Part 4 of our series revisiting the Market & Octavia Area Plan and the future of Hayes Street
In the first three parts of this series, we returned to the City’s adopted Market & Octavia Area Plan, examined how temporary programs and permits accumulated on Hayes Street after 2020, and asked who is now making decisions about the corridor. Those questions lead to a more basic one: Why, six years after an emergency street closure began, does the recurring weekend closure remain the starting point for discussions about the future of Hayes Street?
The Market & Octavia Area Plan was developed through a comprehensive public planning process and adopted as the City’s long-term framework for this part of San Francisco. The recurring Hayes Street closure came later, beginning as an emergency response during the pandemic and continuing through successive temporary permits and renewals.
Over time, however, those positions appear to have inverted. Increasingly, the closure is treated as the existing condition around which future options are considered, while restoring normal street operations is treated as one alternative among others. Six years of renewals do not by themselves transform a temporary operating arrangement into an adopted long-term plan.
When the temporary condition becomes the premise
This issue is visibile in the City’s current Hayes Valley Public Life Study, which is intended in part to inform the upcoming Shared Spaces permit renewal. But today’s conditions are themselves the product of six years of recurring closure and adaptation. Studying those conditions is not the same as asking whether the closure should continue.
That distinction surfaced in the study’s business survey. Businesses were initially asked which recurring closure schedule would work best, with several options involving continued closure but no explicit option to end the closure and restore normal street operations. HVS raised the issue, and Planning added that option. We appreciate the change, but the original framing illustrates the larger problem: continued closure was inside the frame; ending the recurring closure initially was not.
What is the threshold question?
For years, residents and businesses have been asked to comment on closure schedules, permit renewals, operating conditions, events, activations, enforcement, and possible configurations of Hayes Street. But a more fundamental question has received far less attention: Why should the recurring weekend closure continue at all?
Hayes Street is a functioning commercial corridor throughout the week. Each weekend closure interrupts normal street operations and requires merchants, residents, customers, deliveries and other street users to adapt around a recurring temporary use of the public right-of-way. The question is therefore not simply whether some people enjoy a car-free Hayes Street, events attract visitors, or public life occurs during closure hours. It is whether repeatedly suspending ordinary street operations remains justified, according to what criteria, and in relation to what longer-term planning framework.
At some point, the burden appears to have shifted. Instead of the recurring weekend closure having to demonstrate why it should continue, residents and businesses seeking restoration of normal street operations are repeatedly placed in the position of explaining why it should end.
That inversion deserves scrutiny. Normal street operations are not a new pilot program or an alternative concept invented in response to the Public Life Study. The closure is the intervention.
Return to the adopted framework
This is why the Market & Octavia Area Plan remains relevant. It is the City’s adopted long-term framework for this part of San Francisco and should remain the north star for decisions about Hayes Street.
The recurring weekend closure came later, as an emergency response in 2020. Six years of permit renewals, transit rerouting, programming, and adaptation do not replace the adopted planning framework. Nor should repetition turn a temporary operating condition into the presumed future of the street.
Before the City renews the closure again or builds future decisions upon the conditions created since 2020, it should return to the basic sequence of decision-making: What did the adopted Plan envision? What has actually been implemented? What evidence supports continuing the recurring weekend closure?
The current Public Life Study does not resolve that threshold question. HVS has separately asked Planning how the study will incorporate the existing six-year stakeholder record and account for experiences that may not appear in present-day outreach. On September 23, Planning said the project team was discussing those questions internally and would respond by the end of that week. As of October 6, we have not received that response.
But the larger question does not depend on the study. Hayes Street is a functioning commercial corridor, and normal street operations are not the experiment. The recurring weekend closure is.
Ending that recurring closure would not mean ending public life on Hayes Street. It would mean restoring ordinary weekend street operations while continuing to use the neighborhood’s existing public spaces and established permitting processes for events, markets, outdoor activity, and other temporary uses.
After six years, perhaps the question should no longer be how another year of recurring closure might work. It should be what reopening Hayes Street on weekends would make possible.
The Market & Octavia Area Plan already provides the broader framework. Hayes Street does not need another temporary condition to become its future by default. It is time for the City to consider reopening Hayes Street on weekends.