Five Years of Transparency and Policy Analysis on Hayes Street

Understanding the process behind a critical neighborhood issue Responsible civic participation requires understanding how policy decisions are made — and explaining them clearly to the public. At its core, that means examining the process: how decisions develop and how policies are implemented over time. For the past five years, our coalition has focused on documenting and analyzing the decisions surrounding the Hayes Street closure. That work has involved reviewing permits, analyzing agency communications, and documenting conditions and impacts in the …

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When Enforcement Disappears, Fairness Disappears

Under Shared Spaces Permit No. 1316522, the permittee is responsible for ensuring: These are not optional guidelines. They are enforceable conditions of operation. Over the past year, we have documented repeated violations of these terms, including: When residents have attempted to inquire about permits in the past, operators responded with verbal hostility. As a result, neighbors now document from a distance to avoid escalation. This is not how a properly administered public right-of-way should function. Meanwhile, brick-and-mortar leaseholders in Hayes …

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Hayes Street: The Pressure Point

At some point, it became clear that what unfolded in Hayes Valley was not really about a one-block street closure. If it were, the response would have looked very different. Disagreements over a temporary closure should not trigger years of exclusion, narrative control, retaliatory behavior, or institutional hardening. They should invite discussion, evidence, and course correction. Instead, the opposite happened. That tells us something important. Hayes Street became a pressure point. A mirror. A test of who gets to decide. …

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A Record of Non-Engagement

From Campaign Support to Early Alignment This post documents our efforts to establish a working cadence with the District 5 Supervisor’s office in early 2025. It reflects contemporaneous correspondence from two neighborhood groups — Hayes Valley Safe (HVS) and the Hayes Valley Small Business Association (HVSBA). No interpretation is required; the record speaks for itself.


 The full email correspondence referenced below is available here: [HVS email thread] and [HVSBA email thread]. Under former Supervisor Dean Preston, we maintained a regular …

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The Quiet Cost of Silencing Oversight

When a neighborhood association responds to routine civic oversight by reframing it as harassment, invasion of privacy, or harmful conduct, the issue is no longer about a street closure. It is about governance. In Hayes Valley, a private nonprofit administering activity on a public street under a city permit characterized ordinary documentation of public conditions as improper behavior. That response should concern anyone who values transparency, public space, and democratic accountability. Oversight of public streets is not a personal affront. …

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Formal Notice Issued Regarding Civic Process in Hayes Valley

Today, we issued a formal notice to City agencies documenting a sustained pattern of disparaging and delegitimizing communications that have affected civic participation and decision-making in Hayes Valley. The notice is shared for record and awareness. It is intended to document an ongoing governance failure that has distorted public process over time, with real consequences for residents, small businesses, and public trust. This communication follows prior efforts to raise concerns through appropriate channels and reflects issues that have not only …

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After 60 Weeks, the Hayes Street Closure Is No Longer Defensible

Update — August 2026: Documentation has continued since this article was published. As of August 2026, the record has reached 87 consecutive weeks of documented noncompliance, with the conditions described below continuing without substantive correction. For more than 60 consecutive weeks, residents and small businesses have documented permit violations on the 400 block of Hayes Street and submitted them to SFMTA. Over that same period, conditions have not improved. They have persisted, and impacts have escalated rather than been resolved. …

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Bilal in January 2025: Abdicating the Role of Representative

The earliest evidence of undue influence and eroded process. In January 2025, just two weeks into Supervisor Bilal Mahmood’s term, a SFMTA/ISCOTT hearing was held to consider the Head West street closure permit. This for-profit marketplace had begun seeking a higher frequency (4x) of dates in Hayes Valley during the early pandemic — compounding the impacts of the already contentious Hayes Street weekend closure. HVS and local businesses had raised concerns for years, and Head West’s expanded footprint only intensified …

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What Recent Discovery Reveals About the Hayes Street “Public Life Study”

A transparency update from Hayes Valley Safe Over the past year, residents and small businesses in Hayes Valley have repeatedly asked basic, good-faith questions about the future of Hayes Street — including whether the current temporary closure was being evaluated neutrally, and whether public funds were being used to advance a predetermined outcome. Those questions went largely unanswered. In January 2026, in response to formal disclosure requests submitted in December 2025, Hayes Valley Safe received records that had not previously …

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