Mid-Market (or Central Market) is a neighborhood and development area in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

Location

The Mid-Market redevelopment area is centered on

Market Street Market Street may refer to: *Market Street, Cambridge, England *Market Street, Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia * Market Street, George Town, Penang, Malaysia *Market Street, Manchester, England *Market Street, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia ...

starting at Fifth Street, ending at

Van Ness Avenue Van Ness Avenue is a north–south thoroughfare in San Francisco, California. Originally named Marlette Street, the street was renamed Van Ness Avenue in honor of the city's sixth mayor, James Van Ness. The main part of Van Ness Avenue runs fro ...

, and including a number of buildings down to

Mission Street Mission Street is a north-south arterial thoroughfare in Daly City and San Francisco, California that runs from Daly City's southern border to San Francisco's northeast waterfront. The street and San Francisco's Mission District through which it ...

. It effectively creates a sub-neighborhood of the Tenderloin,

SoMa Soma may refer to: Businesses and brands * SOMA (architects), a New York–based firm of architects * Soma (company), a company that designs eco-friendly water filtration systems * SOMA Fabrications, a builder of bicycle frames and other bicycle ...

, and

Civic Center A civic center or civic centre is a prominent land area within a community that is constructed to be its focal point or center. It usually contains one or more dominant public buildings, which may also include a government building. Recently, the ...

neighborhoods for the purpose of redeveloping the area.

History

Decimated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, the entire neighborhood was quickly rebuilt and for decades served as vibrant portion of the Market Street corridor. Noted columnist

Herb Caen Herbert Eugene Caen (; April 3, 1916 February 1, 1997) was a San Francisco humorist and journalist whose daily column of local goings-on and insider gossip, social and political happenings, and offbeat puns and anecdotes—"A continuous love le ...

referred to the neighborhood as 'le grand

pissoir A (also known in French as a ) is a French invention, common in Europe, that provides a urinal in public space with a lightweight structure. The availability of aims to reduce urination onto buildings, sidewalks, or streets. They can be free ...

' because of the amount of public urination, defecation, and vagrancy due to a consolidation and expansion of homeless social services in the area, starting in the mid-1980s.

2011 Initiative

Past initiatives such as sponsored street murals have had little effect in revitalizing the neighborhood and in 2011 the city government turned to tax incentives to encourage businesses to move to the area. The largest and most noteworthy of businesses to date has been

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, which moved into the old SF Furniture Mart building at Ninth and Market streets in 2012. The move by Twitter was initially met with a great deal of controversy, while other businesses such as Zendesk quietly took advantage of the tax break and moved to the area. A number of arts groups, such as the Black Rock Arts Foundation, are working to move to Mid-Market. In October 2013,

Square In Euclidean geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral, which means that it has four equal sides and four equal angles (90- degree angles, π/2 radian angles, or right angles). It can also be defined as a rectangle with two equal-length a ...

moved its headquarters to the mid-Market area, followed by

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), packa ...

and Dolby.Square moves into new S.F. headquarters
/ref> Equally transformative, and often attributed to the new density of tech headquarters in Mid-Market, has been the concurrent increase of residential buildings, most notably high-rise apartments and condominium towers.

References

{{coord, 37.780518, N, 122.412534, W, display=title Neighborhoods in San Francisco Market Street (San Francisco)