Besides its long-running and much-loved Heart of the City farmers market — every Wednesday and Sunday since 1981 — San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza is perhaps best known for its open drug use and sales.
The scene at the plaza, just minutes away from City Hall, has put it high on the list for downtown reform as SF staggers to recover from the pandemic. But fixes for this part of town are nothing new. The now-infamous “Twitter tax break” to revive mid-Market Street, which UN Plaza fronts, was more than a decade ago.
Now that same plaza is scheduled for a million-dollar face-lift starting next month. The city will replace some of its red bricks with smooth concrete and install features for skateboarding: granite ledges, a low rail, and a pyramid based on the one at Paris’s Place de la République.
The redesign also includes chess tables, outdoor workout equipment, and ping-pong-style tables for something called Teqball.
The city’s plans surfaced at a rather ironic time: just days after SF police arrested more than 100 people, most of them minors, at the Dolores Hill Bomb on July 8. The hill bomb is a local tradition where skaters — and some insane people standing on bike handlebars — speed down Dolores Street next to Dolores Park as crowds cheer them on. It has gotten dangerous a few times.
This year’s hill bomb had barely started when officers in riot gear ordered everyone to disperse. But the cops also trapped many on the scene, and mass arrests and hours-long detentions came soon after. There were some cases of vandalism — a Muni train was covered in tags — but most other charges have been dropped for now.
The arrests and UN Plaza news, nearly back to back, underscore the city’s contradictory attitude toward skaters. When skateboarding is disruptive to homeowners in the Mission, it results in mass arrests that were roundly (and rightly) condemned as unnecessary. When skaters disrupt poor residents — some of whom live on the streets or in SROs — it’s with the city’s blessing.
That’s not the official line. SF Recreation and Park Department spokesperson Daniel Montes says the redesign is meant to attract more people. “The best way to make public space safer, healthier, and more joyous is to make it fun,” Montes said via email. “This pilot project is an experiment in doing just that.” (Montes confirmed the $1 million price tag.)
But the subtext seems clear: by drawing a bunch of new people to the space — skaters, chess players, fitness enthusiasts, Teqballers, and spectators — the city might oust the plaza’s current occupants without involving law enforcement. Montes did not respond directly when I asked him if this was the plan.
Market shift
Turns out the farmers market has to move as well. It’s being relocated one block west starting on Sept. 3, with slightly reduced hours — 60 minutes one day, 90 minutes the other. The new site will also accommodate fewer stands, according to a statement from market officials, and vendors will have to park offsite. (The city is offering the market’s customers subsidized parking at a nearby garage.)
[Update 8/18/23: Rec and Park spokesperson Montes says the new space will accommodate as many vendor stands — 70 — as the current space, and that vendors will be able to park either on the plaza or for free on Larkin Street.]
In a statement, the market’s executive director Steve Pulliam said UN Plaza has “better conditions than we’ve seen in years” and questioned the redesign: “Many individuals still need help, but that seems like a public health issue that won’t be solved by a skate park.”
Last year, the plaza was home to the short-lived Tenderloin Linkage Center, part of Mayor London Breed’s emergency declaration. It was meant to connect people with housing and health services, but it closed after less than a year. (The city says it provided about 3,000 connections to housing, health, and other services, a fraction of the nearly 29,000 requests for connections. The center also provided nearly 100,000 meals.)
Sheriff’s deputies now patrol the plaza and prevent people from camping there, but large congregations persist.
Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, one of the city’s largest providers of supportive housing, praises the redesign. “The heavy security required in the current system to keep the dealers and users out during the day is not sustainable,” Shaw told The Frisc. “There has always needed to be an organized activity or some structure and strategy that’s more than a two-day-a-week [farmers] market.”
Coalition on Homelessness executive director Jennifer Friedenbach disagrees, and contests that UN Plaza is an open-air drug market. She says most of the plaza’s occupants are housed, low-income residents of the Tenderloin who commune in the plaza to socialize, and that the plan is racist and classist. “I think the intent is to displace extremely low income people out of the plaza,” she said, adding that the change to the farmers market will limit poor residents’ access to fresh produce.
Ryen Motzek, who runs one skate shop in the city, another in San Mateo, and serves as president of the Mission Merchants Association, doesn’t think skateboarders will displace anybody. He’s part of a small group of skaters that Rec and Park has asked to help with the design of the skateboarding features. “Given San Francisco kind of being in a safety and cleanliness crisis, it’s a way for there to be more bodies and more presence,” he said.
Motzek does note this irony: The steps and ledges of the main public library, just steps from UN Plaza, are a world-renowned — and unsanctioned — skate spot. They’re also the site of plenty of drug use and misery. “I get kicked out all the time when pretty hectic shit’s going down in front of me,” he added. “And I’m always kind of like, ‘Why 40-something-year-old me, skating by myself, being very careful, not being reckless?’”
Normies and undesirables
The act of skateboarding itself may not displace anyone. But skateboarders’ comfort around street folks and aesthetic appeal to normies make us the perfect actors to start a process that could push UN Plaza’s undesirables away.
University of Oregon professor and beloved pro skater Ocean Howell wrote about this issue nearly 20 years ago. In his article “The ‘Creative Class’ and the Gentrifying City: Skateboarding in Philadelphia’s Love Park,” Howell argued that blighted urban spaces claimed by skaters become less intimidating to other, wealthier people who move in and push out poor, sometimes unhoused people. As “first wave gentrifiers” — Howell also includes here creatives, bohemians, and queer folks — skaters themselves are eventually pushed out.
The contrast with the hill bomb situation goes beyond just ‘skaters good/skaters bad.’ In UN Plaza, skaters won’t be fenced into a park or hidden under a freeway. The design deliberately invites them to mix in with everyone else.
(Howell is careful to say he’s not writing specifically about rising housing costs or restaurant prices — he defines gentrification as “any reclaiming of urban space by people of a higher socioeconomic position than the current users.”)
Unlike at Love Park, where skateboarding was illegal and skaters had to run from the cops, UN Plaza’s ledges would be city sanctioned, built to bring skateboarders in.
Max Dubler, another SF skateboarder who is also a policy fellow at California YIMBY, says the UN Plaza redesign is a step in the right direction. He recognizes that it won’t address the root causes of drug dealing, addiction, and homelessness, but hopes it will make other San Franciscans passing through the area more comfortable.
The contrast with the Dolores hill bomb situation goes beyond just “skaters good/skaters bad.” In UN Plaza, skaters won’t be fenced into a skate park hidden under a freeway, like this one. The design deliberately invites skaters to mix in with everyone else. Workers on lunch break and senior residents might be sitting on one bench while skaters bust backside tailslides on another, just a few feet away.
Motzek said the design team took inspiration from efforts in Copenhagen and Mälmo, Sweden to “activate” urban plazas with sanctioned ledges and embankments for skaters — an idea that has also inspired books and conferences.
I don’t see it as really bad if we displace [drug users and dealers]. They’re not stakeholders in a public plaza.
Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s Randy Shaw
The UN Plaza redesign may attract skateboarders and pave the way for other folks to come use the workout equipment or just eat lunch and watch. And it may serve to expel the drug activity, too, but dispersing users and dealers does little long-term without rehab and other services waiting. (One supervisor recently suggested spending millions more on those services in jails and less on neighborhood “wellness hubs,” which didn’t sit well with his colleagues.)
Under District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, arrests have increased, the jail population is rising, but no immediate solution seems at hand. San Francisco is on pace for yet another record for overdose deaths.
Shaw, from the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, has limited sympathy for those dealing and using. “This is a public plaza, and [their presence] turns away many people who don’t feel safe,” he said. “I don’t see it as really bad if we displace them. They’re not stakeholders in a public plaza.”
After what happened on Dolores, skaters might wonder if they’ll end up getting the same treatment after they serve their purpose and a more respectable crowd filters in.
