San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Crackdown on vending, drugs fails to clean up U.N. Plaza
On a recent cold and drizzly Friday, dozens of vendors lined up at U.N. Plaza, spreading their wares out on the brick sidewalk. Several elderly men and women were selling produce and canned goods, while a few dozen yards away, two women applied makeup and took hits from a glass pipe.
A man who identified himself as Tony C. hawked small statues, a chessboard and cigarettes.
He said he’d worked in restaurants before the pandemic, but had spent the last two years earning money by picking through trash bins and selling his wares at the plaza or elsewhere in the city.
“I’m happier,” he said, as he rolled two rocks of crack cocaine into a cigarette.
But the scene — which looks much as it did last summer before San Francisco said it would start to enforce a ban on the fencing of stolen goods in the area — isn’t a happy one to just about anyone else.
Nearly five months after the city pledged to fully carry out a new law banning illegal vending at U.N. Plaza, the practice remains rampant there. Businesses in the area and politicians say they’re frustrated with the lack of progress in cleaning up U.N. Plaza, which fronts City Hall but has attracted illegal activity for much of its 50-plus-year history.
San Francisco Public Works, which is leading enforcement, has not issued any violation notices to vendors at the plaza. That stands in stark contrast to another area of the city where vendors have flocked, 24th and Mission streets in the Mission District. Vending isn’t banned there, but vendors do need a city issued permit. The city has permitted
more than 100 legitimate vendors in the Mission and issued citations to those who sell illegally.
The reasons there have been no citations at U.N. Plaza are complex, said Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon. Illegal vendors “did not stick around to have the notices handed to them,” she said.
But inspectors, who are only there two days a week, have removed abandoned goods from the area at least a dozen times, she said.
The city has empowered Public Works to regulate and enforce street vending, Gordon said — but only to a point.
“We don’t want to put our inspectors in danger,” she said, “and our inspectors have been attacked.”
At least five times, Gordon said, inspectors have been “physically confronted” while trying to do their job, including two in which their arms were grabbed, one “bump” in the head, one “shoulder check” and one incident where an inspector was punched in the stomach. Three times, inspectors’ vehicles have been vandalized, she said, and vendors have verbally threatened city workers in several instances, including death threats.
Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who co-sponsored the ordinance regulating street vending with Supervisor Hillary Ronen, said he believed the law has been effective in his district, which includes the Excelsior and Ocean View, and some parts of the Mission.
“In U.N. Plaza, it has not worked,” he said. He blamed the persistent challenges on more organized criminal ventures dedicated to selling stolen property.
The ordinance, he said, “is not going to be wholly effective in areas where vending is hard to suppress if consequences are not stronger and police are not the ones leading efforts of suppression.”
San Francisco police did not respond to a request for comment. The situation, however, highlights the challenge of rejuvenating the plaza, which has been a troubled spot for decades with drug use and dealing out in the open as city workers look on. The plaza’s troubles worsened during the pandemic when the entire downtown area struggled with the fentanyl epidemic and tourists and office workers left.
Past efforts have fallen flat: In 2018, the Police Department stationed a mobile command station in the plaza. A Chronicle story from the time noted that the city’s efforts to clean up the space were practically an “annual event.”
After The Chronicle raised the issue with the city, officials with Mayor London Breed’s office said she was ordering Public Works and the Police Department to come up with a more effective plan to target vending and other illegal activities in U.N. Plaza.
“Lower-level offenses can be addressed through a partnered approach by Public Works and followed up by SFPD if necessary,” she said, in an emailed statement. “We know U.N. Plaza has a number of challenges that need to be addressed — not just in the short-term but in ways that are sustainable and long lasting . ... Outreach, enforcement, accountability, and activation need to happen in coordination for us to see real change and improvement.”
Officials have already tried a curfew at the site to see whether that helped. They were worried that after the December closure of the Tenderloin Center at the plaza, which allowed homeless people to drop in for food, showers and supervised drug use as well as referrals to housing or treatment, the area would get worse. So officials moved in December to shut the plaza from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., but the city lifted the curfew at the beginning of this month, though a Public Works spokesperson said a new order could be issued in the future.
Businesses in the area are struggling. A nearby Whole Foods has curtailed hours because of the illegal activity, according to news reports. Local merchants such as Chris Pak — who operates a BoostMobile cell phone store just a few dozen yards from the plaza — say the situation hampers business.
The condition of the plaza has grown “very serious,” Pak said. “I don’t feel safe running a business here.”
Henry Karnilowicz, vice president of the South of Market Business Association, called the situation at U.N. Plaza “terrible” and argued that the street scene of people engaging in open-air drug use and illegal vending repels shoppers and visitors.
“People don’t want to walk by there or anything close to that area,” he said. “We’re not getting the interest we should from people — not only tourists, but locals, too. They’re avoiding it.”
Kanishka Cheng, leader of TogetherSF Action, a moderate advocacy group, said city officials are frustrated that stories about the area around U.N. Plaza have painted a negative image of downtown, but she said the problems are acutely visible. She has pushed for an increase in the arrest and prosecution of drug dealers and policing the plaza and other parts of downtown to heighten safety. But she also advocates for more recovery and treatment options for drug users.
City leaders have also weighed in. District Five Supervisor Dean Preston, who represents the area, said Monday that “the conditions at and around U.N. Plaza are frustrating for everyone, including our office, and were only made worse by the closure of the Tenderloin Center without a replacement.”
He pointed out that when police show up, vendors or drug dealers just cross the street.
Preston urged Breed to open a wellness hub in the Tenderloin where drugs could be used inside and under supervision, increase “positive programming” in the plaza and “stop wasting time and money just moving people around.”
The ordinance that banned illegal vending at U.N. Plaza also regulated the activity in other areas of the city by requiring permits to sell goods. Public Works data shows inspectors not only issued the notices of violation in the Mission, but also issued the most vending permits there — 112 out of 122 given out citywide. An additional 10 permits were handed out in neighborhoods such as Chinatown, the Haight, North Beach and the Richmond.
Yet despite the permits and notices of violation, 24th and Mission remains “a work in progress,” said Ronen spokesperson Santiago Lerma.
With inspectors on site daily, illegal vending has decreased during the day, he said, when DPW workers and police officers are most visible. At night, however, that changes.
“Once Public Works employees end their shifts, we have a huge influx of backpack vendors,” he said, “The same type of folks you see at U.N. Plaza.”
The folks at U.N. Plaza, people like Marky Gray, say they don’t have another way to make money.
Gray said he often heads there because he knows he can find his friends — or sell items he’d found while dumpster diving.
As Gray and others hawked soap, shoes, or other goods, Alicia Uribe and her friends picked their way through the square.
She was visiting from Williams (Colusa County), north of Sacramento.
She hadn’t felt particularly unsafe in other parts of the city, she said, but the plaza gave her pause.
“I don’t know,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “