Supervisor Hilary Ronen said today that the city “will ban street vending on Mission Street,” after previous attempts to curb illegal vending have yielded “limited success.”
The ban is set to begin early November and will prevent both permitted and unpermitted sidewalk vendors from setting up along the corridor. Instead, legitimate vendors may soon be invited to sell their wares in currently empty storefronts.
“We understand that this will be a hardship for folks, so we want to make sure we have good alternatives,” said Santiago Lerma, a legislative aide for Ronen.
Lerma said that an empty storefront on the corner of 17th and Mission streets is already being prepared for vendors. Using a grant from the city, the Mission-based small business support organization Clecha has leased the property and will provide programming and resources. The site is expected to open within months.
Other storefronts along Mission Street are being scouted as well, Lerma added. After the initial announcement, Lerma added that the ban would last for 90 days and that the city would review its effects then before deciding whether to make it permanent.
The street-vending ban comes after Public Works employees have been assaulted and harassed while trying to enforce permit requirements. Some Public Works employees have been wearing bulletproof vests to work, Ronen wrote in today’s District 9 newsletter, while others have tried to get reassigned away from the Mission to avoid confrontations.
Since September 2022, vendors in San Francisco have been required to carry permits in an attempt to discourage illegal fencing operations while allowing legitimate vendors to work. Around 170 permits have been issued, 84 percent of which were from the Mission, according to Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon.
“That law has had only limited success,” wrote Ronen, “and the Mission’s vulnerable small businesses and residents deserve streets and a public transportation system that they can easily access and that is safe.”
Lerma added: “The amount of vendors on Mission Street was overwhelming our resources to enforce.” He said that a blanket ban would make it easier to clear the street without needing to check each vendor individually.
Violating the ban will not be a criminal offense but may result in goods being seized.
View from the vendors
Mission Street is host to both legitimate and illegal vendors. None approached by Mission Local today had heard about the forthcoming ban.
For the past three years, Marta has commuted from South San Francisco to run her food stall at the corner of 24th and Mission streets. She was concerned about the ban and how it would affect her sole source of income.
“We don’t have any other source of work,” Marta said in Spanish. She operates the stall six days a week, from Monday through Saturday.
Ever since Maria Valasquez lost her job as a babysitter in June, she has been selling things — beauty products, clothing, vitamins — on Mission Street to help make ends meet.
Valasquez said she feels helpless regarding the ban, and about trying to sell things in the first place: “You earn almost nothing here,” she said in Spanish.
“We understand people are out there because they need cash to feed their families,” said Lerma. He said that, on top of the indoor vending locations in the process of being established, a new stipend is going to be launched by the Mayors Office of Economic and Workforce Development for vendors seeking new employment.
He added that outreach to vendors, letting them know about the upcoming changes, has begun.
Is a ban legal?
Under the 2018 state law SB 946, cities are not allowed to limit vendors to specific areas unless the vending leads to “objective health, safety, or welfare concerns.” Ronen wrote that “vending on Mission Street and around BART Stations are creating measurable hazards in the neighborhood.”
“We have extensive data, since the launch of the vendor program, on the amount of police calls, assaults of staff, and so on,” said Lerma. He said that Ronen’s office feels confident that the safety problems along the corridor mean that a ban falls within the law.
Certain areas of Mission Street, most notably the 16th and 24th Street BART plazas, have seen outbreaks of crime and violence all too regularly over the past few years. There have been three homicides at the 24th Street plaza alone since last summer.
Ronen wrote that this ban was created in concert with the City Attorney’s office.
This story was updated on Friday with comments from Supervisor Hillary Ronen’s office about the temporary nature of the ban.
Where do you suppose the “health and beauty items” being sold on the street come from?
Selling stolen merchandise isn’t gainful employment we should be protecting.
Other than attracting RVs, tent campers, and drug dealers to the Mission, Hillary Ronen has yet to launch a single project that works. Don’t hold your breath.
Her legislative record, like Campos’, is as thin as Campos is portly.
Hillary Ronen’s only role as supervisor is as a technician to connect nonprofit grifters with public resources and to blame her constituents for her failings.
Years ago, cities in Mexico (I can only speak personally for Morelia) banned street vendors and put them in buildings. People complained and then preferred it.
I always liked seeing the medical supply tables set up on Mexico City sidewalks that sold syringes, scalpels and various other implements to passers by.
Great, but will the police enforce the new ban? It’s already illegal to sell stolen goods, but the criminals and police don’t seem to care, so far.
I think the challenge is, how does PD prove something was stolen? “I found this stuff in the trash.” “It was left here so I am selling it.” Etc. Cops can make people scram if there is a vending ban but it’s harder to arrest with a decriminalized state law and lack of evidence.
Assuming that the food vendors can’t be placed inside empty storefronts, they really need to carve out an exception for them.
Wow this is really horrible. The vast majority of these vendors all up and down the street are peaceful and an asset to the neighborhood. I personally frequent some of these vendors. They add so much vitality to the neighborhood and they’re are a lifeline for hella people. And they’re the best late night food options.
it’s not uncommon for a few bad seeds to spoil the bunch. really if everyone acted good towards each other and never stole or hurt other people, we wouldn’t need so many laws and police would just be helpful guides for people who lost things or lost their way.
I think the vendors will just move around the corners to the numerical streets. There are vendors already on 18th St and 17th St right off Mission.
My wife is from Singapore. During her youth, food vendors sold from push carts up and down pretty much every street. After independence, Lee Kwan Yew, the first prime minister, ordered the relocation of all food vendors into facilities known as (and still known today as) hawker centers. It’s worked beautifully in Singapore. The hawker centers are all around the island, and the largest have over 100 stalls selling about anything you’d want. Other than a desire not to change, there’s no reason a similar setup can’t work in the City, with centers in various neighborhoods featuring cuisines from the various ethnic groups in the City.
Agreed with the above poster. The food vendors on Mission Street add much needed vitality to the neighborhood. Everybody whining about the doom loop downtown only need to see the Al pastor truck on 17th and mission to see the amount of foot traffic and community building that their operation brought to that spot. That’s the solution right there to bring back nightlife postpandemic. That spot next to the smoke shop has been empty for years but with that amazing food there, it finally feels like the mission has came back. Other neighborhoods are trying to bring the night markets to their streets and report good results so we should be incentivizing the organic food and street vendors that pop up on mission St not banning them.
Hilary Ronen has spent a lot of time and energy this year trying to fix something that ain’t broke.
Yes, it was a bit difficult to walk through the crowd at 24th & Mission before she started her jihad against sidewalk vendors but I always managed it okay, and now it’s an ugly tangle of fences.
Something had to be done. The neighborhood was demanding it. Not everyone managed it as well as you did, and there were several stabbings and shootings.
My understanding is that residents of the 1950 Mission affordable housing are demanding to be transferred to other buildings because of the deplorable conditions on the sidewalk. Are they just NIMBY who are fixated on bourgeois propriety?
This is where the performative washing of the feet of the lepers by the progressives who compete to serve the least sympathetic to bolster their intersectional bona fides run headlong into the realities of working class values.
Centering homeless people over Latino students at Marshall with the cabin village, centering addicts over Latino seniors at Centro Latino, over indigenous addicts in recovery at Friendship house, over those same at risk Marshall students, are other examples of how intersectionality produces politically absurd, destructive outcomes.
This is all about the progressive activists being seen washing the feet of the most destitute beggars for their own edification.
This is Foolish,
First you require a couple of hundred of them to purchase permits.
Which you now render useless.
Just like the cabbies only lots more cabbies continue to be burned.
Ever been to the Casbah in Casablanca ?
I have and the biggest draw are the densely crowded streets of vendors.
Same in Istanbul.
Athens too.
Rome too.
This goes against the natural character of San Francisco.
But, I love the Tiny Houses.
Go Niners !!
h.
These vendors make Mission street better, not worse. When Ronen’s done, this place will be a deserted wasteland of fences and garbage. All this blame on the poorest among us is purely a distraction tactic to take focus of SF City Gov’t complete failure to do their job.
Is there a democratic mechanism for this ban? An ordinance? Mayoral decree by fiat?
And what happens when whack-a-mole just displaces this somewhere else for a while like encampments and residents on the numbered streets not named Mission find they’ve got new racketeer run and enforced “legitimate businesses” on their sidewalk?
There is a mechanism, yeah, commerce. If it isn’t profitable, they will go away.
but it seems it is profitable, so that means people like them.
Let’s level the playing field: if Walgreens can’t hire guards to draw a weapon when someone steals from them, neither can these street vendors. Let’s see how long they can stay in business playing the same games other retailers have to play.
And I’d like to see proof of their contribution to Healthy SF.
A legal mechanism for the ban for vending on Mission St?