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 impact at 16th and Mission because existing shops were grandfathered in. And, in the meantime, shops selling new products for adults — 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 ten years, but the number of smoke shops at 16th and Mission remained stubbornly high.
A 2020 study by Priyanka Vyas and other UCSF researchers 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 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, but on returning, the owner never appeared.
Sofia, from the state 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.
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.”