Two days a week, the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market transforms San Francisco’s historic U.N. Plaza into a healthy mecca. The rest of the week the space is sickly.

Every Wednesday and Sunday, the public square is filled with thousands of residents buying fresh produce in the urban food desert. But when the farmers depart, the plaza returns to scenes of drug dealing and tragic addiction. These uses have intensified since the 2022 closure of the Tenderloin Center, a temporary site to reduce overdose deaths set up by the city’s Department of Public Health.

The city’s planners intend to remedy the problem by injecting the space with human activity seven days a week. The Recreation and Park Department is constructing a skate park, ping pong tables, chess boards and exercise equipment. The updated plaza is set to open in November.

People walk amid the vendor stalls at the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market in its former location at San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza. The 42-year-old market was relocated earlier this month at Fulton Street. (Glenn Gehlke/Bay City News Foundation)

The 42-year-old Heart of the City Farmers’ Market was moved from the brick-lined architectural plaza to an adjacent street surface space on Fulton Street between Hyde and Larkin streets that is bifurcated by a public monument. Before the change, the city asked the market if they could stay open for seven days, and they responded they could not.

The city’s actions are the subject of a resolution unanimously passed on Sept. 21 by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit and Oversight Committee.

Sponsored by Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin, and joined in sponsorship at the meeting by Supervisor Connie Chan, the resolution requests a list of actions from the Recreation and Park Department to mitigate the disruption.

“I have not heard from a single person who does not agree that the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market has been a success and has activated U.N. Plaza in a positive way.” Supervisor Dean Preston

“I have not heard from a single person who does not agree that the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market has been a success and has activated U.N. Plaza in a positive way,” Preston said.

His sentiments were seconded by a passionate chorus of public commenters, who spoke as if the market were closing, which it is not. The resolution asks for better communication from the city planners and for further assistance to help the market make the transition.

Inconsistent messages

Steve Pulliam, the market’s executive director, spoke to the supervisors about the inconsistent messages he’s received from the city. He said the Recreation and Park Department first told him that the change was just a pilot project, a test period that would last six months, then they later told him it would be two years.

Pulliam said the new Fulton Street location is more crowded and constricts the market’s future growth. The asphalt is hotter and less shady, which wilts the fresh goods over long market days, and the farmers can no longer pull their trucks up behind their booths. They must tote their goods by hand. 

“ … I’d like to emphasize that those farmers already have 17- to 18-hour-long days. Any change to that, anything making that more difficult, is really a travesty.”  Steve Pulliam, Heart of the City Farmers’ Market

“Those farmers that don’t have their trucks with them, their jobs are a lot harder than it used to be,” Pulliam said. “And I’d like to emphasize that those farmers already have 17- to 18-hour-long days. Any change to that, anything making that more difficult, is really a travesty.” 

Demands to support market’s transition

In a Sept. 20 letter to the supervisors’ committee, Phil Ginsburg, general manager for San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department, said the city is offering a list of supports that will help the market thrive, including overflow space in Civic Center Plaza. Many of the items listed are the same measures requested in the resolution.

The list includes dedicated parking for staff and vendors, a monitored loading zone for restaurants picking up orders, security assistance, improved landscaping and a repaved Fulton Street. 

“We think the HCFM is exactly the kind of healthy activity our public spaces need,” Ginsburg said, “and we are grateful to them for helping us make both U.N. Plaza and Fulton Plaza safer for everyone.”

According to Preston, little effort was made by the city to obtain community input and the terms of the pilot program were vague.

The new resolution urges the city’s Recreation and Park Department to provide information to the public and for the city to reveal the project’s itemized costs and sources of funds. It asks for the city to make commitments to the farmers’ market to mitigate the impact of their move, including granting the market an operating permit to replace a temporary one.

The resolution also asks the city to provide the metrics for evaluating the success of the farmers’ market in the new location and the plans for returning the farmers market’ to U.N. Plaza if the pilot project is not successful.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.