A promotional mailer for the Hayes Valley Farmers’ Market recently began arriving in neighborhood mailboxes. On its face, there is nothing unusual about that. Farmers markets advertise. Organizers promote their events. A market that wants customers has every reason to tell people when and where to find it.
But the mailer also provides a striking illustration of a larger question that has increasingly confronted Hayes Valley:
When public-space programming is concentrated on an existing commercial corridor, who is that programming actually designed to support?
The mailer directs people to the Hayes Valley Farmers’ Market at 450 Hayes Street every Saturday. Alongside the market’s branding are the names and logos of Hayes Promenade and the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, the nonprofit organization holding the temporary permit for the Hayes Street closure. What is conspicuously absent are the permanent businesses of the commercial corridor itself.
The Businesses Are Already There
Hayes Street did not need to become a commercial destination. It already was one. Independent retailers, restaurants and service businesses have spent years—and in many cases decades—building businesses along this corridor. They pay rent, employ people, pay taxes and depend upon customers being able to see, reach and patronize their storefronts.
For many small destination businesses, weekends have historically represented some of the most important revenue-generating periods of the week. Yet increasingly, those same periods are also when the corridor is being repurposed for layers of temporary programming.
Since June, HVS has been documenting operating conditions associated with the Saturday Hayes Valley Farmers’ Market. The recurring conditions documented include unattended closure barricades, market-related vehicles occupying curb space on and around the corridor, impacts to customer parking and business loading areas, sidewalk activity, and overlapping commercial activity. These are not abstract questions about whether farmers markets are good or bad. They are questions about who bears the operational cost of putting one here.
A Temporary Event Has a Larger Footprint Than Its Tents
The physical farmers market itself occupies only a portion of the street. Its operational footprint is considerably larger. Market-related vans and vehicles have repeatedly been documented occupying curb space on Hayes Street and surrounding streets, including Octavia Boulevard and Gough Street. Some display Hayes Valley Farmers Market parking passes. Those spaces matter. A parking space occupied by market operations is unavailable to a customer visiting an existing merchant. A loading area being used by an event vehicle is unavailable for ordinary business deliveries and loading. A large van parked in front of a storefront can affect its visibility.
Individually, each occurrence can sound minor. Collectively, week after week, they represent the transfer of a temporary event’s operational requirements onto an existing commercial district. And the permanent businesses continue paying their rent, payroll, taxes and other operating expenses regardless.
Then Comes the Promotion
That is why the farmers market mailer is worth examining. Again, the objection is not that the farmers market advertised itself. The question is what the mailer reveals about the larger ecosystem surrounding this programming. Residents receive a professionally produced piece encouraging them to visit 450 Hayes Street on Saturdays. The farmers market is promoted. Hayes Promenade is promoted. The Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association is promoted.
But where are the merchants? Where is the comparable neighborhood-wide effort encouraging residents to shop at the independent businesses already operating on Hayes Street? Where is the mechanism ensuring that businesses surrendering customer access, curb space, loading capacity and storefront visibility on Saturdays actually benefit from the programming being placed outside their doors?
Where, in this increasingly programmed version of Hayes Valley, do the permanent businesses fit?
A Commercial Corridor Is Not an Empty Event Space
This distinction matters. A plaza, vacant lot or dedicated event space begins as space to be programmed. A commercial street does not. It begins with businesses already operating there.
When government permits recurring programming on such a street, the existing economic ecosystem should not become secondary to the programming layered onto it.
There are public spaces throughout Hayes Valley and the surrounding area that could potentially accommodate community programming. HVS has repeatedly raised alternatives including Linden Alley, Parcel K, the Octavia corridor and Buchanan Mall. Instead, more activity continues to be concentrated on the same commercial corridor.
And with every additional layer, the question becomes more difficult to avoid:
Are we programming the commercial corridor to strengthen the neighborhood’s existing economic ecosystem—or using that ecosystem as the backdrop for programming controlled and promoted by others?
Promotion Is Not Representation
There is another dimension to the mailer that deserves attention: branding matters. Repeatedly associating neighborhood programming on Hayes Valley’s commercial corridor with particular organizations can create the impression that those organizations themselves represent Hayes Valley. Nonprofit status and neighborhood branding are not the same as representation of the merchants, residents and other stakeholders affected by that programming.
Promoting an event is one thing. Allowing a nonprofit membership association to become part of the de facto public-facing identity of a neighborhood’s commercial corridor is another. That distinction becomes particularly important when the businesses experiencing the consequences of that programming do not have equivalent influence over how the street outside their doors is used.
What about the Merchants?
Perhaps that is the more important question raised by all of this: What about the merchants?
The farmers market is a temporary event operating on a temporarily closed commercial street. It promotes itself, with support from the organization holding the street-closure permit. But the businesses lining that street are not temporary. They operate there year-round, and many of the operational effects documented throughout the summer—reduced curb access, constrained loading and additional activity outside their storefronts—are experienced by them.
Where is the corresponding investment in promoting the businesses that operate on the corridor 365 days a year? Where is the recognition that customer access itself is part of the infrastructure that keeps a commercial district viable?
Hayes Valley can support farmers markets, community events and an active neighborhood. But those things should not require treating the neighborhood’s permanent businesses as scenery—or asking them to quietly absorb the costs.
A healthy commercial corridor is itself a public asset. The businesses that built it should be treated accordingly.