Stand at the intersection of 16th and Mission streets, a main transit hub in San Francisco, to understand the limits of good intentions, zoning laws and enforcement.
Making the four blocks that meet at the intersection walkable and habitable has been one of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s quests since taking office over a year ago.
It started on March 12, 2025, when a police mobile command van rolled onto the BART plaza. We at Mission Local have watched this effort closely, documenting the troubles on Day 100 and progress on Day 200.
A year later, the northeast BART plaza is still plagued at twilight by illegal vendors and open-air drug dealing. Sometimes the illicit activity moves onto the southwest plaza and south on Mission Street.
Why is it so hard to keep a major transit area — used by thousands of riders — safe and drug-free for the residents who live there?
Roughly 900 people, including 81 children, live in 471 households on the four blocks that meet at 16th and Mission, according to the U.S. Census. The oldest major stakeholder in the area is Marshall Elementary School, around since 1914, rebuilt in 1977 and still teaching 247 students.
The four blocks also include eight single-room-occupancy hotels and three public housing projects, one of which opened in 2022 and also has an adjacent early education program for 42 toddlers.
In sum, it’s a vulnerable population, one that lives in the midst of a retail corridor full of shops unsuitable for children, or adults trying to stay clean or sober.
Contemporary zoning laws recognize and regulate tobacco, liquor, and cannabis sales near schools. But the restrictions came too late to have much effect at 16th and Mission, because existing shops were grandfathered in. And, in the meantime, shops selling new products for adults, such as cannabis and drug paraphernalia, also moved in.
MediThrive, a cannabis dispensary, was able to open on the same block as Marshall in 1996, and Union Station, another cannabis shop, opened in 2022 a block away, at 2075 Mission St. Tobacco stores in the Mission and 16th corridor also sell drug paraphernalia that is used for consuming hard drugs like crystal meth or heroin.
The 16th and Mission corridor has the kind of foot traffic that could support a wide variety of small businesses, but on the four blocks of retail fronting 16th and Mission streets, some of the most common items for sale are torches, generally used for heating drugs like crystal meth or heroin; glass pipes to contain the latter; and, of course, cigarettes and alcohol.
The number of places to buy drug paraphernalia is curious, even to those who frequent the stores.
“It can be confusing,” said Destiny, a self-described drug user who hangs out in the neighborhood, but does not live nearby. Torches and pipes are legal to sell, but if police officers see her using one, she can be arrested.
To be fair, two of the stores selling liquor and tobacco also sell groceries. A third sells only groceries. But a lot of the existing retail caters to adults who smoke, drink or use drugs. How did this happen?
Smoke shops, tobacco sales offer window into limits of zoning
In the early 2010s, San Francisco began to address the high density of smoke shops in poorer neighborhoods.
At the time, tobacco licenses were unregulated, and an astonishing number of smoke shops were highly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods like the Mission District. The Mission had 114 smoke shops, including five places that sold cigarettes at 16th and Mission streets.
The correlation between poverty, smoke shops, and tobacco-related diseases had, by then, been well-documented and, in December 2014, the Board of Supervisors approved a cap of 45 licenses per district.
The number of smoke shops in the Mission overall dropped to 87 in 10 years, but the number of smoke shops at 16th and Mission remained stubbornly high.
A 2020 study by Priyanka Vyas and other researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, offered a reason why. Poor areas like the Mission were more likely to have too many smoke shops and many would be grandfathered in.
To be effective, they concluded, retail restrictions on smoke shops “must be applied to existing retailers after a specific time period,” meaning that existing stores would be given a certain time window to transition to another business mode. The city has not incorporated that advice.
‘The city could say: No more’
What’s more, for all the attention to clusters of smoke shops in 2014, no one thought to put restrictions on other, newer shops that might be problematic and would see the four blocks as a good place to do business.
“If we can’t do anything about the existing businesses, what about the new businesses that are at the same level of public harm?” said Vyas.
Good question. But in the Mission, no one had an answer. Instead, after 2014, drug paraphernalia shops and cannabis stores also moved onto the four blocks. To compete, the tobacco stores also added drug paraphernalia.
This did not have to happen. There were ways to prevent the pile-up of shops considered unfriendly to children and families.
“The city could say: No more,” said former planning director John Rahaim, who retired from the Planning Department five years ago.
Santiago Lerma, head of the Mission Street team, which has been the front line of defense in the mayor’s efforts to confront the crisis on the streets, said that sales of single sheets of aluminum and butane torches to heat and use drugs should absolutely be banned.
Elsewhere in San Francisco, local officials have done just that. Most recently, drug paraphernalia shops were banned from the Lower Polk Street Neighborhood Commercial District.
That never happened at 16th and Mission. No one was watching. For all of the attention on 16th and Mission Streets, no one is watching the myriad ways in which rules and regulations are unenforced.
A September police raid in the Tenderloin and Mission netted what appeared to be gambling machines from the Bart Front Market, which is now closed, and Dana Enterprise Smoke Shop, which has so far not lost its license.
It becomes clear in reporting from 16th and Mission, that it is easy to duck regulations.
Smoker Friendly, and a culture of neglect
Take Smoker Friendly, a tobacco retailer at 2007 Mission St. The owner has not had a state tobacco license since 2021.
I discovered this last year, while reporting on conditions in the plazas. I reached out to the city’s Department of Public Health.
“SFDPH has informed CDTFA [California Department of Tax and Fee Administration] and they will lead the enforcement process,” the department wrote on July 28.
Seven months later, the shop is still open. In multiple visits to the store, the employee behind the counter had no answers. The owner would be there later, I was told. But on returning, the owner never appeared.
Sofia, from the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, recently confirmed that there is no ongoing investigation.
“The city randomly checks on licenses and locations. Licenses expire all the time,” she explained.
It does not matter that it expired five years ago. “Who cares?” seems to be the operative attitude. It’s an attitude that bleeds into other regulations that are strictly enforced elsewhere, but not in the Mission.
Take, for example, city codes requiring windows in commercial districts to be transparent. The regulation is a basic tenet of good urban planning, based on the theory that eyes on the street deter crime. But, by and large, retailers and others with frontage on Mission and 16th streets ignore those rules.
Windows are glazed over or covered with heavy curtains. How do so many tenants get away with this? It’s a complaint-driven system, a city planner explained. No one is complaining, so the rules are easy to ignore.
“Everyone knows the Mission is lawless; the cops aren’t going to do anything. That’s a reputational thing” built over years, said Lerma, the head of the Mission Street Team.
The yearlong effort, he hopes, is changing that perception. His job, he adds, was created in an effort to pay better attention to what’s happening on the street. But he understands the challenge. “The folks out on the street, they have all the time in the world to watch us and study where we’re not” paying attention, he said.
Still, he hasn’t lost hope. Mayor Lurie, he said, remains engaged. More officer patrols have been promised. “Enforcing the laws,” Lerma said, “can break that culture.”
“Licenses expire all the time”. BS, when your library card expires SFPL well makes sure you re-up for another four years.
Where’s Jackie Fielder?
San Francisco supervisors, like Fielder, write and vote on laws at the local level, and have no jurisdiction over the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration that enforces this law.
What laws has Jackie Fielder written?
Spoken like a true bureaucrat. Well, I take it this confirms what we already knew: She’s useless.
You mean what “you” already knew. It’s your comment, now “ours.”
“No jurisdiction” only means they can’t change the laws directly; but in general, local representatives tend to be able to raise issues up the chain when their constituents bring up concerns.
Nope, the Democrat Party in California does not work that way. State reps feel no obligation to convey the needs of localities into the legislative process. Ditto for the feds. Democrats are not really a political party in the classical sense of the term for this reason.
Great reporting. I wasn’t aware of the regulations around having transparent windows. I’m going to start reporting this – hopefully it will put some pressure on these businesses.
This is a fantastic article and I always look forward to Lydia Chávez’ reporting. I have lived at 15th and S. Van Ness for twenty years and it has gotten so bad. Drug users broke into the vacant lot next to me and caught my back fence on fire. People were stealing the electric bike batteries and using them for warmth and they caught a car on fire. This weekend, some people smoking drugs were pulling out my plants by the roots. I told them to put them back and they called me a “b…ch’. There is a childcare center across the street, and as Lydia discussed, Marshall elementary is a block away. I assumed it was getting worse on my block because people were being pushed out for the Superbowl. Now I drug users are moving to 15th Street because construction has begun 16th and Mission. The part that makes my street even more surreal are the Waymos and Zoox that ‘live’ around here that drive around riderless all day and night.
This article gives me hope because there are seemingly easy steps, like enforcing codes, that could make a difference.
There have been campaigns against liquor stores, moratoria, license limitations and such in the Mission for decades. None has had measurable impact.
There have been paraphernalia stores around 16th and Mission for decades. There is no correlation between the presence of these establishments and visible street substance use.
There has been a nonprofit patronage apparatus funded by the City of San Francisco that has insisted that it represents both the Mission District and Latinos and their families, that cannot be bothered to attend to deteriorating street conditions unless they are paid.
To the contrary, they demean anyone who is disgusted with persistent public squalor as being “rich” and “privileged,” including affordable housing residents and Marshall elementary families. This is why a progressive will be hard pressed to ever carry the North Mission in an election moving forward. Voters can’t be guilt tripped into voting for a captured political operation that hates them.
What HAS changed is that fentanyl use in the Tenderloin has been disrupted because the D5 supe is an ally of the conservative Democrat mayor while the D9 supe is not politically allied with the mayor. The D9 supes, for their part, are creatures of the nonprofit cartel and takes their cues from the ones that put them into office.
The D9 supe does not only not oppose the displacements that have sited public squalor around 16th and Mission, then run the situation through their intersectionality spreadsheet and determine that addicts are more vulnerable than Marshall and affordable housing families.
This could be that there is new funding for addicts that animates nonprofits and the affordable housing checks have been cashed. The rule of nonprofits, their claims of leadership notwithstanding, is that the only time they light up is when they are funded to. If there is no funding, then the nonprofits are silent, white supremacist and capitalist oppression are ignored.
The city funded politically connected nonprofits in the Mission are the real addicts in this situation. Luis Granados at MEDA is huffing close to $400K/yr alone.
16th and Mission is in this position because the structures of democracy for residents to have self determination have been short circuited and grounded out. Residents don’t only just have no representation, those who purport to represent us hold us in contempt and treat our corner of the Mission as their opportunity site.
Welcome to District 9, where meth torches can be sold all over the place, but sitdown restaurants are banned over gentrification risk.
The legal marijuana business is based on a (seemingly reasonable) assumption that the federal government will not enforce its drug laws. But it seems like a bit of chutzpah to be a place like Medi-Thrive, that’s on the same block as a school, when 21 U.S.C. section 860 doubles the punishment for drug distribution within 1000 feet of a school. At any point, the feds could come in and put some people in jail for a long time.
Of course, with the density of schools and playgrounds in SF, maybe every dispensary is potentially subject to this enhancement.
The Marshall Elementary community supported Medithrive opening on Mission Street, and there is absolutely no indication that Medithrive is in any way associated with squalorific street conditions around 16th/Mission.
“The four blocks also include eight single-room-occupancy hotels and three public housing projects”
Might that a part of the problem here?
The public housing projects are not contributing to the drug and debris issues. Many of the people I’ve spoken to who live in public housing here actually grew up and went to school in the Mission. They are worried that their kids have to grow up on these blocks, but have no real option to leave.
And no “Monster in the Mission”. You deserve the neighborhood you asked for.
The real monsters were already there, disguised as “marginalized”. Marginal is what that area will forever be…
The area between 14th and 18th, Guerrero and Folsom was called The Devil’s Quadrangle, not the Bermuda Triangle, when I first moved to the Mission in the late 80s.
If a shop has no license to sell what they are selling simply shut it down, close it down. The mission needs equality, the hot dog venders get shutdown daily, the smoke shops need to get shutdown too.
That requires municipal enforcement, something not looked upon charitably by many in the Misson Neighborhood and elsewhere.
In the mid-90s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the NY subway system by enforcing every law on the books ruthlessly. Fare-hoppers were all arrested. Spitting was ticketed. Graffiti was painted over. Police patrolled on foot. That approach is probably what it would take here, too, if we’ve got the stomach for the many civil rights that will be trampled along the way.
Police are the answer. When the cops are there, the crooks vanish. When they leave, the crooks take over.
I know, this is Mission Local, all police are the same and all are bad.
But in the real world, police are the answer. That, and deciding that crime is bad and should not be accepted for social justice reasons.
If the junkies weren’t frequenting these shops, they would be replaced by something more useful to the community. But here we are.
These shops sell almost exclusively bongs of varying degrees of elaborateness, vape pens and batteries, an array of rolling papers and cannabis pipes. Torches are a small part of their biz.
The shops would be replaced with something more useful, or the people using drugs would be? Police do have a deterrent effect, as somewhat limited as it may be.
^* going to state here unequivocally I myself won’t use your choice of term to refer to people with substance use disorders, fyi.
I’d like a follow up on Destiny’s observation.
It is puzzling to say the least that a business is allowed to sell drug paraphernalia, but someone who buys it could be arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia as soon as s/he leaves the store.
If one person with one crack pipe needs to be locked up to protect “society,” why does the store owner not need to be locked up even more? One person with a pipe is a criminal. One person (or an LLC) with shelves full of pipes, torches, and more is a small business. Of course, we all know how small business are held up by virtually everyone as the best thing that ever happened – or at least the kind of thing politicians yak on enthusiastically about when seeking votes – so maybe that’s why their business model is shielded from prosecution, but once they’ve parted with their cash, the customers can end up in jail.
The pipe is legal. The crack in the pipe is not. Store isn’t selling the crack. The user with one pipe is the one in possession of the illegal crack.
The stores would close if they didn’t have customers. S.F. leaders are responsible for allowing the open drug den.
Crack pipe, how 1990s!
Where’s our wonderful, progressive, anti-police supervisor? Nothing has changed because she is evidently absent, disinterested, or just hasn’t realized that her strategies and policies are out of touch with reality and don’t work, but she won’t admit that. In the meantime, everyone suffers and is harmed. She carries a lot of responsibility for this.
Campers,
16th and Mission is worse than it has ever been and I’ve been looking at it for 45 years.
The main reason is that there are no Legal vendors there
When the last administration took them away, they took away their loyal customers and neighborhood friends and their families, all groups that softened the overall dynamic.
That left the illegal vendors of hard drugs and their customers and friends on a larger scale.
We can solve that problem by returning the Police Koban Feinstein had which, I believe, is now selling tickets at the Powel Steet cable car turnaround and staffing it with 9 cops, 3 per shift alternating time in the Koban with walking single officer Foot Patrols.
Instead the City sends in dozens and dozens of cops and DPW workers who do nothing but stand in clusters and talk to one another or ‘patrol’ down the sidewalks in a cluster like ducks.
Decriminalizing drugs in the City would take the dealers and cops out of what is mostly a medical problem.
Legalizing the Sex Trade would clean up the sleaziest stretch of the Hub on the west side of Mission from 16th on over to 17th.
Then, Recyle the Armory into an Ohlone Indian Casino and we’d make millions off the neighborhood instead of pouring millions into it.
go Niners !!
h.
16th and Mission remains a magnet for fentanyl users, but not for lack of effort by the SFPD which has done all it can to civilize it.
I don’t like this articles anti-drug bias. I wish my neighborhood had an affordable dispensary within walking distance. Cannabis helps my ADHD brain slow down and focus on my surroundings and people around me. The stigma around it only made it harder to figure out how to effectively take cannabis. Additonally, I don’t smoke cigs, but the rates of cig smoking for people with schizo affective ppl is pretty high, it hurts people’s lungs for sure but people also find it a useful tool to deal with symptoms. That’s up to the individual to choose for themself if it’s worth it. And why is the author so concerned about people’s windows? She comes across as a boomer busybody. We all know that Lurie promising more cops is only going to make things worse for mission residents.
Why live there is what I want to know.
The Den of iniquity’s harms extend to the wider/nicer neighborhood. It sucks if you need to go on BART anywhere.
How “let them eat cake” of you.