2025 in Review: Receipts, Resilience, and a Reset for Hayes Valley
For the past five years, we’ve marked time with either an end-of-year reflection or a start-of-year reset. This year feels different, not because the challenges disappeared, but because the full picture finally came into focus.
2025 was the year the pattern became undeniable.
What many neighbors and small businesses experienced anecdotally, including exclusion, predetermined outcomes, selective enforcement, and closed-door coordination, became documented, traceable, and impossible to dismiss.
Rather than waiting for the next shoe to drop, we’re choosing to close the year by taking stock and setting the stage for what comes next.
What 2025 Made Clear
This year did not introduce new problems.
It confirmed long-standing ones.
Across permits, advisory bodies, and legislative maneuvers, the same dynamics repeated:
- Decisions framed as “temporary” quietly hardened into permanence
- Public process was treated as a formality rather than a requirement
- Dissent was pathologized instead of engaged
- Compliance failures were tolerated while scrutiny flowed in only one direction
Alongside these process failures, enforcement itself increasingly became discretionary. It was applied unevenly, deferred indefinitely, or outsourced in ways that left basic safety, access, and accountability unresolved.
As the year closed, an additional shift became impossible to ignore. Responsibility for public space on Hayes Street is increasingly being delegated, informally and without clear authority, to a private nonprofit neighborhood organization operating outside formal public accountability structures. What began as a temporary permit has evolved into a system where access, scheduling, and conditions for public use are filtered through non-public processes, with liability disclaimed and oversight blurred. This is not a minor administrative concern. It raises fundamental questions about who governs public space and under what rules.
Key Developments This Year
In 2025, the record expanded significantly:
- The Entertainment Zone effort exposed how major policy shifts were advanced without meaningful notice, balanced input, or neighborhood consent.
- The year revealed extensive behind-the-scenes coordination between City Hall, HVNA/HVMC, and select stakeholders, while other impacted residents and businesses were excluded.
- The Community Board / Parcel K controversy revealed how “community” structures are increasingly used to manufacture legitimacy rather than reflect it.
- The Hayes Street permit renewal proceeded despite unresolved safety, access, enforcement, and economic-impact concerns, underscoring structural weaknesses in the Shared Spaces framework.
- The so-called “Public Life Study” emerged not as a neutral assessment, but as an active justification tool, contradicting adopted plans and bypassing the public processes those plans require.
- Sound, event, and activation creep continued to expand beyond what licensed businesses themselves are required to comply with.
- Public-space installations and pilot projects raised new questions about safety, oversight, and accountability when experimentation lacks guardrails.
- Coalition support deepened, particularly among small businesses and residents who spoke up or remained outside gatekeeper-led programming altogether.
Taken together, these are not isolated disputes. They form a consistent, documented pattern.
What We Documented, Advanced, and Concluded in 2025
In addition to ongoing engagement, 2025 marked a shift toward record-building, documentation, and follow-through:
- Maintained continuous monitoring of the Hayes Street Shared Spaces permit, including conditions, enforcement gaps, and operational impacts throughout the renewal term.
- Facilitated large-scale community engagement, supporting more than 2,000 residents, small businesses, and supporters in submitting letters, comments, and petitions on policies directly impacting Hayes Valley.
- Met directly with all city agencies involved in the Hayes Street closure, the Entertainment Zone, and public safety matters, working to expand community engagement and represent residents and small businesses not otherwise included in the process.
- Documented non-compliance and safety concerns tied to access, emergency response, sound, and event operations associated with the closure.
- Exposed coordinated planning and messaging between City Hall, HVNA/HVMC, and select stakeholders that excluded impacted residents and businesses.
- Challenged the Entertainment Zone expansion and related management plans advanced without notice, balance, or neighborhood consent.
- Engaged directly with small businesses outside gatekeeper-led programming, reflecting a growing split between hospitality-driven activations and retail sustainability.
- Tracked and analyzed the emergence of the “Public Life Study,” identifying conflicts with adopted plans and procedural safeguards.
- Continued public safety engagement, logging conditions and escalation pathways while pressing for accountability rather than symbolic responses.
- Documented and elevated concerns regarding the Hayes Valley Community Board, including questions around composition, transparency, and its expanding role in legitimizing decisions affecting public space without broad community representation.
- Expanded coalition coordination and information sharing, strengthening alignment across residents, merchants, and citywide allies.
This work is cumulative and intended to support long-term accountability.
What Changed Because People Spoke Up
It’s important to say this plainly: silence enables drift. Documentation interrupts it.
Because neighbors and merchants stayed engaged:
- The public record now reflects majority opposition, not manufactured consensus
- Compliance failures are logged, timestamped, and visible
- Advisory bodies and permit renewals are now subject to greater scrutiny, rather than proceeding entirely by default
- The designation of programs as “temporary” is being tested as extensions accumulate and impacts persist.
The cost of speaking up has long been evident and remains a persistent challenge. Participation has too often been met with deflection, mischaracterization, or attempts to discourage further engagement. Rather than deterring involvement, that reality makes sustained participation all the more critical for the health of civic process.
This collective work doesn’t always produce immediate wins. But it changes the terrain, and that matters.
Where This Leaves Us Heading Into 2026
We’re entering the next year with clarity and intention. 2026 will not be about reacting in real time to decisions already made or chasing outcomes after the fact. It will be about reasserting policy boundaries that were ignored or stretched, challenging the normalization of process shortcuts, and expanding participation beyond the same narrow set of voices. Most importantly, it will be about re-centering decision-making around the residents and businesses who live and operate here, rather than allowing Hayes Valley to be reshaped through destination-driven programming advanced without broad community consent.
It will also require confronting a more basic question that can no longer be avoided: whether public streets can quietly be governed by private intermediaries, without clear authority, accountability, or community consent.
The tools are there. The record is there. And community engagement is broader, more informed, and more durable than ever.
A Note of Thanks, and a Look Ahead
To everyone who wrote letters, shared experiences, asked hard questions, or simply stayed engaged: thank you. This work is slow by design, but it only moves forward because people refuse to disengage.
We’re closing this year grounded, focused, and ready.
Not to fight louder —
but to act smarter.
More soon.
-HVS