Some of the strategies San Francisco has tried over the years to solve the problems of Market Street, its main commercial thoroughfare, include banning cars from the crucial traffic artery and passing a criticized tax break in an effort to get companies — namely tech startups — to stay in the neighborhood.
The latest strategy? A competition with a cash prize to lure fresh ideas from the public.
In early April, the Civic Joy Fund and the San Francisco chapter of the Urban Land Institute launched a competition inviting people to send in new ideas for how the city might recreate its signature thoroughfare in the post-pandemic era that's in part created vacant storefronts and sparse foot traffic. Market Street Reimagined invites “visionary thinkers to transform Market Street into a thriving, dynamic, and sustainable corridor that embodies San Francisco’s future,” wrote the organizers in a statement.
The contest will accept ideas from anyone anywhere through June 1. The only requirement is that entrants submit a 24-by-36-inch vertical, or portrait layout, PDF graphic of their vision. Entries will be judged by a diverse panel of architects, designers and investors and local luminaries, including author and venture capitalist Po Bronson and former iPhone designer Jony Ive, founder of the locally-based LoveFrom design firm. The judges will gather in July to decide how to distribute $100,000 in prize money to the winners.
“We’re calling on designers, architects, and people from across industries to submit world-class ideas — big or small,” said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, plugging the contest in a video of himself flanked on either side by Market Street’s stately early 20th-century high rises.
An Irish-born surveyor laid out Market Street in 1847, aiming for a grand ceremonial boulevard that would cut diagonally across the city’s existing grid and connect the waterfront to the city’s interior. Running some three miles from the Ferry Building in the Embarcadero to the base of the city’s woodsy Twin Peaks neighborhood, it quickly became the city’s commercial spine. Before and after the 1906 earthquake and fire that devastated much of the city, “Market Street was a dividing line between the upper class to the diagonal north and working class to the griddy south,” wrote San Francisco Chronicle culture critic Peter Hartlaub in 2018.
History repeats
The wide boulevard that runs diagonally through downtown San Francisco from the bay to the hills has long symbolized the city’s biggest challenges.
As far back as 1962, urban planners have been trying to come up with solutions for the “paradox” of Market Street, as it was described in a report issued that year by the nonprofit San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association titled “What to do About Market Street.” In order to make the corridor less “congested, dirty and unattractive,” the report sketched a futuristic plan for installing monorails and sunken hanging gardens down the middle of the street.
While those plans never came to fruition, San Francisco did enact what many had long dismissed as a radical idea in 2019, when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency approved a car-free Market Street on the eastern side of the span with the support of bicycle activists, parents, health care workers, business owners and then-Mayor London Breed. A $600 million capital project called Better Market Street promised to create a futuristic boulevard that would safely buffer bicycles and scooters on elevated sidewalk lanes, while underground BART trains continued to shuttle passengers around the city and beyond.
Six years later and post-COVID-19, Market Street is indeed traffic free — but it’s also lacking people and stores. A coalition of local businesses has revived a push to reopen Market Street to private cars. Manny Yekutiel, a well-known San Franciscan who heads the Civic Joy Fund, said Market Street Reimagined aimed to rise above the car/no-car debate.
“Right now, there’s not a lot of conversation about anything else,” pertaining to the future of the city’s main thoroughfare, said Yekutiel, who explained the contest is aiming to spark a “smart, collaborative high-level” discussion about how to improve the current state of San Francisco’s central artery.
“We can all agree the status quo is not ideal,” he said. “Market Street is feeling emptier and sadder and not as well utilized as we’d like our main street to be.”
Organizers said in the release that the competition would build on a series of recommendations the Urban Land Institute presented to city leaders in 2023 on how to revitalize an area surrounding Market Street. The group’s suggestions include reducing and restructuring business taxes, encouraging office-to-residential conversions and activating empty public spaces and vacant storefronts—ideas that appear in former Mayor London Breed’s Roadmap to San Francisco’s Future, launched in 2023. The current mayor, Daniel Lurie, has proposed some of the same strategies, in addition to planning a tax break for retail, restaurant and hospitality businesses.