Dolores Park Food Truck Plan Draws Ire
Permits for taco and coffee carts upset neighborhood groups
The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department did not expect its decision to permit two vendors inside the Mission District's popular Dolores Park to raise many eyebrows.
The food trucks — Blue Bottle coffee and the nonprofit food business incubator La Cocina — would offer the estimated 1.2 million annual visitors access to two beloved Mission treats, fancy coffee and tacos, and bring money to city coffers.
But a group of neighbors, business owners and Stephen Elliott, an author who spearheaded last year's successful campaign to stop American Apparel from opening on Valencia Street, begged to differ.
Over the past few weeks, contentious discussion has raged online and in community meetings over bringing commercial activity inside the park. Some also argued that not enough notice had been given about the trucks, which are equipped for four employees and include a generator.
"The process is so deeply flawed," Elliott said about the permits.
Amid rhetoric of varying civility, James Freeman, owner of Oakland-based Blue Bottle coffee, announced on Wednesday that he would not use his permit. The coffee trailer, which he spent around $25,000 outfitting, will go to other places.
"With being compared to McDonald's and the threats of spitting — at the end of the day, I don't have to do this," said Freeman, referring to online comments likening his entrance to the park to opening a fast food chain.
Caleb Zigas, acting executive director of La Cocina, said that the taco purveyor El Huarache Loco, which is leasing a permit, is on schedule to begin operating in the park next month.
The permits are good for two years of daily operation and were expected to earn $65,000 annually for the city. The recreation and parks department has not decided whether it will pursue another vendor permit in the wake of Blue Bottle's exit, a spokesman said.
Currently, the department has a $12.4 million budget shortfall.
Zigas of La Cocina said there was "a measure of irony" in the contention that the department was ignoring the public. "Rec and Park had the capacity to make a progressive response to a national trend of food carts," Zigas said. "We saw it as a positive San Francisco innovation."
The permits — priced at $1,000 per month, with the department taking 10 percent of earnings — cost far less than opening a brick-and-mortar business.
The department said that it planned on moving forward with permits in other parks, although it declined to say which ones.
The feeling, even among those who railed against the trucks, appeared to be muted.
"No one's winning in this situation," said Crystal Vann Wallstrom, one of the founders of the neighborhood advocacy group Dolores Park Works.
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
Dolores Park Neighbor
"The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department did not expect its decision to permit two vendors inside the Mission District's popular Dolores Park to raise many eyebrows."
Isn't the protocol to reach out to a community by Park and Rec, to notify nearby businesses and residents when major change is going to happen? That did not happen and now look at the mess they have gotten us into. If Rec and Park had followed the rules and did what was expected by their own Sunshine Ordinance than they would have known how people felt. Plain and simple.
"It seems that the consensus is that most attempts to develop or redevelop public spaces have been characterized by attempts by the middle/upper classes, business owners, government, and planners (those with decision-making power) to promote biased views of who the “public” is and how public spaces should function. These ideological visions of public space promoted by the dominant groups of society have created public spaces that exclude certain groups from fully accessing and using the public spaces.
Indeed, the trend has been for dominant groups in society to take various measures to privatize public space as a means of creating order, control, predictability, comfort, sameness, and security in public spaces in order to promote recreational, entertainment, and shopping opportunities. This practice has proven that long term affects in urban areas result in deterioration of land and abatement of properties.
Mystery Days
You quote Zigas as saying, "Rec and Park had the capacity to make a progressive response to a national trend of food carts" But this is not about food carts. First because they're not "carts," but vans. Second because most opponents to the vendors I know love food carts and everything they do. But Rec & Park's permits haven't favored this "national trend." They just favored two vendors, one of them very well estalbished, with permits for as long as five years! If Rec & Park wanted to support the food cart movement, they should have opened up Dolores Park to food festivals a couple of times a year allowing a lot of small vendors to gain exposure.