by ELENI BALAKRISHNAN NOVEMBER 22, 2023 (MissionLocal.org)
With a vending ban on Mission Street five days away, Latino vendors held a press conference Wednesday morning, again pleading for a delay until after the New Year.
More than 100 vendors, they said, have formed an association that is getting legal assistance to assess how to fight back and delay the Nov. 27 start date.
“We’re not asking for anything unreasonable,” said Luz Eresma, a vendor who, like others, spoke in Spanish before the crowd on Wednesday morning. “How will we survive if they want us moved elsewhere, or want to take us away from the Mission, which has been our home?”
Eresma said the process by which District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen announced the vending ban last month lacked transparency, and many vendors voiced concerns that the ban could be extended indefinitely.
Santiago Lerma, a spokesperson for Ronen’s office, said that the vending ban would last for 90 days and then be reassessed, but that Monday’s start date would not be delayed.
“It’s almost impossible, just on an average day, for inspectors to walk the corridor because of the amount of vendors out there,” Lerma said. He said the ban was necessary to get control of an “out of control” situation.
The vendors met with Ronen on Friday in a tense exchange, after which she refused to delay the ban.
Last summer, Ronen’s office announced a vendor permit program, which she said would allow city officials to more easily identify and remove vendors selling stolen goods or engaging in other criminal activity. Many vendors signed on and acquired permits. But that process has not done much to change the climate at the neighborhood’s BART plazas. Fencing of stolen goods and open drug use continue, and disputes sometimes escalate to violence.
During the ban, permitted vendors will have access to a space rented by the city at 2137 Mission St. for 30 to 40 vendors that will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. A second spot at a parking lot at 24th and Capp streets will house nine vendors, and run Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Anyone else vending in the street come Monday, Lerma said, could be immediately identified and asked to move along by police.
Lerma added that Public Works inspectors would be stationed at both BART plazas, and that two teams would patrol the Mission Street corridor.
He said that, while vendors may feel safe working together, inspectors and residents do not. “The City employees that are getting assaulted are [afraid],” Lerma said. “So we have to work for them, too. We have to work for the brick and mortars. We have to work for the people that can’t ride the bus … because there’s too much chaos.”
How those breaking the rules will be kept away long-term, however, is unclear. Typically, when inspectors leave or turn their backs, people hawking goods flock back to the area. On Tuesday afternoon, a group of DPW workers and police stood on a virtually clean part of the plaza, but on the side of the plaza that fronts 24th Street, vendors sold items from paper bags.
Between 23rd and 25th streets on Mission, at least three different individuals sold items Tuesday afternoon from a paper bag or a small suit case.
Deldelp Medina of the Latinx Democratic Club, who spoke during Wednesday’s press conference, called for a more specific plan on handling the street conditions.
“Just because you don’t have vendors doesn’t mean that you’re automatically going to gain safety,” Medina said. “Do not conflate … having a safe system for us to be able to walk around in this area, with a lack of vendors.”
And, most vendors who gathered on Wednesday seemed unwilling to move indoors during the ban — for visibility, and because they say there isn’t space for all of them.
“As a permitted street vendor, we have rights, and they should not be violated by anyone,” said Carlos Escalante, another vendor who spoke on Wednesday morning.
Juanita Valdez held a sign listing “bigger problems than street vendors:” car break-ins, street shit, drug addicts, rent prices. “SF put your energy where it matters. Leave vendors alone,” it read beneath.
Valdez said she supports her two children by selling flowers in the plaza with her husband — she has been selling for nine years in the 24th Street plaza, and sold flowers for some 20 years before that closer to 16th Street.
Asked what she will do if the ban goes into effect on Monday, Valdez, like others who gathered on Wednesday, was unfazed: “I will keep fighting,” she said in Spanish.
ELENI BALAKRISHNAN
REPORTER. Eleni reports on policing in San Francisco. She first moved to the city on a whim more than 10 years ago, and the Mission has become her home. Follow her on Twitter @miss_elenius.
