Streets Are for People. Which People?
Today, Senator Scott Wiener and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood joined HVNA for a ribbon cutting celebrating the new Hayes Street Farmers Market — held directly on the closed 400 block of Hayes.
The timing was striking.
Just as the event was underway, Andrew Seigner and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood took to social media to celebrate the market, emphasizing that “Streets are for people.”
This is the same group (HVNA/Seigner) that filed a civil harassment restraining order against residents who had been documenting conditions and permit compliance issues related to the closure.
See our statement on civic documentation and public streets.
The symbolism was difficult to ignore.
They are celebrating a project that has increasingly been treated as permanent, even though the closure remains deeply divisive within the neighborhood.
A major business corridor stays closed every weekend. Small businesses continue to struggle with lost foot traffic and revenue. And the farmers market was placed here despite many residents and businesses expressing a preference for alternative locations such as Octavia or Linden.
See our full position on the Hayes Street Farmers Market.
This is no longer really a debate about the value of public space. It’s about who gets to decide what happens on a commercial corridor — and whose voices are treated as legitimate in the process.
For years, major decisions about Hayes Street have moved forward through a narrow set of aligned stakeholders while many residents and storefront businesses have received little meaningful engagement. Despite repeated requests, substantive dialogue has never materialized.
Five years of noncompliance
For 77+ weeks, the permit holder has operated in open violation of basic permit conditions — with little to no enforcement from SFMTA. Yet instead of addressing these failures, the city is now spending half a million taxpayer dollars on a “study” exploring how to make the closure permanent.
This is not a neutral process. It is using public resources to entrench a deeply contested outcome while ignoring documented noncompliance and widespread concerns from the corridor.
Streets are for people. Public officials are supposed to represent all of them. The question Hayes Valley continues to wrestle with is which people get heard, which people get represented, and which people are expected to simply accept decisions made on their behalf. This is not how healthy community decision-making works. It’s time to reopen the 400 block of Hayes.