Another beloved San Francisco business has announced it will close its doors due to the city’s drug and homelessness crises, as staff slam officials for allowing criminals to roam free.
La Cocina Marketplace opened just two years ago in the city’s downtrodden Tenderloin district, and quickly found success serving food made by immigrant women.
While the establishment has received praise from the public, elected officials and the media, it struggled with the scene on the sidewalks outside, where drug use, public defecation and crime are a common sight.
Despite spending $275,000 on security, those who ran the stands at La Cocina said the unsavory scene scared off potential diners.
‘We worked very hard – every business here, not just me – to bring more people here, to let people know about this amazing place,’ Wafa Bahloul, an Algerian immigrant who has a food stand in the hall, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
La Cocina Marketplace has announced it will close its doors due to the city’s drug and homelessness crises
The food hall opened just two years ago in the city’s downtrodden Tenderloin district, and quickly found success serving food made by immigrant women
Despite spending $275,000 on security, those who ran the stands at La Cocina said the unsavory scene scared off potential diners (The Tenderloin district pictured above)
‘But what happened outside versus inside was totally opposite. The best solution was to just shut the doors.’
Bahloul added that her husband recently witnessed a shooting outside the business.
Security guards Damian Morffet and Ron Haysbert targeted City Hall officials for what they described as a lackluster police department that has given free reign to criminals.
‘If the police were consistent with their patrols and efforts, people would come out here at night,’ Morffet told the San Francisco Chronicle, claiming cop’s ‘drive by and look, and they don’t do anything.’
The guards shared that on Tuesday a man defecated outside La Cocina before walking away; staff is reportedly still dealing with the smell, which has scared off customers.
The food hall said it will shut down on September 1 and turn into a commercial kitchen closed to the public. Only La Paloma bar and a pop-up lunch area will remain open for walk-ins.
La Cocina is just the latest business in the city to announce it can no longer keep open under the circumstances.
Earlier this week, Goorin Bros. haberdashery, a century-old hat boutique, became the latest casualty of the so-called ‘retail apocalypse’ gripping downtown San Francisco.
The company has joined a host of stores shutting in San Francisco’s Union Square, amid widespread crime and plummeting footfall.
Security guards slammed City Hall officials for what they described as a lackluster police department that has given free reign to criminals
Last month, the owner of the iconic HRD Coffee Shop decided to close shop for good, blaming the city for not supporting business owners amid a homelessness crisis and the aftermath of the pandemic.
Meanwhile Westfield shopping center announced it had stopped making mortgage payments last month due to crime and tanking sales – defaulting on its $558million loan and handing it back to the lender.
This was sparked by the decision from Nordstrom, the mall’s anchor tenant, to close – which Westfield blamed in large part on ‘unsafe conditions’ and a ‘lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity’.
Other major firms such as Banana Republic, Office Depot, Old Navy, H&M and Whole Foods Market have either left the area or announced plans to leave in the coming months.
AT&T announced that it will close its flagship store on August 1 in yet another blow to the city’s struggling retail sector.
Goorin Bros. haberdashery was founded in 1895,and also recently announced its closing
An analysis of official figures and other research reveals San Francisco may lose hundreds of millions of dollars through an exodus of businesses and its failure to recover from Covid
Last month Park Hotels & Resorts announced it was stopping mortgage payments on two hotels, the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco and the 1,024-room Park 55, saying: ‘Now more than ever, we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges.’
The city has also suffered particularly badly from the rise in remote working after the pandemic, which has decimated footfall in the financial district and Union Square areas and left office blocks deserted.
Office vacancies reached a record high of 31 percent in May, enough space for 92,000 workers.
In April, Salesforce said it will leave its eponymous 30-story Salesforce East building in downtown, where around 1,000 staff had worked before the pandemic.
Leaders estimate the situation will contribute to a budget shortfall of $1.3 billion in five years. The decline in property tax revenue alone could cost nearly $200 million per year, according to a worst-case scenario drawn up by the city’s chief accountant.
The city is also facing rampant drug use – with many dealers plying their trade openly on the streets.
As a result, city figures show there were more than 268 drug overdose deaths in the first six months of 2023 alone – a 41 percent increase on last year.
