a predetermined outcome?
- And why, exactly, is there still no public decision point in this entire process?
Until these questions are answered and the process is corrected, this cannot be understood as a neutral study. It is a politically shepherded conversion effort being backfilled with study, branding, and curated stakeholder engagement after the fact.