February 2025 HVNA Briefing: Early Plans for Permanent Hayes Street Closure
This internal presentation, dated February 10, 2025, shows early coordination between the Supervisor’s office and HVNA on making the Hayes Street closure permanent. Weeks into office, the Supervisor met with HVNA to discuss making the temporary Hayes Street closure permanent—without any public dialogue or community input.
Experiment or Exploitation? When temporary policy becomes permanent politics on Hayes Street.
The 400 block of Hayes Street is closed off on Fridays and Saturdays to project an Instagram version of urban joy. Little music setups sprout up, chalk boxes appear, tango lessons unfold, and bubbles drift through the air between Octavia and Gough; meanwhile, playgrounds, parks, living alleys, and public parcels within blocks in each direction sit underused. But that’s apparently fine, because a feel-good vibe is where governance lives these days. A short-term pandemic experiment has become a permanent political …
Activation or Appropriation? How Hayes Street Became a Stage Set
What began as a temporary pandemic closure in 2020 has stretched into its fifth year. Somewhere along the way, the City stopped asking if the street should reopen and started inventing new reasons to keep it closed. The most powerful of those reasons arrived in 2023 under a single word: “activation.” The Turning PointWhen the permit came up for renewal that fall, SFMTA staff no longer spoke about circulation, safety, or neighborhood balance. Instead, they praised the block’s “activation potential”…a …
The Hayes Street Reset: What We Want to See Happen
For years, the Hayes Street closure has been described as an “experiment.” But experiments are meant to teach us something — not divide a neighborhood or drain the lifeblood of its small businesses. After five years of trial and error, the lesson is clear: this hasn’t worked. It’s time to move past the talking points and start telling the truth about what this has become: a stalled project propped up by a handful of insiders, long after its purpose expired. …
When Politics Crosses the Line: Why San Francisco Set Boundaries for Its Supervisors
The Backstory — Why These Rules Exist San Francisco’s City Charter isn’t vague about this: Supervisors make laws, they don’t administer them. That line was drawn for a reason — and it goes back to incidents like Aaron Peskin’s notorious late-night calls to department heads. Those drunken phone calls and attempts to direct agency staff triggered reforms clarifying that supervisors cannot interfere with operational decisions. The Preston Precedent — Turning a Street Closure into a Political Campaign In 2023, Supervisor …
Statement RE: How a “Temporary” Street Closure Became a Permanent Political Project
San Francisco’s Shared Spaces program was meant to help businesses recover. Instead, it’s been used to keep Hayes Street closed for nearly five years. What began as a temporary Shared Spaces closure on Hayes Street in 2020 should have ended years ago. By late 2023, SFMTA staff were prepared not to renew the permit — citing safety issues, merchant complaints, and the clear intent that Shared Spaces closures were never meant to be indefinite. That decision changed only after Supervisor …
What We Learned From Engaging SFMTA on Pay or Permit Parking
Over the past two years, Hayes Valley has been used as the first large-scale test case for the City’s Pay or Permit Parking (PPP) program. The idea is simple: residents with permits can park for free, while visitors must pay at meters instead of following two-hour time limits. In theory, PPP is meant to increase parking availability, reduce circling, and improve air quality. In practice, Hayes Valley has experienced something very different. Our direct engagement with the San Francisco Municipal …
We Are Not a PAC
San Francisco politics is increasingly run through PACs and nonprofits. They raise big checks, buy access, and dominate the headlines. But here’s the difference: 1. Who We Are vs. Who They Are 2. Access vs. Exclusion 3. Incentives vs. Consequences 4. Accountability vs. Escape 5. What We’re Not 6. What We Are