CMCBD News

Mid-Market combats blight with new district

San Francisco Business Times
10/05/2007 12:00am
Sarah Duxbury

Mid-Market property and business owners finally have their community benefit district and a CEO to run it.

The CEO, Daniel Hurtado, is wasting no time getting to work: Requests for bids for cleaning and maintenance and for public safety services, the new district's two primary programs, are due Oct. 5. Hurtado hopes to have them running by the end of the year.

Supporters hope that the district will be a significant step in reclaiming a blighted stretch of Market Street. The zone includes the south side of Market Street from Fifth Street to Ninth Street, with dips north and south. (Most of the north side of Market Street is included in the Tenderloin community benefit district.) Almost 70 percent of the property owners who voted supported creating the district, which owners will fund through a new tax based on lot size, building size and amount of street frontage.

"Our mission is to create a clean and safe neighborhood for the community and to improve the neighborhood," Hurtado said, though what form that will take and the specifics of the district's two core programs are "still a work in progress."

Hurtado said that the district will use ambassadors, much as Union Square does. Central Market ambassadors will be trained by police and social services agencies. They will be law enforcement's eyes and ears on the street, a resource to connect people on the street with social services and shelter, and a hospitality service for hapless tourists and others who need a bit of help.

Those involved believe the district, once its programs start, could hep shift the public perception of the mid-Market area, event if it can't single-handedly solve the blight.

"It will have the ability to experiment and try new strategies and contract out in a way that the city doesn't," said Michael Yarne, director of development for the Market Building Co., and president of the Central Market district's board.

Martin Building Co. owns and has developed several properties in the zone, including the Mint Plaza project.

"We have multiple properties in the district, and we're staying here. We don't flip properties," Yarne said. "We saw the CBD as essential to the success of Mint Plaza."

The district is expected to spend more than $400,000 on public safety and maintenance programs in this first year, and those programs will receive 65 percent of the CBD's $535,000 operating budget going forward.

The district is run by a 10-person board, only half of whom are property owners. Two of the other five are residents and two are merchants; one member is from Urban Solutions, a community-based organization. All board members are elected to two-year terms.

"There's great city-wide interest in this," Yarne said. "There's regional-wide interest, I think, in the well-being of Market Street."

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"Our mission is to create a clean and safe neighborhood for the community and to improve the neighborhood," Hurtado said. (Click on the link above to download this article.)