Neighbors: Ghost kitchens causing traffic problems
Lunchtime is chaotic on Charter Oak Avenue, a small cul-de-sac in San Francisco’s Apparel City neighborhood. Every parking spot on the block is taken, and a handful of drivers are double-parked or stopped in front of businesses’ driveways. Others simply idle in the middle of the road.
Most are visiting the same building: a ghost kitchen run by Cloud Kitchens.
“It’s so crowded with cars that you can’t get down our street during lunch or the evening rush,” said Natasha Koral, co-founder and CEO of Dan Perata Training, a dog training business that has been operating on the block for a decade. “There is not enough parking, so their kitchen people park in our spots. And then all the (delivery) drivers, they block us in.”
Ghost kitchens like those operated by Cloud Kitchens have become a staple part of the food scene in the past few years. But for some businesses located near these densely packed facilities — which can house dozens of takeout-only restaurants under one roof — these high-traffic locations have brought a variety of problems. A few years after many of the sites opened, some neighbors say the situation hasn’t improved, despite attempts to work with the ghost kitchens and repeated complaints to city agencies.
Cloud Kitchens, which is backed by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, began opening facilities around 2018. According to its website, the business now operates more than 90 locations across the country. California has by far the largest concentration, with 10 in the Bay Area: Two each in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose and single locations in Sunnyvale, Redwood City, San Mateo and Hayward. From the start, businesses and residents near their sites often talked about how the company didn’t
seem to care about the problems they caused for their neighbors. Cloud Kitchens didn’t respond to requests for comment.
When Cloud Kitchens came to Charter Oak, around 2019, Koral said there were guards who helped direct traffic. But they were in place for only a short while. Today, she said, tensions regularly boil over.
“I’ve seen drivers cuss out the police. They cuss us out. They threaten to fight us,” Koral said. “We are verbally assaulted on the daily and threatened with physical violence on the daily . ... It gets scary.” Koral and other neighboring business owners tried working with Cloud Kitchens to resolve the issues but say the company never followed through on promises to help.
Across the bay, in a largely residential part of North Oakland, Cloud Kitchen’s Adeline Food Hall also draws traffic, as well as mixed reviews from locals. (Full disclosure: I also live in this neighborhood.) Some residents say the business is an improvement, noting that the building had been vacant for a while. Others disagree, citing problems with traffic.
Jeremy Leeds, who lives near the ghost kitchen, said the business has made the area more dangerous for biking. Families with young kids frequently use Adeline’s bike lanes to ride to and from school. “The double parking, both by delivery drivers and from food wholesaler trucks, forces cyclists out into the traffic lane and creates blind spots for cyclists and motorists alike,” he said.
Local neighborhood associations initially tried working with the business but say that after a couple of early conversations, Cloud Kitchens stopped responding to their emails. And while company representatives told local residents that they would hire staff to direct traffic, there was no visible traffic or security personnel at the building after the first few weeks it was open.
The locations that do seem to have resolved their traffic and parking issues are those that have dedicated off-street parking available for delivery drivers. In East Oakland’s Jingletown neighborhood, for instance, the Oakland Food Hall originally had the same kinds of issues with illegal parking reported at other sites. However, unlike many Cloud Kitchen sites, this location has a dedicated parking lot, and over time the business was able to successfully direct drivers to those spots. Today, people who work nearby say that there don’t seem to be any traffic-related issues.
At the sites where parking issues have not been resolved, businesses and residents have tried turning to the city for assistance. Koral and her husband and business partner, Dan Perata, contact the city’s 311 line and the police regularly but say nothing is done. (San Francisco parking enforcement did not respond to a request for comment.)
Angela Gennino, the president of the Golden Gate Community Association, which represents many households near the Adeline Street site, said she has reached out to a variety of offices within Oakland city government over the past three years, ranging from the City Council to traffic enforcement. In 2022, after she sent city officials photos of garbage outside the facility, the Public Works department inspected the site for stormwater pollution prevention compliance and told Cloud Kitchens to store their trash indoors. But the problems with illegally parked cars and blocked bike lanes have persisted.
In 2021, the neighborhood association and a partner organization, Oakland Neighborhoods for Equity, filed a complaint with the city, arguing that multiple kitchens offering takeout would have traffic, noise, waste and delivery impacts equivalent to a fast food restaurant complex, a type of business prohibited in the neighborhood’s mixed-use zone. More than two years later, residents are still fighting the city over these issues. (The city of Oakland declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.)
Gennino said many of the issues related to Cloud Kitchens’ sites stem from the fact that the ghost kitchens business model, with its high traffic and lack of traditional restaurant seating, is not accurately covered by any zoning regulations. The city of Oakland seems to be taking a wait-and-see approach to some of the problems ghost kitchens bring, she believes.
“We had a meeting about what can be done to maybe add protected bike lanes,” she said. “And they said, ‘When it’s a problem related to a specific business, we don’t tend to devote a lot of resources to fixing it, because those businesses oftentimes don’t last.’”
“I’ve seen drivers cuss out the police. They cuss us out. They threaten to fight us.” Natasha Koral, whose business is near a ghost kitchen on Charter Oak Avenue