San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
What’s authentic?
Defining 24th Street.
Page 4
At the 9-month-old Foxsister on 24th Street in the Mission District, our round of soju slushies is followed by chips and dip: puffy, oversize pork cracklings and lotus-root crisps served with a bowl of kimchi queso. Then, as I sink into the Camaro-red booth, under the garlands of red-chile lights, the waiter brings fried chicken wings dipped in a sweet chile lacquer.
Welcome to Year Four of the Latino Cultural District.
For the past five decades, 24th Street has been the heart of the Mission District’s Latino community, a tree-lined stretch of panaderias and jewel shops and markets whose exteriors collect murals the way Wiz Khalifa does tattoos.
In May 2014, the city Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to designate the corridor a Latino Cultural District. And yet the street continues to fill with breweries, cafes, wine bars and bistros that don’t serve Mexican or Central American food.
The progress seems so irreversible that I can’t help but ask: Is the cultural district designation a blueprint for preservation — or a gravestone for 24th Street as it was?
No one knows yet. But the designation is giving the city, Mission residents and community groups like Calle 24 (Veinticuatro), which oversees the district, the mojo to do something I’ve never seen before in San Francisco: pressure incoming businesses to take the existing neighborhood’s needs and wants seriously.
And at the center of this effort are restaurants.
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Salvador Vazquez, owner of Belmar (also known as La Gallinita), has owned a meat market and taqueria on 24th Street since 1972. When he first moved to the corner of Harrison Street in 1975 — buying the building soon afterward — it was a few blocks west of the Mexican retail corridor. In those early days, someone even slipped racist “get out” notes under his door, illustrated with swastikas.
As Mexican and Central American immigrants settled in the Mission, though, Vazquez saw Latino businesses expand all the way east to Valencia, their concentration peaking in the 1990s. Events like Dia de los Muertos and Cesar Chavez Day filled the streets with revelers. Arts organizations like Galleria de la Raza arose. The neighborhood’s more than 600 murals began attracting tourists. Over the years, Vazquez’s regular customers became grandparents and even great-grandparents.
Business remains steady, Vazquez says, even as the commercial strip around him changes again. “I thank God every day that I got this place. If I hadn’t I would be out of here,” he says. “The rents are going up. There’s no way that I could keep up. I’m amazed that anyone can keep up.”
According to the mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the Latino population of San Francisco has grown 26 percent between 1990 and 2014 — yet at the same time, an estimated 8,000 Latino residents of the Mission have left the neighborhood, now making up just 15 percent of the neighborhood’s population.
Erick Arguello, who grew up in the neighborhood and now runs Calle 24, has seen the effects of this shift. “Out of 130 businesses on 24th Street from Mission to Potrero, historically 79 to 82 are Latino,” he says a few weeks ago as we talked over tea at Temo’s Coffee. “What we’ve seen over the last 10 years — more so the last five years — was those numbers drop all the way to 64.”
As restaurants, cafes and bars that catered to higherincome, not specifically Latino clients arrived, longtime merchants reported to Calle 24 that real estate developers were leaving notes or stopping in, trying to contact the property owner.
“For every high-end restaurant, we see two (lowerpriced businesses) disappear, especially in the vicinity,” Arguello said. “The landlords say ‘Oh, these businesses are coming in here now, I can do that for mine, now.’ It’s a ripple effect.”
“Do you feel like restaurants are the strongest engine of gentrification?” I ask. “Yes,” he replies.
He wasn’t just referring to their economic impact, either, but all the ways — many of them symbolic — these restaurants invite new Mission dwellers in and reject the old.
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After dozens of community meetings and focus groups, the city has identified six unique characteristics of the Latino Cultural District that it will support, including small storefronts and murals, Latino arts and crafts, legacy businesses, affordable goods, and work opportunities for Mission residents.
“The designation of the cultural district from the city was an acknowledgment that to us, you do exist and you are important, so we need to protect you,” Arguello said. “But that’s all it did. It lacked teeth.”
The first incisor, so to speak, was a special-use district that the Planning Department added to the commercial corridor in 2014. Now, when a property owner wants to combine two storefronts into one or change the zoning from retail to food service, the application triggers conditional-use hearings. Arguello says that this new policy bulwark has prevented several landlords from kicking out existing businesses.
The Office of Economic and Workforce Development says it has designated staff to mentor 24th Street business owners and help negotiate leases, and has provided funding for local festivals, murals and street flags. In 2015, the California Arts Council embraced the idea of cultural districts, and two years later granted its own designation to 24th Street, bringing in additional funding and support.
But there’s a limit to what city and state regulations can do. So neighborhood residents and Calle 24 have taken up another tool: peer pressure.
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Brandon Kirksey, chefowner of Foxsister, first encountered the force of community opinion when the news broke last May that his restaurant — he describes himself as a white guy cooking Korean food —was taking over a pizza parlor on the street. The 16-year Mission resident says he picked the location because he loved the strip for its colorful storefronts and alleys of trees.
On Facebook, a stream of people he had never met called for boycotts months before he opened. So Kirksey reached out to Calle 24. “I just wanted to make sure that I was coming in with the right demeanor and as respectfully as possible,” the chef said.
Arguello said that in general, he and other Calle 24 members move as quickly as possible to talk to the owners of incoming businesses. He says he presents them with a memorandum of understanding that explains what the Latino Cultural District means, and asks them to sign.
“It talks about how do you connect to the families in the area, and talks about price points,” said Arguello, ticking off the conditions on the memorandum. “What are your hiring practices? Are you hiring in the Latino community, bilingual-ly? How do you represent the area through the built environment, through signage, through artwork?”
Kirksey said that he was already planning on hiring Apexer, a local artist, to paint a mural on the exterior. His conversations with Arguello inspired him to add Latino touches to the interior, like the chile pepper lights. He posted a “help wanted” sign on the window instead of posting on Craigslist, and because of that outreach, half of his staff speak Spanish and live nearby. The Facebook attacks never recurred.
But those measures aren’t the extent of Calle 24’s conditions. At our meeting, Arguello listed others, which on first hearing ranged from the commonsense to weirdly intrusive: Posting a bilingual menu. Lowering the menu’s prices and adding senior’s and children’s specials. Displaying artwork from local artists. Eliminating displays of wine bottles. Refraining from hiring a host to meet prospective diners at the door.
The last condition refers to the battle that Calle 24 and other neighborhood groups waged against Local’s Corner and Local Mission Eatery, a pair of restaurants owned by Yaron Milgrom and Jake Des Voignes. In 2014, after the host at Local’s Corner denied a Latino family of six a table for brunch, the neighborhood responded with public protests, boycotts and vandalism. Both restaurants have since closed.
Given the influence he exerts, Arguello has earned a reputation as a fierce advocate. Some business owners refused to speak to me on the record about the Latino Cultural District, fearing they might say the wrong thing.
After our meeting, Arguello biked with me up the street, pointing out the six or seven retail shops Calle 24 has helped bring to the street, upping the count of Latino-owned businesses back over 70. Yet he also expressed concern over the facades of Alma Cocina and Son’s Addition, higherpriced restaurants with Peruvian and Mexican American chefs that nevertheless look akin to what you’d find on Valencia Street. He appreciated Foxsister’s willingness to blend in, but didn’t think Apexer’s mural was explicity Latino enough.
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Our conversation left me mulling over Calle 24’s demands. Low prices, art from local artists, invisible wine racks — the vision that emerges is the working-class and bohemian Mission of the 1990s, and, I worry, a restrictive view of what a Latino-owned restaurant should be. In a city whose minimum wage is about to hit $15 and where workers’ rents are skyrocketing, too, is it fair to demand that restaurants keep their menu prices down?
City representatives repeatedly state that the cultural district should not prevent the businesses on the strip from diversifying. As the Office of Economic and Workforce Development’s Diana Ponce de Leon wrote in an email: “The strategies pursued are not merely about preservation. They all look to change the trends for the future and shape growth of the neighborhood from a place of cultural identity and strength.”
Middle-class residents, particularly white ones, tend to see gentrification as a passive force, something that just occurs in a changing city. First there’s a high-end doughnut shop, then a cocktail bar, and oh, I guess that taqueria closed, how sad — but wasn’t the Mission Italian and German before Mexicans and Central Americans moved in?
To live — or, more acutely, own a business — near 24th Street is to see how the actions of many individuals make gentrification happen. How Son’s Addition opens and, a few months later, the Salvadoran-owned Sunrise Cafe receives a $3,000 a month rent hike and a longstanding bakery is evicted.
Calle 24’s memorandum of understanding holds up a mirror to prospective restaurateurs and says: This is how we who live here see you. Your spare white walls, wine displays and cheery blond hosts may make people like you feel comfortable, but they alienate us. Actively.
Arguello argues that Calle 24’s memorandum helps new businesses reach local customers. He offers as evidence the Top Round Roast Beef shop on 24th, which opened in August 2017.
Owner Ricky Lopez grew up in a Mexican American family in San Bruno and worked at grilled-cheese chain the Melt before buying the Top Round franchise. When he spotted the Discolandia space, even with the legacy sign that neighborhood activists had fought to retain, he thought it was a perfect location.
Arguello approached Lopez before he had even signed the lease. “I think it’s kind of cool what they were doing and you know, helping Latinos,” Lopez said later. “What really helped me was that they gave me a lot of suggestions that have proven to work.”
He posted two menus on the window, one in Spanish and one in English. Top Round’s chefs have designed a carnitas sandwich for him. He’s participating in local events. Most lunchtimes, when you walk in the restaurant, Spanish words dominate the ambient conversations.
“We don’t want to be a museum. We want to be a living, breathing cultural district. We want to be able to live here,” Arguello told me. Talking to restaurants is just one part of the effort. Can placing demands on incoming businesses block a demographic tide, especially as San Francisco’s growing Latino population — which is increasingly second- and third-generation American — leaves the Mission for southern neighborhoods like the Excelsior and Portola?
If San Francisco’s Chinatown offers some foresight into the Latino Cultural District’s destiny, perhaps 24th Street will become half Stockton Street, drawing Chinese Americans from all over the city to shop, and half Grant Avenue, a photogenic sightseeing destination. Not what it used to be. But not an Epcot Center exhibit, either.
“We just want a small space here, a few blocks,” Arguello said. “You can have Valencia. You can have the rest of the city.”
“We don’t want to be a museum. We want to be a living, breathing cultural district.”
Erick Arguello, Calle 24