The Hayes Valley Entertainment Zone: The Story is Unraveling
San Franciscans deserve transparent governance, not a backroom deal disguised as community policy.
To those of you who have stood with us – thank you. Please keep sharing this with neighbors, small business owners, and public safety and good governance advocates.
Over the past several weeks, we have uncovered internal emails, planning notes, and meeting records that reveal a coordinated effort by Supervisor Bilal Mahmood and his staff to deliberately exclude the public from the creation of the Hayes Valley Entertainment Zone.
From February through May, while residents and small businesses struggled to schedule meetings and ask questions, Supervisor Mahmood was privately orchestrating the outcome — staging events, soliciting letters of support, and coordinating messaging with hand-picked insiders from HVNA and HVMC.
This wasn’t outreach. It was orchestration.
On May 21 — just two days before a staged media event on Hayes Street — HVNA President David Robinson emailed the Supervisor’s office requesting “talking points… like Bilal went over today” in preparation for a reporter. While the public remained in the dark, they were scripting headlines.
Let’s be clear:
The Hayes Valley Entertainment Zone was conceived through exclusion, engineered through favoritism, and advanced through deception. Residents were not consulted. Retailers were ignored. Businesses were falsely listed as supporters. Concerns were buried. This was never a community process — it was a political maneuver designed to manufacture consent and silence opposition.
Supervisor Mahmood failed the most basic test of public service: inclusion.
Rather than engage honestly with a diverse neighborhood, he elevated insiders, sidelined critics, and used his office to steamroll a predetermined outcome. And now he expects us to fall in line?
We will not.
We are calling for:
- Immediate removal of Hayes Valley from the Entertainment Zone ordinance
- A formal investigation into the discriminatory and exclusionary conduct behind this process
- A new, publicly accountable standard for neighborhood-based legislation
This is about more than Hayes Valley. It’s about the integrity of our civic institutions — and the kind of leadership San Francisco deserves.
Our community outreach makes one thing clear: the very people and businesses impacted by this Entertainment Zone were shut out. That’s especially damning for a first-time Supervisor who campaigned on “listening to the people.” But we were paying attention — and it was clear from the beginning that HVNA was in Mahmood’s pocket, campaigning alongside him and laying the groundwork for exactly this kind of insider politics.
The promises of transparency and inclusion have proven hollow.
The backroom story is unraveling — and we will not be erased from the rewrite of our own neighborhood. We need your help — before Hayes Valley gets Engardio’d. Our community is being rewritten without us. Don’t let them erase us.
More updates to come.
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