In the battle between development and neighborhood interests, both sides agree on a fundamental point: the Mid Market neighborhood must be improved. Crime, problem street behavior, and vacant buildings and storefronts are nobody’s idea of a successful neighborhood. But developers, real estate speculators, and City Hall are chiefly responsible for Mid-Market’s current state, and should not be entrusted to fix a problem they created. It is time to allow those who live and work in Mid-Market to chart its course. This means forgetting about simply bulldozing changes in the neighborhood, and instead building upon Mid-Market’s potential as a vibrant, economically diverse neighborhood. ##M:{more]##
The Mid-Market neighborhood represents two decades of public and private sector failure. City Hall has refused to invest funds in the area, and practiced not so benign neglect when an economic infusion could have halted the neighborhood’s decline. Meanwhile, developers have demolished theatres, evicted small businesses, and left huge vacant areas to became havens for alcoholics and drug dealers.
A major reason Mid-Market declined while much of the rest of San Francisco prospered is that speculators and longtime property owners have held the neighborhood hostage waiting for land prices to rise. Some cashed in their chips and sold property during the dot com boom, but the new buyers—such as Sterling Bank, which purchased the Grant Building at 1095 Market and a vacant building on the same block—have done nothing to improve the area.
When I represented the Grant Building Tenants Association in their successful effort to avoid eviction, the owner’s representative explained to me in 2001 why they were also evicting a donut shop and the other ground floor retail businesses. The owners felt such neighborhood serving businesses were not good for the Grant Building’s image, and they instead planned to install an upscale restaurant.
Since that conversation, formerly occupied commercial spaces have sat vacant, while the notion of an upscale restaurant coming to 7th and Market anytime soon would strike some as deranged. The Grant Building is not only less than fully occupied, but the vacant former furniture store purchased by the same owners remains uninhabitable and unused to this day.
Other landlords joined the Sterling Bank in evicting ground floor retail businesses that kept away drug dealers and inebriated troublemakers. The Embassy Theatre, once a beautiful building that had been allowed by its owner to fall into neglect, was demolished. All this did was create another vacant hole for panhandlers to do business without interference.
Where was City Hall when Mid-Market needed help? Making the problem worse.
When Mayor Brown removed all seating areas from Civic Center Park, many of the homeless persons who congregated there moved east to UN Plaza. When the benches were then removed from that location, and the crowd was dispersed from sitting in the grassy area between the Plaza and Market Street, homeless persons sought peace and quiet in front of the many vacant parcels in Mid-Market.
The Redevelopment Area has spent over $80 million on Sixth Street in the past decade, but virtually no funds were used to improve the troubled Sixth and Market area. The Agency focused its resources at least a block away from Market, squandering a critical opportunity to improve the Mid-Market neighborhood.
With recent and longtime property owners, along with City Hall, all combining to make the Mid-Market neighborhood worse, is it not time to let the community chart a course for positively transforming the area?
A forum will be held on Thursday at 1310 Mission Street to discuss the specifics of this transformation. But San Francisco neighborhood activists have a long track record of creating vibrant neighborhoods, so it is no mystery what is involved.
First, Mid-Market must create a vibrant street life by encouraging a profusion of small businesses. Owner-run businesses ensure that someone with a direct financial interest in the street’s success is on the scene, something that is not necessarily the case with chain stores.
Independent bookstores, theatres and cafes cannot pay the high rents of the chains, so a vibrant Mid-Market must use its market-rate development projects to subsidize such businesses. These subsidies will be more than recovered, as an exciting neighborhood increases real estate values.
Second, Mid-Market must house people of all income levels. This was the case when Jane Jacobs wrote approvingly about New York City’s Upper Westside in her classic 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and it is what makes the Mission and Lower Haight such high-demand neighborhoods today.
Those planning to build luxury housing in Mid-Market will not be able to compete with Rincon Hill or downtown when it comes to providing a neighborhood free of poor-persons. Developers should be seeking to attract buyers who want to live in an economically diverse neighborhood, for this is what creating a true sense of community is all about.
The central importance of economic diversity throughout Mid-Market—and this means the critical blocks between 5th-7th Streets—must be the guiding force behind any
plan for the area. And achieving this diversity involves far more than the specific percentage of inclusionary housing units that developers must provide.
Let me be very clear on this. Whether the affordable housing requirement imposed on developers is 15%, 20% or even 25% of the total units built (the Mid-Market PAC endorsed only 12%)is much less important than the need for all affordable housing requirements to be met exclusively through newly built rental housing affordable to those earning no more than 40% of median income. The housing must also be built in close proximity to the market rate project.
Any inclusionary requirement that allows housing at higher than 40% of area median income, or which provides condo ownership for far more than area residents can afford to pay, will do nothing to foster real economic diversity in Mid-Market.
Is there a need for affordable housing for those at higher income levels? Absolutely. Does San Francisco need more below-market homeownership opportunities? Certainly. But there are other market-rate housing projects and other city laws, like the SRO ordinance in SOMA, that address these needs.
But if the current residents of the Sixth Street and Tenderloin neighborhoods are to get any benefit from making Mid-Market a Redevelopment Area, it will only happen if they have priority in obtaining newly built housing they can afford to rent.
Despite the rhetoric and the “victories” won at the Board of Supervisors, low-income tenants have gotten scarce if any benefits from the city’s vaunted inclusionary housing law. When it comes to Mid-Market, the goal of economic diversity requires that all affordable housing plans guarantee the priority of Central City tenants to newly built housing.
In addition to owner-run small businesses and economic diversity, Mid-Market must have its theaters revived so the neighborhood as the legitimate nighttime activity necessary to crowd out bad actors. Add these theaters to the existing Orpheum, Warfield and Golden Gate Theatres and there will be no reason for theatergoers to rush out of the area when the show is over.
The Luggage Store art gallery is a longtime Mid-Market fixture, and provides an anchor for expanded arts uses in the neighborhood. Mid-Market could become San Francisco’s version of New York City’s hugely popular Chelsea district. There is the new cultural and dance space, CounterPulse, at 9th and Mission, and so much vacant ground-floor commercial space in the area that, with developer subsidies, artists would flock to the neighborhood.
The final piece of reviving Mid-Market is already in place: public transit. It’s easy to get to Mid-Market from anywhere in San Francisco; as the community vision of Market Street emerges, the people will come.
An economically diverse neighborhood with community-oriented small businesses, nighttime entertainment, and arts and cultural attractions—-this is a vision for Mid-Market everyone can support.
(Ed: Beyond Chron’s community forum on Reclaiming Mid-Marke ist this Thursday at noon at Counterpulse at 1310 Mission Street. An evening meeting will occur next week; details soon.)
