Threats prompt ban on Mission Street vendors
San Francisco will ban street vending on Mission Street beginning next month, Supervisor Hillary Ronen announced in a letter to constituents.
“Starting in November, the City will ban street vending on Mission Street,” Ronen wrote in the letter posted this week on her district website.
“To mitigate the harm to innocent street vendors who sell their artisan goods to make a living, we are identifying spaces off public sidewalks where vendors can sell their goods as well as adding resources to existing workforce development programs serving the street vending population so they can find alternative sources of income.”
San Francisco Public Works will issue an order mandating vendors vacate, said Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed.
Under state law SB946, which decriminalized street vending in 2018, sidewalk sellers are allowed to sell food or merchandise with a permit. Enforcement in San Francisco is carried out by members of the Public Works department.
Ronen said the ban was prompted by assaults of Public Works employees whom she said have been threatened by street vendors.
After discovering that some Public Works employees were wearing bullet-proof vests to work because they feared for their safety, Ronen said her office convened meetings with the mayor’s office and the city attorney’s office to “find a way within the law to address the situation.”
“After pulling health and safety records in the neighborhood, we were able to make the case that allowing vending on Mission Street and around BART Stations are creating measurable hazards in the neighborhood,” she wrote.
The mayor’s office is working with Ronen on legislation that will make “structural changes” to the city’s vending rules, Cretan said, adding that Mayor Breed and other mayors across the state “have been expressing equal frustrations with our current laws.”
Santiago Lerma, a legislative aide to Ronen, said the supervisor’s office is working with existing workforce development programs to help street vendors find new sources of income. Many of the vendors are “newcomers” to San Francisco, he said.
“It is incumbent on us to offer alternatives so that vending doesn’t become something they rely on, because it is not safe out there,” Lerma said, noting that fights have broken out among sellers over vending territory.