Whole Foods closure raises questions about neighborhood's future
SAN FRANCISCO - The temporary closure of San Francisco's Civic Center Whole Foods, not even a year after it opened, is another alarm bell for city business leaders. For those living in the neighborhood, it's not exactly a surprise.
"It's really sad to say that it is closing within a year," said Yvonne. "And you know, and I hate to say, it's just basically from the neighborhood."
Yvonne and her dog Zeus live about two blocks from the Whole Foods. Did she ever see anyone stealing things?
"Oh yeah," she said. "People taking bags of stuff, walking right out the garage door at the bottom basement out the parking garage."
But she says crime, statistics, or even the word crime, doesn't quite capture the challenges here,
"They're in a bad location number one. The people that are using the drugs are right across the street."
The Whole Foods sits on the far side of the block that may very well be ground zero for the city's drg crisis - right at the foot of the federal building, the drug market, and customers, and the misery that comes with it all.
"I think we have seen a degradation of our public common spaces that you have a heart of our city streets," said Rufus Jeffris of the Bay Area Council. "It's still visible in too many ways and it hits you like a ton of bricks every time you walk out your front door."
Jeffris says Whole Foods is another alarm bell, signaling a further crumbling of confidence,
"I think we have to be thinking about this as almost a state of emergency.," he said. "This is an emergency situation, really thinking creatively out of the box, what are the measures that we can take to bring a sense of safety back to the streets?"
"I think we definitely can," Mayor London Breed told KPIX recently about turning back the so-called "doom loop." But we've got to make sure we are as aggressive as possible."
Breed said she's confident the spiral can be turned around, but Whole Foods is a sign that inertia, or at least perception, is still heading the wrong way.
"Yeah, it feels different this time and I think that's what we have to recognize," Jeffris said. "It feels different, it looks different iit s different."
"Yeah it's not pretty," Yvonne said of her neighborhood. "It's not the same place that I remember at all. Not at all."