The first two articles in this series looked at two different ways Hayes Street has been shaped.
The Market & Octavia Area Plan established a long-term planning framework through years of public participation, environmental review, and coordinated decision-making.
What followed years later was very different. Beginning with the pandemic, temporary programs, permits, renewals, events, and other initiatives gradually accumulated on Hayes Street. No single decision produced the street we see today.
That raises another question: Who has been making those decisions?
A complicated governance structure
There is no single agency responsible for Hayes Street. Different aspects of the corridor involve different public agencies, elected offices, permit holders, nonprofit organizations, event operators, and advisory bodies. SFMTA oversees the recurring weekend street closure and transportation operations. Planning is involved in land-use and public-realm planning. OEWD has played a role in the Entertainment Zone. Other City departments become involved depending on the particular use, permit, event, or public-space issue. The District 5 Supervisor’s office also plays an important role in neighborhood policy and communication.
And outside government, neighborhood organizations and permit holders have increasingly become involved in operating and programming public space. Each participant may have a defined role. The difficulty is understanding how those roles fit together and where responsibility ultimately rests.
From planning to permitting
The distinction matters because planning and permitting are not the same thing. A comprehensive planning process asks broad questions about how transportation, businesses, housing, open space, circulation, public space, and neighborhood needs should work together over time.
A permit generally asks a narrower question: Should this particular use be allowed under this particular program?
When one permit is followed by another renewal, another program, another event, and another initiative, each individual decision may appear relatively limited. Collectively, however, those decisions can reshape how a street functions. That is essentially what has happened on Hayes Street.
The result is not simply a collection of individual permits. It is an evolving public-space policy. And while responsibility for those decisions may be distributed among different agencies, programs, and operators, residents and businesses experience their cumulative effect on the street.
The growing role of private and nonprofit actors
Another important change has been the role of nongovernmental organizations in shaping the street. Public agencies still issue permits and retain governmental authority. But the day-to-day operation, programming, and presentation of public space can increasingly be influenced by nonprofit organizations, permit holders, event producers, and other private actors.
That creates an important distinction. A neighborhood organization can advocate for an idea. It can organize programming. It can hold a permit. But it does not represent every resident, merchant, property owner, visitor, or stakeholder affected by the use of public space.
When a private organization becomes closely involved in operating a public street, the question of representation therefore becomes inseparable from the question of governance. Who gets a seat at the table? Who does not? And who is responsible for ensuring that competing perspectives are heard?
Representation matters
This is why the question of representation has become increasingly important in Hayes Valley.
Neighborhoods contain competing interests. Residents may disagree with one another. Businesses may have different needs. People living directly beside a project may experience it differently from people visiting it. That is normal.
A healthy public process requires a structure capable of recognizing disagreement and incorporating it into decision-making. That becomes especially important when temporary programs begin influencing the long-term use of public space. The question is no longer simply whether one program is popular or whether one event is successful. The larger question becomes whether the process used to shape the street adequately represents the people affected by it.
A public street, a public process
None of this means Hayes Street should remain frozen in the vision adopted nearly two decades ago. Cities and neighborhoods change, and public space changes with them. But when substantial changes to a public street are contemplated, the process used to make those changes matters.
The Market & Octavia Area Plan demonstrated one model: comprehensive planning, competing priorities, public participation, environmental review, and an adopted framework. The evolution of Hayes Street since 2020 demonstrates another: temporary programs, permits, renewals, programming, and administrative decisions accumulating over time. Understanding who has participated in those decisions — and how authority, representation, and accountability have been distributed — is therefore essential to understanding how Hayes Street arrived where it is today.
The story continues
The governance history is only one part of the story. As temporary programs have continued and new initiatives have emerged, the City has increasingly turned to studies, surveys, public engagement, and new planning efforts to evaluate the future of Hayes Street.
Those processes raise their own questions: What exactly is being studied? Who is participating? What assumptions form the starting point? And perhaps most importantly: How will the results relate to the planning framework that already exists? Those are questions we’ll continue examining as this series develops.