Poor urban planning, plus a dearth of treatment and San Francisco’s convoluted bureaucracy have, for decades, contributed to poor street conditions at the 16th Street BART plaza and its surrounding area, according to a former Mission and Tenderloin station police captain speaking at a Mission Local panel on Thursday.
Al Casciato, who spoke alongside local resident Rob Young of the newly formed 16th Street Alliance, said 16th and Mission streets’ troubles started half a century ago.
“I think the biggest change for 16th and Mission was the BART station,” said Cascioto, recalling many businesses going under in the early 1970s after the streets were ripped open during the BART system’s lengthy construction.
Before then, Casciato remembered childhood shopping trips with his Salvadoran-born mother on Mission Street’s “Miracle Mile,” when the corridor was a destination for department stores and restaurants.
Then BART arrived in the Mission District and Cascioto, who had recently joined the SFPD, recalled a debate about whether to add housing or storefronts at the BART plazas. Either would have provided the “eyes on the street” that urban planner and author Jane Jacobs suggests in her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”
In the end, neither was included, a lost opportunity for Casciato.
“I think that we missed the bet with 16th and Mission and 24th and Mission by not putting in the housing and a good, vital retail. I think that breeds safety,” he added. Plans for some 400 units of 100 percent affordable housing at the plaza are coming, but still years away.
The conversation, moderated by Mission Local Managing Editor Joe Eskenazi, took place at Manny’s on Thursday night.
Young, who has lived in the Mission for five years but moved near 16th and Mission in 2020, has had his life lately upended by drug use nearby. The encampments that appeared during the pandemic were later removed once the U.S. Supreme Court lifted some restrictions on sweeps.
“Depending on how you want to judge success, the city did a job, a good job, of removing tents. You know, whether that’s good or bad is a different question,” Young said. “But they removed most of the tents. What that left is a bunch of people without any shelter. The same addictions, the same problems. Except now it’s out in the open.”
Young lives on one of 16th and Mission’s alleyways, where drug users often congregate. He described how a “wholesome family activity” on Wednesday night playing Rummikub was interrupted by the sound of lighters clicking off just feet away, from drug users huddled beneath their window.
“My kids know these are lighters constantly going off, because there’s people cooking drugs,” said Young. “I don’t know what to do in that situation, because I want to protect my kids. I live here. I can’t move. This is our home.”
It’s a regular occurrence. “Ask me today, ask me tomorrow, and it’s going to be a different anecdote, but it’s the same in-your-face, impossible-to-ignore, ongoing trauma,” he said. “It’s sadness, sickness, human tragedy.”
Other neighbors have described similar experiences, calling the alleyways a “drug carnival” and saying they are sometimes afraid to leave their homes.
Casciato, for his part, pointed to recent attention from City Hall.
Mayor Daniel Lurie has made a crackdown at the 16th Street plazas a test of his administration, and Casciato applauded the mayor’s decision to bring in four “policy chiefs” to help him oversee the city’s 43 departments.
Such a decision, Casciato said, could help facilitate multi-agency collaboration.
“Sometimes I feel like we have more CEOs in the program heads than we have homeless people,” said Casciato. “Things seemed uncoordinated. If you want to coordinate, you need to have up at the top someplace with all these services together.”
Casciato also recalled the times when the BART plazas had police kobans (small kiosks) with an officer in turn keeping tabs on the area. The strategy has been replicated by Lurie, whose police department in early March drove a bus-sized mobile command unit onto the plaza and has parked it there since.
But both are temporary imitations of the “eyes on the street” that Casciato said would make the biggest difference. Though Lurie has said the SFPD unit will stay indefinitely, that does not mean forever.
Even when officers are present, neighbors complain that sometimes drug use and vending happens just across the street, within eyeshot. Vandalism can even occur beneath officers’ noses: Eskenazi brought up an email in which the police department asked its officers to keep the van free from defacement; by Thursday evening, someone had tagged the command center in yellow marker with the word “piss.”
What’s old is new again: Casciato recalled that the 1980s kobans had wide windows on the front, where officers would hold forth and take help tickets from passers-by. In the back, however, where officers couldn’t see, people would urinate on and graffiti the kiosk.
It is not just a presence, however: Casciato said the city must do far more to ensure a continuum of care when dealing with drug users and homeless people.
The former captain recalled episodes where homeless people were turned down at navigation centers and taken back to the streets.
He added that it is necessary to clear people’s minds from drugs for at least seven days before they can make a rational decision to get treatment.
“What we should be doing is protecting them,” said Casciato.
Conditions have clearly deteriorated, and Young’s observation that “drug use became more visible” after the 2024 Grants Pass decision by the U.S. Supreme Court was, Eskenazi said, not anticipated at City Hall.
“I can tell you that, at the highest level, this was not foreseen,” said Eskenazi, citing conversations with the mayor’s office and the health department. City officials did not realize “that if you took away people’s tents, you would be confronted with antisocial behavior right in front of you. This did not occur to people.”
What would success look like?
For Young, it means spending far less of his life dealing with the problems outside his door.
“I don’t want to have to be here doing this,” he said. “I would like to get to a point where I don’t feel the need to file a 311 ticket multiple times a day, or call the non-emergency line, or make a website, form an alliance, or meet the mayor.”
“Honestly, we’re not doing well,” he added “I don’t want to be melodramatic about it, but we’re in kind of a crisis as a family. I talked to neighbors, and it’s the same thing.”
Al Casciato you are exactly correct. At least since the ’90s when I came to SF, 16th/Mission has had serious problems. The City’s cash cow business district sucked all the focus of the city administrations. It is a sad irony that BART – something that should have added to the life of Mission Street – did exactly the opposite by disrupting and then never restoring the local businesses. And that lesson has still not been learned it seems: Look at the mess the series of construction construction projects along Market street for the last five plus years has made. Just one example is the almost total disregard for the wellbeing and experience of customers of the businesses when BART takes over almost the entire sidewalk and blocks half the road to build their shiny metal follies. Instead of treasuring the city, its upstart local businesses and history, it’s seen as something disposable and scary. Witness the destruction of the markets that grew out of the pandemic around 24th/Mission. It was messy. It was sometimes illegal. But it was alive, and it pointed to a potential way forward: Open air markets where people actually are. We can’t have it both ways: Empty streets and eyes on the street.
Aside from during the pandemic, the problems around 16th/Mission BART had not been characterized by persistent homeless tent encampments.
Our neighborhood has always suffered “a thousand cuts” where some of the full range of social problems could occur on any given day.
16th/Mission had been known as “The Devil’s Quadrangle” back in the 1980s before homeless tent encampments existed in San Francisco. That did not start until around 2010 when the CoH started providing tents.
The BART plaza had long been a containment zone for the City’s problems. There had been, in succession, drunks drinking fortified wines, crackheads smoking, speed freaks tweaking and heroin addicts injecting, all before fentanyl addicts lighting foil.
None of those previous episodes comes close to the intensity of fentanyl usage that spiked after London Breed ordered the SFPD to contain fentanyl around the BART plaza and the Mission Cabins opened up last summer. administration point person Santiago Lerma told us to get used to it last fall before Breed got ousted. He is not telling us to get used to it anymore.
This is a recent problem, a symptom of political corruption and a pathetically weak previous supervisor, not something that’s been building for 50 years.
What a cop out by a cop to give cover to SFPD makework of pitching fentanyl addicts to our neighborhood and then pulling overtime to catch what they’ve pitched.
Seriously, The NE plaza had a very active Walgreens, that used to sell alcohol and cigarettes, as well as an auto parts store and then a dollar store in the other space.
Neither plaza looked remotely like today’s fentanyl festival back in the day. Real estate speculation by Maximus, the failure of Mission Housing and the MOH to execute on funding affordable housing at 1979 Mission, and the retrenchment of the retail economy and its replacement with Mission Cabins is what’s deactivated 1979 Mission and opened the door for miscreants.
Real estate speculation? They had a development proposal that local extortionists stymied. Evidently, they preferred a blank plywood wall over a few hundred high functioning, high income households.
No rest for the wicked.
Drive them forth from that place.
Speaking of pathetically weak supervisors, where’s our shining light of socialist hope these days?
Oh wait. There she is. Right here in Saturday’s Mission Local!
Her “office” is monitoring things on a “daily basis” and she’s none too happy with the cop show.
Perhaps it’s just too long of a BART ride from Civic Center to 16th for her to personally visit the epicenter of the district she represents. Maybe she might be photographed standing in proximity to a cop or – heaven forbid – talking to one (I honestly think that’s the reason – think about it).
Just to put emphasis on “pathetic”:
“But when asked about her own long-term solution, Fielder’s office did not reply.”
I’m speculating her solution is to bring about the collapse of late-stage neoliberal capitalism before anything can be done.
Hey – maybe that’s a realistic plan seeing as how our president is making a mighty effort to create global economic chaos that might just do the trick.