'The Fences Didn't Help': 24th Street Mission BART Vendors Brace for New Permit System Amid Crackdown on Sale of Stolen Goods

The 24th Street BART plaza, in San Francisco’s Mission, is the beating heart of the city’s Latino Cultural District. Commuters riding the escalators up from the underground station are immediately immersed in the unmistakable aroma of carne asada sizzling in the nearby taquerias, the sounds of street ministers preaching in Spanish and the sight of people from all walks of life moving through this Bay Area crossroads.

The plaza has traditionally served as a public space to congregate or rest, as well as an unofficial marketplace for street vendors. But in recent months, it’s become a point of contention among community members, amid the city’s ongoing efforts to combat the sale of stolen goods on its streets. In response to public safety concerns from San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who represents the district, BART erected fences around the plaza in late July, keeping only a narrow corridor open for passengers to access the station.

But on August 20, a group of self-described community members and vendors dismantled the fences in protest, lambasting the blockade strategy as an attack on lower-income people already struggling to survive. The fences have remained dismantled since then.

Ronen this week told KQED she has no intention of asking BART to reinstall them and said she regrets not having first held a town hall to gather community input before the original decision was made.

“You live and you learn and in the future we will do that,” said Ronen.

Instead, Calle 24, a local community group, convened its own town hall this past Tuesday, an event that drew some 200 people.

“What can we do to better protect the women who go out to work for their children?” asked Yolanda Dorado, a Mission resident who said she walks through the plaza before sunrise in order to get to work, and has been harassed there.

“The community needs more police to prevent people from selling drugs outside BART,” added Silvia Ferrusquía, who runs a nearby bridal and quinceañera dress shop.

But some in attendance, particularly younger people, voiced concerns that more law enforcement presence in the neighborhood would likely lead to an uptick in police violence against people of color.

“You and your history have shown us how a community can protect itself,” said Rut Hernandez, who grew up in the Mission. “If the older generation thinks the police can be of help, it’s worth considering it. Even if we’re not in agreement about that, we can reach some sort of compromise.”

On August 20, within hours of the fences being dismantled, the plaza was once again packed with vendors as pedestrians gathered to watch a low-rider parade.

“The fences didn’t help. If anything, they just created more of a problem,” said Joshua Baltodano, a nearby resident who helped create the “Mission DeFence” Instagram page to organize resistance against the fences. “When the fences were here, there was no room for anybody. Now we have room to actually have some legitimate vendors out here selling their goods and services and trying to make a living.”

Baltodano said BART tried to reinstall the fences later on Saturday morning but gave up when community members refused to leave the plaza.

Vendor Demetra Block, who has been selling used clothes on the streets for the past two years, said she came back and set up shop at the plaza shortly after the fences came down. She said she relies on the plaza not only to sell her wares, but also to buy basic necessities.

“I sell my stuff for $1, $2 or $5. Which is very affordable. I also have to come here to get my laundry detergent,” she said. “I can’t afford no $20 laundry detergent at the stores. But I can come here and get it for 10 or 15 bucks.”

She also pushed back against the assertion that open-air markets, like this one, are dangerous, and said in the time she has been coming here, she has never seen a fight.

“These people are trying to feed their families. They’re staying out of trouble. They’re not selling drugs,” Block said. “Why would they take this place from us?”

But Ronen said in the months leading up to the fences being erected, her office received numerous complaints from constituents that the plaza had become overcrowded and unruly, with an increasing number of people selling stolen goods and making it hard for seniors and people with disabilities to navigate the sidewalks. Meanwhile, nearby brick-and-mortar businesses complained that the street vendors created unfair competition.

Ronen also said some longtime vendors who had sold in the neighborhood for decades reported being assaulted.

“People would come and rip their tablecloth off the table and have all of their wares flying away,” she said.

‘Stop and Shop’

Another vendor, Jerome Allen, used to sell goods at the plaza but was forced to move down Mission Street when the fences went up. His sidewalk spread, which he calls “Stop and Shop,” is among the larger ones in the vicinity. It stretches the entire length of a typical retail storefront, and is organized by wares, including shoes, clothes, tools, electronics and games.

“If you can name something I don’t have, I’ll give you something for free,” he said.

He says he tries to maintain a legitimate business.

“A lot of the stuff, people donate to me,” he said. “They’ll just pull up in their car and give me a bag of stuff.”

But Allen acknowledges that inevitably, some of what he and others sell may have originally been stolen before it reaches them — what he calls “boosting.”

“I think the boosting has gotten a little out of hand, you know, they’re doing too much,” he said.

Last year, viral videos of organized retail theft operations — including a brazen robbery of a Louis Vuitton store in the city’s upscale Union Square shopping district, and a man in a Walgreens casually throwing items off a shelf into a garbage bag and riding his bicycle out of the store — thrust San Francisco into the national spotlight, particularly galvanizing the attention of conservative media outlets, which pumped out headlines describing the city as “lawless.”

State and local politicians took notice.

“Illegal street vending has posed a significant challenge to our city and our small businesses for quite some time now, and it has only gotten worse since the beginning of the pandemic,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed in a March press release.

The unwanted publicity from retail theft spurred action from politicians and law enforcement agencies, who began to focus on cracking down not only on theft, but also the resale of the stolen goods. The BART plaza fence was another of these reactions.

Yet some of the vendors who spoke with KQED said they were in favor of the fences. Garcia is one of the vendors who continued selling alongside the fences while they were still up (he asked that his full name not be used because he fears for his safety). He said he actually welcomed the fences, because it prevented people from harassing him while he worked.

Garcia said someone even recently stole the dolly he had used to transport his stuff. But he still returns to the plaza to sell his wares, and uses what he earns to pay his rent and send money home to his family in Guatemala.

Another vendor, Lourdes Villegas, who sells tamales and champurrado, a warm beverage, at the plaza, said that she supports the fences because they prevented people from hanging around her table at the plaza. She said the crowds made her food appear unhygienic and drove customers away.

“We’re protecting our area so that we can continue to maintain our livelihood. If we let it one person come, everyone will come,” said Villegas.

The new rules

The fences were a last resort, and were never intended to be the permanent solution to address the complaints about deteriorating conditions at the plaza. That was intended to be addressed by a controversial new street vendor permit ordinance the city’s Board of Supervisors unanimously passed in March.

The wording of the measure makes a clear connection between unregulated street vending and an increase in disturbances that require police intervention. It specifically cites an informal market of vendors at United Nations Plaza in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood that “fuels unlawful activity [and] leads to a high volume of 911 calls, incident reports, and arrests.”

But the new law had been slow to implement on the ground — the city’s Department of Public Works now plans to begin enforcing it on September 12, roughly six months after its passage. Ronen, who has tried to fast-track its implementation, said the department needed time to create the entire permitting process, and that the ordinance includes a mandatory outreach period to inform street vendors of the changes and allow them enough time to comply with the new rules.

Susana Rojas, executive director of Calle 24 in the Mission, is one of the community organizers putting the word out about the new law.

But after spending several months trying to inform vendors about the imminent rule changes, she said many people are still confused about it.

“It’s fear. This is the way that they make their money. Anytime that they think, ‘Oh my God, I’m not gonna be able to vend there,’ they kind of shut off. So we have to come back multiple times until they understand what it is,” she said. “For us, what is important is that they do understand and they are ready so that they don’t end up getting moved and lose income with something that’s preventable if we all work together.”

Under the new rules, vendors will be required to register for a business license, and pay a $430 fee to get a permit. They’ll also need to show proof of original purchase if they’re selling products that appear to be new. Without that proof, their goods can be confiscated by city enforcement officers; if they continue selling without permits, they could face fines of up to $1,000.

Ronen said she sees this new law as the “ultimate solution” to ending the sale of stolen goods on city streets, and the allegedly unsafe conditions that accompany them.

“I believe this law is essential to making change in the neighborhood, because once people realize that their goods are going to be confiscated, then it’s no longer going to be profitable to sell these stolen goods in the streets,” she said.

She also acknowledges that many people who take to selling goods on the street are simply trying to earn a basic income, and notes that the new rules do not carry any criminal penalties for vending without a license.

“We do believe that the vendors themselves, even the vast majority of the vendors selling the stolen goods, are not criminals themselves. They’re trying to survive,” she said. “This is the result of living in an expensive city with minimum-wage jobs, rising inequality and all these deep-rooted social problems that we have in San Francisco not allowing people to make ends meet.”

Susana Rojas, with Calle 24, said that the nonprofit reluctantly supported the fences being erected. She said they did so because the number of complaints from community members made them feel that they had run out of options.

“We never said that the fence was perfect. The fence was a little barrier to protect the vendors and to provide some kind of relief. That’s what the fences are, and to also give us an opportunity to create the process so that our vendors can have the BART plaza back,” said Rojas.

Going forward, she hopes that the future of the plaza will be community led.

“We’re hoping that we can come up with a community solution to make it better and to really have the steps that are going to support people … and addressing the root issues,” said Rojas, adding that her organization is now working to help some vendors fill out their paperwork and pay the new fees.

But opponents of the new vendor law say it will just make life harder for people already struggling to make ends meet, and will ultimately further displace longtime residents of the Mission by removing a crucial source of income.

Asked whether she plans on getting a permit to sell her goods, vendor Demetra Block scoffed.

“I couldn’t afford $430. They know that we can’t pay that,” she said.

KQED’s Dan Brekke and Carlos Cabrera-Lomelí contributed to this report.