For the first time in more than two decades, a major plan to redesign the 16th St. BART plazas is underway.
BART will share preliminary renderings of the new design with the public in April, according to BART communications officer Christopher Filippi. After that will come public meetings to collect feedback from residents and, starting around late June, the fundraising to actually build the thing.
Attempts to physically and socially engineer the plazas into more pleasant spaces are as old as the plazas themselves. The 16th St. station opened in 1973, just in time for homelessness and drug addiction to become visible enough to become a regular fixture in local politics.
The last year of engineering the 16th St plazas has been mostly the social kind: increased policing, a giant police van, an alphabet soup of street teams doing outreach and sidewalk powerwashing, as well as the occasional pop-up mercado.
What would a physical redesign of the plazas look like? Key players involved in the project, Tim Chan, a BART staffer who manages the agency’s station redesigns, and local landscape architect David Fletcher, who redesigned the 22nd St. Caltrain stop, referred Mission Local to BART public relations.
BART public relations declined to offer details in advance of the plan’s release.
Documentation from the redesign’s early community engagement workshops, posted to BART’s website, offers hints as to what a physical re-engineering of the plazas might look like, though.
A series of posters with space for write-in comments ask participants to weigh in on a smörgåsbord of design ideas, including painted crosswalks, brightly colored folding chairs, food carts and “smart poles” — WiFi-connected streetlights with built-in security cameras.
There’s a whole section dedicated to maintenance, which makes sense, because the plazas are among the most heavily used public spaces in the neighborhood.
The posted responses to those prompts are very Mission.
“Why are materials always gray and black? Why can’t it be colorful?” reads one.
“Security should mean presence and lighting, and dignity, not policing alone,” reads another.
Next to it is perhaps the most Mission statement of all.
“The plazas are our neighborhood living room,” it reads, “and should be for everyone.”
One battle after another
Even before the 16th and Mission Street BART plazas were built, they were spaces that people fought over. Concept drawings from 1966 show the station entrances as the barely-sketched-in center of a modernist fantasia of office and apartment towers, parking garages, gift shops and outdoor cafes.
The look is sleek, but vague. The built reality would have likely been closer to the plaza at BART’s 12th Street/Oakland City Center station (sunken strip mall surrounded by towers) or the Embarcadero Center (apartment and office towers connected by elevated walkways).
At the time, the federal government was giving out huge grants to city redevelopment agencies that came to it with proposals like this one. But Mission residents of 1966 looked at the drawings, and said “Nope.”
Some were horrified at what redevelopment had done to the Fillmore and Western Addition. Some thought it was just bad business to tear up that much of Mission Street. (The redevelopment opposition was led, in part, by Mary Hall, a realtor, and Jack Bartalini, a self-described “right-wing populist.”)
Others were offended at how the plans offered up the Mission — a neighborhood not even included on tourist maps — as a BART-in, BART-out spectacle with “special tourist facilities,” “a Spanish-American atmosphere” and an elevated arcade-style walkway to take visitors from the 16th St. BART station directly to the Mission Dolores.
A 1970 op-ed published in Basta Ya! sums up that general vibe.
“Is Señor Taco the type of urban renewal we want? BART will bring tourists from downtown to 16th and Mission in three minutes. Our homes will become hotel rooms and restaurants and serape stores and Topless Taco Clubs that do not serve Mexicans.”
Mission residents were able to stop the redevelopment, but couldn’t stop BART.
When the system opened, the plazas embodied BART’s disconnect with the neighborhood. Glen Park got a station that has been described as “the cathedral of the BART system.” The Mission got four holes in the ground, squeezed into a grid of buildings that the redevelopment agency had hoped to destroy.
The plazas looked like they had been dropped into the Mission from another dimension. Their brick pavilions and curved edges gave them the look of a collection of low-slung modernist smokestacks.
The idea behind BART’s modernist design was to deliver a luxurious experience to a large number of people, says Gary Leung, board member of Docomomo, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of modernist architecture.
The sparse design, he adds, was part of a post-war obsession with breaking with the past and reinventing civic spaces from scratch. It was also about making transit look cool to suburban commuters — the insides of the cars were designed to look like 1970s-era airplane interiors.
The simple, unadorned design was also, unintentionally, a paradise for skateboarders.
“There used to be this amazing necklace of skate spots that culminated at 16th and Mission in the late ’80s,” says Ted Barrow, a local art historian.
Skaters would start at Corbett Street, on Twin Peaks, skate down to the Safeway at Church and Market streets, and then move on to the 16th Street plazas, where the curved brick detailing — still visible at 24th St. — made an excellent quarterpipe.
In the early 2000s, the plazas were redesigned by Mission Housing, Urban Ecology, BART, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, in a clear attempt to make them look more like traditional plazas.
The curved brick was torn out. A metal railing covered in papel picado-style cutouts was added, along with palm trees and benches, facing back to back. In the years following the renovation, one of the benches was usually occupied by Lone Star Swan and several dozen pigeons.
The 2002 redesign was a cautionary tale to those who might think that design alone can fix a space. Maintenance was a challenge. BART was responsible for cleaning and policing the plazas, but most of the agency’s staffers worked several feet underneath the plaza, and were disinclined to come to the surface.
A brisk drug trade continued to flourish. BART cleaned the plazas so infrequently that, in 2017, then-BART director Bevan Dufty and then-supervisor Hilary Ronen began to clean the plazas themselves in an effort to shame the agency into providing four hours of power washing a night, a cleaner on-site from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week, as well as larger trash cans and clear signs in Spanish and English.
The benches were taken out in 2018, and replaced by two-ton blocky concrete squares that are impossible to recline on.
Later that year, a group of artists dropped off a massive aluminum ping-pong table, hoping that would make the plaza feel a bit more sociable, but it only lasted a few months — stray balls would hit people in the plaza, and at night, the table became a spot for public hook-ups.
“There might have been a little ping, but there was way too much pong,” said Dufty. “I had to kind of put my tail between my legs and go, ‘This isn’t going to work.’”
What would work? Or to be more pragmatic, what would be worth trying next? Too restless to wait for the plan’s release, your correspondents began calling around to other experts. Here’s what they had to say:
Make nearby streets more pleasant to walk
Design is a powerful tool, but it can only take you so far, warns Anna Muessig, a partner at Gehl, an urban design consulting firm. Specifically, she says, there are issues in society and in San Francisco that become extremely visible in public spaces like the plazas.
Design is not going to fix society. But it can, hopefully, make it easier for members of that society to share those public spaces, from the nanny pushing a baby carriage down the street to the flock of teenagers headed to Nieves Cinco de Mayo to share a mangonada.
One of the things that helps a space like the plazas feel safer is how comfortable the streets around it are to walk down on foot. People tend to feel most comfortable, says Muessig, when they encounter a new storefront every 100 feet or so — the technical term is storefront rhythm.
In this, the BART plazas are fortunate; the southwest plaza, in particular, is surrounded by an array of small storefronts.
The way those small storefronts are currently set up, though, counteracts that benefit. It’s important to pedestrians that buildings that have windows they can see through — but in this part of the Mission, city regulations that mandate that store windows be transparent do not appear to be enforced.
The difficult-to-see-through windows hide not only dubious business enterprises, but places that BART commuters would probably be excited to gawk at, like Bicis del Pueblo, a nonprofit that teaches people how to repair and maintain their bicycles.
It’s also not unheard of, when a transit station is redesigned, to develop pedestrian-friendly walking routes to that station.
The city’s Department of Public Works implemented a plan like this when the 22nd St. Caltrain was redesigned by adding greenery, street trees, traffic calming and wider walking paths to streets directly surrounding the station.
Move the bike docks
You don’t want people to try to ride bikes through a plaza, says Muessig. So what are docks for BayWheels bikeshare doing in the Southwest BART plaza, especially since they make pedestrian traffic going into and out of the station entrance even more crammed?
As someone who has personally checked out and docked at the 16th St. station many times, your correspondent can confirm that this is a terrible place for a bike rack.
Not only does it increase congestion, but biking down either 16th or Mission Street feels like a death wish, riding a bike on the sidewalk is both gauche and illegal, and walking a bike on the sidewalks to the plaza feels like being a salmon trying to swim upstream.
Plus, 17th Street was redesigned years ago to encourage bicyclists to stay away from 16th.
Checking out and returning bikes is also awkward at 16th Street, because people who hang out at the plaza use the bike baskets as cafe tables and ad hoc trash bins. Moving the docks to, say, Hoff Street, could also open up wall space for licensed street vending.
Put in a skate park
Muessig calls what has happened in many public spaces — in San Francisco and elsewhere — as “the race to the bottom.”
Someone with power over a public space decides that a certain category of people are spending too much time in the space. They begin making the space more unpleasant in the hopes of encouraging them to leave. That, says Muessig, is how you get spikes on benches, and totally empty public places filled with giant planters.
Echoing the words of William Whyte, she notes that as the space becomes more miserable, the only people who stick around are usually the people that officials were trying to push out in the first place.
In recent years, skateboarders have been enlisted in efforts to remake spaces that have hit bottom (from a civic space perspective).
A few years ago, Barrow was involved in a redesign of the Civic Center BART Plaza, which is credited with making Civic Center feel like a safer place for everyone by adding features for skateboarders, including a curb modeled on the one from the Church and Market St. Safeway.
Not long after, he says, then-Rec and Parks director Phil Ginsburg suggested adding features for skateboarders at 16th Street in the hopes of doing the same thing.
“They were like, ‘Well, would you guys want to do something at 16th and Mission at the Mission Plaza?’” recalls Barrow. “And we’re like, ‘Dude, that was originally a good skate spot and y’all fucked it up. … You can’t just use skateboarding every goddamn time to sweep away undesirable elements.”
There’s also, Barrow adds, too much foot traffic at the plazas now. A good skate spot requires enough space for a crew of people to actually hang out and watch each other. “Eighty percent of skateboarding is not skateboarding,” says Barrow. “It’s just sitting around in a pleasant place.”
Make the plaza better for bus riders
The biggest takeaway from Gehl’s research, says Muessig, is that the plazas are not used that much by BART riders, who tend to rush through the space as quickly as possible to get to where the trains are.
“We think of it as a BART plaza,” says Muessig. “but it’s really a bus plaza.”
Muni riders might be the population of plaza users who would benefit the most from plaza improvements — the most likely to provide the eyes on the street that could make other people people feel safer in the plaza, and the most able to wander over to a flower seller or street food purveyor and actually buy something if they see that their bus is delayed.
In the long term, if signage were added at the plaza itself announcing the arrival and departure times of the next BART trains, BART riders might ultimately spend more time in the plazas, too.
A Muni-focused redesign of the plaza might feel different, says Muessig. It could involve making the bus waiting areas larger, or putting new plaza amenities in places where bus riders can have a clear sightline of an incoming bus.
Create more public space close to the plazas
The BART plazas are even confusing as station entrances. They’re about 10,000 square feet apiece, with a giant hole in the center, and absolutely no way for pedestrians to get in or out without having to pivot sharply to the left or right.
The holes seem to have been designed to fit some strange personal ideal, rather than the way most humans move in space. They also let in a lot of free-floating schmutz that makes the escalators harder to maintain.
If money wasn’t an issue, changing those entrances would free up the plazas to function as better public spaces.
Muessig suggested tucking the station entrances along each wall, which would activate those edges.
Yakuh Askew from Y.A. Studio, the architecture firm that designed Casa Adelante, an affordable housing project a few blocks away, would, given infinite funding, move the station entrances into another building entirely — something that some local businesses asked for when the BART stations were being planned, to direct more foot traffic past storefronts on Mission Street (they were denied).
The 16th and 24th St. BART stations (and their holes) were designed to accommodate a projected daily flow of 28,000 passengers. With the rare exception of super-crowded ridership days (sporting events, protests), the 16th Street station has yet to reach even half of that number.
(Average daily exits at the 16th Street station peaked at 9,186 people in 2001. In February, about 6,245 people exited daily.)
“My biggest critique of this intersection is that it’s designed as a quasi-public space,” says Askew, “but there really is no space for gathering.”
People who appear to have no other space to go are hanging out in the same space as commuters trying to get to their destination as quickly as possible.
“You’re going to create conflict,” says Askew.
Residents of the SROs in the blocks around the plazas, says Askew, don’t have much space to socialize in their units, which tend to be the smallest amount of space that can be legally rented to anyone for the night.
“There’s not enough gathering or lounging space.” As city residents, he says, they deserve better public space than a transit plaza.
The current situation around 16th and Mission is bad enough that no one has, as of yet, been willing to take on the challenge of creating new public space that’s accessible.
The Paseo de Artistas at La Fenix, for example, was designed as public space, but remains locked behind a metal gate because the residents and workers in the building have struggled so much with security issues.
The BART plazas are both too small and too large to be comfortable as public space. The ideal human density for a space that size for most people is about 20-40 people, says Muessig.
When Gehl studied the plazas, it found that 60 percent of the people passing through the intersection were on foot, and as many as 5,000 people were crossing Mission Street at peak hours.
Of those, an average of 43 people at any given time lingered in the space, rising to an average of 68 people around 5 p.m. during peak commute times. An earlier study of plaza traffic, called the Mission St. Public Life Plan, found similar patterns.
That is, says Muessig, a lot of people — enough to make the space feel uncomfortable, even if the plaza itself were more pleasant. It suggests that the area needs more public space, period. “The plaza can’t be everything to everyone,” says Muessig.
But still, she adds,“ People need public space to live their lives.”
Activate the active edges
There’s this urban planning term called “active edges,” says Muessig. An active edge is pretty much anything that isn’t a blank wall, a parking garage, or a vacant lot.
It could be a storefront window, a flower stall, a food stand, a bench, a few cafe tables and chairs, or even just a ledge that people can lean on while they drink a coffee and check out who’s walking by.
What an active edge does to a space, says Muessig, is help people feel like anyone could safely enjoy the space.
“”Passive surveillance’ doesn’t sound great sometimes,” Muessig adds. “But in the most positive way, passive surveillance means that if something were to happen to you, someone is going to see it and help you — or tell someone else. It’s this positive sense of being in society.”
When Gehl mapped 16th and Mission pre-pandemic, there were surprisingly few active edges for such a busy traffic corridor. The only spaces directly facing the plazas that fit the highest standard of active edges were the Casa Thai Supermercado (now Casa Latina) and Mi Tierra Market.
The walls closest to the BART plazas were either blank (Wells Fargo, Aramex), fenced off from the plazas (Walgreens) or totally vacant (2973 16th, a then-recently closed Burger King).
16th and Mission storefronts 2018
N
clear windows
covered windows
blank wall or vacant lot
N
clear windows
covered windows
blank wall or vacant lot
Map by Iryna Humenyuk. Source: Data inspired by Gehl, data collected by H.R. Smith
Since then, the edges around the plazas have only gotten less active.
16th and Mission storefronts 2026
N
clear windows
covered windows
blank wall or vacant lot
N
clear windows
covered windows
blank wall or vacant lot
Map by Iryna Humenyuk. Source: Data inspired by Gehl, data collected by H.R. Smith
The Walgreens closed in 2019, followed by The City Club during the pandemic, and then Hwai Lei Market, and Mission Hunan a few months ago, to make room for construction at 1979 Mission.
In 2022, a debris fire that started on Wiese alley spread to 3032 16th, displacing 22 tenants and Taqueria Los Coyotes, a local stalwart legendary both for its California burritos and for staying open until 3:30 am during pre-COVID times. The building is still boarded up, more than four years later.
Having storefronts with doors that open onto the plazas, and windows large enough for people inside to see out, and vice versa, would go a long way toward activating the space, says Muessig. If there’s a cafe or two in the mix, it’s quite possible that it would also increase transit ridership for Muni and BART.
“It’s great transit culture to have a cafe next to a transit stop,” says Muessig. “The Bay Area is a huge region, and people come from and commute from really far distances.”
If commuters have a place at the beginning or end of their journey where they can take a moment to collect themselves, go to the bathroom, wash their hands, and/or grab a bite to eat, transit gets a lot more appealing.
When asked if BART would object to a building adjoining the BART property line that would open a takeout window or door facing the plazas, BART spokesperson Christopher Filippi wrote that BART “encourages adjacent buildings to have doors facing the plazas to help promote activation and security,” and that the agency is “having conversation with the 1979 Mission developers to have their doors in the family housing building open up onto the NE plaza.”
That conversation could include a ground-floor commercial space that opens onto the plaza, Filippi continued, “but no specific uses are being considered at this time since the building is still awaiting funding.”
Out of the three buildings that have permits to build on the Northeast Plaza, only the permanent supportive housing has funding to break ground. That building will have a clinic on the ground floor.
There is quite a bit about active edges in BART’s redesign materials, though the accompanying images are of the kind of permanent buildings that, for now, look like they might not arrive for a decade or more.
But there are also images that look more improvisational: Temporary seating, temporary structures. The look here is reminiscent of Proxy — two city-owned vacant lots at Hayes and Octavia that are, currently, a mixture of small businesses operating out of pre-fab structures, and open space for public events like outdoor movies.
Proxy has been almost too good at creating public space. When then-supervisor Dean Preston moved, in 2023, to de-commission Proxy and build the affordable housing that was planned for the two lots, some neighbors went apoplectic at the thought of losing it.
In the case of the Northeast Plaza, the challenges would be great (16th and Mission is nothing like Hayes and Octavia, and the land around the Northeast Plaza is owned by MEDA and Mission Housing, not the city). But the civic payoffs could be significant.
The soon-to-be-vacant lots around the plaza could be a place to watch outdoor movies, programmed by the Roxie, while munching on a hot empanada from Chile Lindo.
They could be a spot to buy a cafe de olla to drink while you stand around waiting for a friend visiting from out-of-town to emerge through the BART entrance. They could be a dance pavilion where the Mission’s hard-partying seniors could dance the night away.
The Mission, unlike many neighborhoods in San Francisco, actually wants affordable housing, and residents fought hard to get it built at the Northeast Plaza. A party plaza can’t make up for having to wait years more for the family housing that the neighborhood desperately wants. But it’s a start.
The last time I walked to the plazas, Mission Street felt the way it usually does : Like a cacophony of San Franciscos jostling for space. The sidewalks were packed with commuters racing to their next thing, and with people nestled into the small wedges of semi-privacy created by the intersection of sidewalk fixtures and parked cars.
A group of helmeted delivery men stood by their scooters, visors up and chatting with each other. Two young people in jaunty hats, both clearly under the influence of something, hunched between two parking meters, staring intently at a pile of buttons.
A man riding a knee scooter as though it were a very small bicycle tried to swipe a banana from a bin in front of Mi Tierra Market, was called out by an apron-wearing teenaged worker and scooted away bitterly.
The long wall of the former Walgreens was thick with people who didn’t seem to particularly like each other, and actually seemed like they might actually be about to fight each other. The group was, nonetheless growing in numbers.
Even when that Walgreens was open, there was always something weird going on along that wall. I now knew that the storefront next to it was a boutique gym — there were a surprising number of those nearby — but its windows were covered.
Except for a discreet sign advertising their wares in a lowercase font, the storefront — and virtually every other storefront around it— looked like it hadn’t been open in years.
The plazas themselves were nearly empty, except for the usual clump of guys drinking at the bicycle docks, and a few other people (also guys) sitting around with their backs to the rainbow fencing, scrolling through their phones or staring watchfully into the distance.
At the bus stop, a small juice cart with a jaunty rainbow umbrella appeared to be doing zero business.
It felt familiar, and it felt dreamlike, like something had shifted off its axis. All of buildings along 16th Street between the Northeast Plaza and Capp Street are gone; the first phase of the new construction, currently in the form of a security fence encircling a massive hole in the ground. Without those buildings there, everything looks different — the light, the shadows, the sky. I still haven’t gotten used to it.
At some point, it will start to feel familiar. For now, it feels like anything can happen.
Iryna Humenyuk and Nicholas David contributed interviews and insight to this story.
My office was at the corner of 16th and Mission for twenty years above the old McDonald’s.
When I tried to work with BART to try and improve the experience of one of the most active public transit spaces on the West Coast, they told me they were a public transit agency, not a public space agency and their hands were tied.
I funded the Gehl Public Life Plan and supported the ping pong tables. I initiated the graffiti murals on the side of the old Walgreens, and BART told me I would have to wait six months to get a permit to paint murals on private buildings. We went ahead and did it anyhow. I gave the Downtown Streets Team philanthropic funds to clean the 16th Street Plazas, and was told to stop, because the BART janitors’ union would sue if non-union workers cleaned their plazas. Eventually I gave up. You can’t get blood from a stone.
BART is a **malevolent actor** in this public space; their actively intervene to make the two plazas at 16th and Mission antisocial, filthy, and dangerous. There is *one* janitor who splits their time between Civic Center, 16th and Mission, and 24th and Mission. The spaces are left to fall apart during the day, BART sprays down the spaces at night, and then in the morning it falls apart again.
The City should take the Plazas away from BART and build housing there. BART is radically incompetent at managing this space.
TLDR.
The pathetic state of affairs that is the 16th Street BART plaza is fundamentally a political problem.
Neither architecture — nor landscape architecture — can solve a political problem.
NEXT.
Eliminate the plazas. Put a tower of desperately needed market rate housing on top.
I don’t hate that idea at all Mo. Market rate and affordable units. BART could use the money.
Yes. And simultaneously solve part of BART’s budget problem.
The people running this part of town do not want their constituents to be high functioning people able to hold down a job.
The nonprofits that claim ownership over the North Mission do not want any high functioning people that might catch onto their grift anywhere near their deal.
That would result in them losing their own jobs.
No. Beware of people who want to privatize your public spaces.
So, the redesign is up to BART, but keeping it clean and safe will be . . . everyone else’s problem? That sounds like a good idea.
Why isn’t getting rid of the plazas even listed as an option?
Wait, what? I thought BART was going off a fiscal cliff and we had to make painful cuts to service.
BART Must Be Held Accountable
Bay Area Rapid Transit continues to have a transparency problem.
Before demanding more taxpayer money, BART should explain — in clear, verifiable detail — how this makes sense with the looming FC that has been in the news.
I really hope this is not a blown opportunity for the public to take back the space from dysfunctional drug addicts. This area is a complete nightmare. People are shooting up and selling stolen items. It’s not enough for good intentions — this space is no longer a civic gathering place.
They should line the dead walls with vendor stalls and food trucks. Take the money earned from renting that space and pay for security guards, “ambassadors”, or cleaning.
That the American Indian Cultural District (AICD), claims this filthy corridor filled with drug addicts as a historic hub for Indigenous people – is beyond me. Its telling that these Affinity groups that control the Mission clearly have a “Ideology above Action” mindset. The mess that is the Mission street corridor is not edgy, cool or cultural it just sucks
I’m pretty sure you can’t build on top of the Mission plazas without totally rebuilding the station boxes so that’s a nonstarter.
But I haven’t seen a good explanation why these stations after all these years still don’t have canopies over their escalators—just copy Downtown Berkeley’s design. The footprint for those would take up a lot of the inactive and sketchy activity-attracting dead spaces on the plazas. Also, the material used to pave the southwest plaza is crumbling away and just gross. Can’t we just get the same red brick from the 24th St plazas installed there? And finally, this is likely a tad expensive but all entrances/exits need UP escalators—why not have two escalators instead of escalators & stairs? This would definitely help Muni riders.
All misguided planning unless you have law enforcement 24 x 7 as step 1.
@Paulo – Law enforcement has let this plaza be a “sacrifice zone” for generations. Really handy for suburbanites coming into the city on BART to drop by and buy drugs.
_New Mission News_, which in my mind is the predecessor to _Mission Local_, did some investigative reporting on the heroin dealing at this plaza in the 1990s. And got firebombed for their efforts.
Suggestion for revised title:
“Can we displace the human misery that is evidence of widespread poverty out of the 16th St. BART plazas so it doesn’t trouble our beautiful PMC minds?”
It is not poverty. Nobody has a problem with SRO neighbors hanging out in the plaza.
The BART plaza is not a place where homeless people camp or sleep.
What residents do have problems with are the fentanyl trade and use in and around the plaza by drug tourists.
Why can’t staff hear the community, not the nonprofits but people who live here day in and day out and know the rhythms of the space, out BEFORE they present their own ideas instead of putting forth their ideas and making the community fight that?
This is the customer service model of government, where government has devolved into people we pay money to not delivering what we paid for until they damn well feel like it, if at all.
Demonizing all non-profits that serve the marginalized is a sly way to limit public input.
Bart has a budget shortfall and is talking about closing stations but they want to spend money on this?
“only the permanent supportive housing has funding to break ground. That building will have a clinic on the ground floor”
That says it all.
The rest is pantsing in the wind.
It’s “junkies first” in San Francisco.
A nice, clean, subsidized (ultimately, by whom?) place to OD and rot for a week while the non-profit managing the place claims to be underfunded for regular wellness checks.
Wonder if the clinic will be handing out needles.
Lots to be done.
Less seating for loitering, perhaps some coffee carts and vending carts lining the walls, better bus shelters and better lighting for them, permanent kiosks for police and the restroom staffers, and most importantly the BART entrances mustn’t be open to the public. You really need to have a way to keep the BART stations secure for ticketed passengers only. Plazas are a nice idea but we have learned the hard way that any public open space here will just be taken over by vagrants and drug dealers. Make the BART plazas safe and clean and for transit passengers. Downtown has been working on this, why can’t we have similar in the Mission?
Less seating. Eliminate plazas. Why not shut down Dolores Park while you’re at it?
Tropical – you ask, “Downtown has been working on this, why can’t we have similar in the Mission?” — Because the Mission is where the mayor and downtown powers that be have quietly agreed to dump the vagrants and drug dealers.
BART can pave the plazas in solid gold, but nothing good is gonna happen at 16th and Mission until the city cracks down on fentanyl dealing and open use. And that includes the Gubbio Project.
There are some loud people and organizations that want to keep the area for junkies instead of families/normal people. Can you imagine how much change would have to happen for watching a movie out there at night to feel like a good idea?
You can see in this very article the envy towards successful parks like the Proxy, yet an unwillingness to learn from them.
Design is not going to fix society. But it can, hopefully, make it easier for members of that society to share those public spaces, from the nanny pushing a baby carriage down the street to the flock of teenagers headed to Nieves Cinco de Mayo to share a mangonada.
===
Those members already share public spaces without any issue. The problem is that the public spaces can’t be shared with drug dealers, the homeless, and the thieves with their open-air markets. Tolerating that while focusing on design is truly a case of rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
1. Close down the SRO’s. (Reopen in Stockton/East Bay).
2. Prosecute the hell out of the drug market.
3. Take back the plazas: re-zone and redesign a block in each direction. Completely transform all these businesses.
4. Say no to non-profits.
This is excellent reporting, and anyone who reads it alongside BART and Fletcher Studio’s own planning documents will notice something striking: every single activation idea in the September 2025 concept deck has a literal question mark next to it. “Containers??” “Movable seating??” “Vending??” These aren’t proposals. They’re brainstorming prompts — attached to a timeline that doesn’t produce a physical improvement until 2028 at the earliest.
BART has already done significant community engagement on this project. Two rounds of stakeholder consultations, community workshops, trilingual engagement boards. The input is clear and has been remarkably consistent across the 2003 Community Design Plan, the 2015 Mission St. Public Life Plan, and the current Fletcher Studio process: activate the edges, add commercial uses, improve lighting and maintenance, make the space safe and dignified. The community has spoken. What has never followed is execution at anything resembling the pace the situation demands.
BART’s own “What We Know” slide acknowledges rampant drug use, frequent vandalism, and frequent human waste. Their own Rider Experience action plan lists this plaza redesign as a live milestone. Their own “Elements for Successful Activated Space” framework (slide 20) names the first requirement: a paid activation lead, on-site regularly, accountable for programming the space. So who is it? When do they start? That is the question this process should be answering right now — not “containers??”
The plazas are failing by BART’s own metrics. The station was designed for 28,000 daily riders. It currently serves about 6,245. Gehl’s study found that 5,000 people cross Mission Street at peak hours, but an average of only 43 linger in the plazas at any given time. That is a 99% pass-through rate — virtually everyone who encounters this space rejects it. Meanwhile, the storefronts around the plazas have gotten less active since the engagement process began: Walgreens, The City Club, Hwai Lei Market, Mission Hunan, and Taqueria Los Coyotes are all gone. The fire-damaged building at 3032 16th has been boarded up since 2022. Every year of delay is another storefront going dark, another stretch of dead wall where a window used to be.
BART has shown it can deliver visible improvements when it chooses to. Systemwide through 2025, violent crime was down 31%, property crime down 44%, and customer satisfaction hit 89%. The Civic Center plaza was transformed with a skate park and managed programming. Downtown Berkeley works because the Downtown Berkeley Association manages the space as a single accountable entity. Neither took a decade. Neither required years of fundraising after years of design after years of further engagement.
I’d urge BART to commit to a two-phase approach:
Phase 1 — deliver fast, using existing tools. Use the Rider Experience program and near-term capital to build the high-return package first, before the permanent redesign is funded:
Name a paid plaza activation manager now. BART’s own framework says this is requirement #1. Fund it from existing budgets, not a 2028 grant. Give them authority to issue vendor permits, schedule programming, manage the space daily.
Protect the 10-foot rider-access buffers as non-negotiable. The concept boards show these for both plazas. Rider circulation, BART-to-bus transfers, elevator and restroom access come first. No activation element should block those paths.
Fast-track the restroom in the SW plaza concept. Treat it as core sanitation infrastructure, not a design amenity.
Relocate the BayWheels docks off the plaza. They increase congestion, the baskets become trash bins, and the surrounding streets are hostile to cycling anyway. Free up that wall space for licensed vending — those “active edges” the design goals call for.
Install real-time Muni and BART arrival displays. Muessig from Gehl identified bus riders as the real plaza population. Give them a reason to linger and spend money at vendor stalls rather than rush through.
Activate the NE plaza vacant lots immediately with temporary uses. The family housing at 1979 Mission is still awaiting funding. Those lots will sit empty for years. Deploy prefab vendor stalls, a cafe de olla cart, mercado weekends — exactly like Proxy at Hayes and Octavia, which was deployed in months and became one of the most beloved public spaces in the city. The Mission has the cultural infrastructure to fill these spaces. What it lacks is institutional permission.
Enforce existing storefront transparency regulations. The covered windows around the plazas violate city code and kill the passive surveillance that every study identifies as critical. DBI could issue notices tomorrow.
Phase 2 — build the permanent edge as funding and development advance. Active ground-floor uses from the housing projects opening onto the plazas. Overhead shade and canopy elements. Integrated art and wayfinding. Durable, power-washable materials designed for the hardest urban use, not for renderings. Every design choice tested against: can this be cleaned daily? Does it create a blind spot? Does it survive without a maintenance budget?
And publish outcome metrics quarterly. Not how many workshops were held — whether the plaza is actually working. Cleaning response times. Reported safety incidents. Licensed vendor occupancy. Rider satisfaction at 16th St. station. Daily lingering counts (Gehl’s methodology already exists). Ridership trends. If the numbers aren’t moving, change the approach. Stop measuring process. Measure results.
BART is under real fiscal pressure, with major operating deficits projected in the FY27 budget. That makes the case for Phase 1 stronger, not weaker — high-return, low-capital improvements that strengthen rider confidence and support legitimate commerce are exactly what a cash-strapped agency should be prioritizing. The 16th St. plazas don’t need ornamental perfection. They need a clean, safe, active transit environment that 6,000+ daily riders and their neighbors can actually use.
The community input on these plazas has been remarkably consistent for over twenty years. Finish the concept. Define the Phase 1 package. Name the operator. Publish the metrics. Build it.
Plaza needs 3 things,
First, it needs a 24/7/365 Police Kiosk
Second, it needs a stage large enough for 4 musicians.
Third, it needs Vendor Spaces painted out on ground, numbered and permanently assigned and spreading out from the Cop Box and Stage on either side.
go Niners !!
h.
@h.brown – Interesting to see the 1966 rendering with vendor spaces. Even more interesting to see that one is a “Bodega” (from the East Coast) and that the artists seemed to think “piñata” is a viable business model. Or maybe they just picked random Spanish words.
QUIT PROVIDING PLACES FOR PEOPLE TO SIT!!!