How San Francisco’s “Activation” Agenda Is Gutting the Neighborhood Economy Again
Hayes Valley once set the bar for protecting small business. Its 2004 formula retail ban was designed to block chain stores and preserve a local-serving economy. But over the years, City Hall has quietly chipped away at those protections first by making exceptions, then by ignoring them outright. Now, a new threat is taking root: Entertainment Zones (EZs). And if you think they’re about vibrancy, think again. They’re about consolidation of power, space, and revenue all favoring a select few.
Back in 2020, vacancy rates were climbing in Hayes Valley. Instead of offering meaningful support to small businesses, the City fast-tracked approvals for chain brands undermining the very ban residents had fought to establish. (Source: SF Business Times, Sept. 4, 2020) Now in 2025, we’re watching the same bait-and-switch unfold. But instead of big retail, it’s big nightlife backed by real estate brokers, city-funded nonprofits, and politically connected merchants.
Let’s connect the dots:
- Maven Real Estate, the same firm marketing the corridor to high-end brands, is closely aligned with Lloyd Silverstein of HVNA/HVMC. Both support the permanent street closure and the new “activation” plans under the EZ.
- The Entertainment Zone amendment gives this small group the ability to shape events, vendors, and street use across the neighborhood without meaningful input from most small business owners.
- Meanwhile, local shops lose visibility, access, and control over their own commercial corridor – while weekend pop-ups and bar-led events take center stage.
San Francisco Planning’s own policy guidance warns against “eroding neighborhood character” and the “clustering of similar commercial activity.” But that’s exactly what’s happening again. Whether it’s Todd Snyder (a subsidiary of American Eagle), Cotopaxi, or a pop-up wine bar hosted by HVNA, the result is the same: fewer independent businesses, more monoculture, and a corridor programmed for profit not people.
From formula retail to EZ, the pattern hasn’t changed — just the packaging:
- Declare a crisis (vacancy, safety, “activation”)
- Sideline the small businesses already here
- Shift policy to favor insiders and short-term spectacles
- Call it “revitalization”
In 2021 and 2022, we raised these concerns directly with Supervisor Dean Preston …flagging violations, calling out Maven’s and Lloyd Silverstein’s role in marketing the corridor to chains, and urging action to tighten the Formula Retail Ban. At the time, even Preston acknowledged the issue, telling Axios:
“It’s deeply concerning that major corporations are finding ways to get around our formula retail laws. My office has heard from a number of concerned small business owners about this phenomenon, and I have been working with our city attorney to find ways to tighten up our restrictions so we can keep the mom-and-pop character that has come to define this neighborhood retail destination.”
(Axios, 2022)
Yet nothing changed. The loopholes widened, enforcement lapsed, and now the EZ model has emerged to finish the job.
This isn’t organic growth. It’s manufactured gentrification and it’s no accident. Hayes Valley’s formula retail ban was supposed to prevent this. But a new wave of political and commercial actors backed by real estate interests, alcohol dollars, and City Hall access is hollowing it out from the inside. If we don’t push back now, the “Entertainment Zone” will become the new normal one that looks nothing like the neighborhoods we’re trying to preserve.