Parking in a "ghost town"
Regarding “How S.F. is creating ghost towns in Mid-Market and the Mission” (Letters to the Editor,” SFChronicle.com, Aug. 27):
In July, I took BART to Oakland from San Francisco for a midweek, late afternoon stroll. I walked around Old Oakland and Chinatown, and up Broadway and its side streets.
Old Oakland had some interesting shops and restaurants, and Chinatown looked dowdy. Empty storefronts and restaurants dotted the landscape.
Letter writer Ben Janken cites the lack of parking as the reason for the downturn in San Francisco. Despite street parking everywhere in Oakland, there were fewer cars and foot traffic than in downtown San Francisco.
This is post-COVID life in Oakland and San Francisco.
What has sucked the life out of the Mid-Market area is safety concerns over the proliferation of drug users and theft, a tech community that didn’t support neighborhood businesses even before COVID, and a lack of general investment in the area.
Retail and restaurants in Mid-Market have struggled for years. Hopefully, the Better Market Street plan will be a new start.
Steve Vaccaro
San Francisco
Labels: BART, City Hall, Neighborhoods, Pandemic, Parking, SF Chronicle, Whole Foods
posted by Rob Anderson @ 12:26 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Besides high crime and homelessness is only half of the story. The other half is ruining the streets banning of cars cutting access to businesses in half meaning they make less money then adding high business taxes and fees and a high min wage. Theft from these businesses is the icing of the cake. They try to put the blame on Covid lockdowns but that excuse is getting old. What does a so called pandemic have to do with slow streets and banning more cars? The same dumb people that believed that you could catch Covid in office building but would not catch it in target or Macy's are the same dumb people that have continuously voted for bad city management. Now everyone is crying and complaining. Shut up and deal with it. A better market street wont fix anything. Banning more cars, removal of more parking spaces and adding 400 street vendors won’t make a difference.
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