Hayes Valley vs. the Market & Octavia Plan
When the Central Freeway finally came down in the early 2000s, Hayes Valley felt like it had won. The teardown was celebrated as a turning point, a chance to reclaim land and reconnect the neighborhood (Hoodline, 2015). But the replacement street, Octavia Boulevard, didn’t live up to the promise. Instead of being a grand, multimodal boulevard, it became what SFMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin later admitted was “one of the biggest failures of my career…”
In 2019, the City tried to paper over that failure with the Octavia“Open Street Project.” Octavia between Hayes and Linden was closed to cars and folded into Patricia’s Green. “Octavia Open Street gives a Hayes Valley block back to pedestrians” declared SF Weekly. The idea was safety and vitality; the reality was more disorder and no meaningful safety data. That same year, Wired profiled Tumlin’s big-picture vision for cities: “Our job is to make it easier for people to live a good life without needing a car.” Lofty words but on the ground in Hayes Valley, the results were neither safe nor livable.
Then the pandemic layered on another closure. In July 2020, the City shut down three consecutive blocks of Hayes Street — the 300, 400, and 500 between Franklin and Laguna — under Shared Spaces. Framed as a temporary emergency measure, the closure hardened into a program that stretched on year after year. After sustained advocacy from neighborhood merchants and residents, the 300 and 500 block were finally restored to traffic — a recognition of how damaging the blanket closure had been for retail and everyday operations. But the 400 block has remained closed on weekends, now in its fifth year. Even SFMTA admitted: “The closure has at times blocked emergency access and conflicted with the 21-Hayes bus route.”
One failure begat another. Octavia Boulevard led to the Octavia closure. Octavia’s closure set the stage for Hayes Street’s closure. Hayes Street’s closure is now being codified into Entertainment Zone legislation. At each stage, problems were shifted, not solved, while insiders declared ‘success’ as neighbors absorbed the fallout. The costs are visible: blocked ambulances, a fraying sense of safety, and local retail displacement and instability. This fall, Hayes Valley lost Miette, a 20-year anchor. The owner was blunt: “The city’s car ban and deteriorating conditions cut foot traffic and hurt deliveries. We just couldn’t sustain it anymore.”
Perhaps the most dangerous failure isn’t physical, but historical. Responsibility vanishes as quickly as the ribbon-cuttings. Few remember who pushed the Octavia closure, who benefited from it, or who was excluded. HVNA and allied insiders reappear in each chapter, repackaging failures as progress and escaping accountability. Within weeks of a bad outcome, the narrative resets. As one neighbor put it: “Fifteen minutes after they do the deed or get caught in a lie, amnesia sets in.”
What makes the cycle even more galling is that it runs directly against the City’s own planning framework. The Market & Octavia Area Plan envisioned a balanced neighborhood: dense but livable, with strong transit, thriving retail, and public spaces that served everyone. Instead, Hayes Valley has been steered toward imbalance — closures that divide neighbors, tip the scales toward entertainment over retail, and make safety harder, not easier. Events staged in the closure space now directly compete with leaseholders, undermining the very businesses that anchor the neighborhood year-round.
Across five years, Hayes Valley has been promised safety, community, and vitality. Instead, it has been left with an uneven playing field for independent operators and a neighborhood more divided than ever. The costs fall on residents and small businesses, while the same players tighten their grip on the story. The through-line is clear: Hayes Valley is living through compounding failed experiments, made worse by compounding amnesia. Until there is an honest reckoning with both, the neighborhood will keep paying the price.