The Sunset Night Market is Dead Due to Politics
PLUS: Lurie’s 1,500-Bed Pledge: Failure or Pivot?
What You Need To Know
Here’s what happened around the city for the week of July 6, 2025:
It was a pretty slow week!
- The Sunset Night Market is dead due to politics
- Lurie’s 1,500-bed pledge: failure or pivot?
- SFPD will hire retired officers to staff events and homeless shelters
Recent & upcoming openings:
- Al Pastor Papi’s new permanent home
The Sunset Night Market is dead due to politics
The Facts
The Sunset Night Market is no more, according to a report in The Standard. Organizers did not give a reason why the popular market wouldn’t return, but many suspect it was the political environment caused by the recall of Supervisor Engardio. The Standard called the market “politically radioactive.”
The Context
Supervisor Engardio helped launch the Sunset Night Market last year, inspired by trips to his husband’s home of Taiwan, where night markets are a vital part of the culture. The night market was exceptionally popular, drawing over 10,000 people to event.
But now Supervisor Engardio faces a recall election on September 16th, and the campaign to oust him may have contributed to the market being cancelled.
Engardio told The Standard that “politics should not be part of the night market. It’s about bringing people together and creating joy. At the end of the day, most people say they love the night market.”
The GrowSF Take
What a loss for the Sunset and for San Francisco. This is local politics at its worst. Disagreements over political policies shouldn’t lead to the cancellation of popular public events. The recall campaign ought to be ashamed of itself for causing this.
Lurie’s 1,500-bed pledge: failure or pivot?
(Spoiler: we think it makes sense!)
The Facts
Mayor Lurie campaigned on a pledge to create 1,500 new emergency shelter beds within his first six months, touting the figure as late as March. As of today, 436 beds have been opened or announced, and the administration is changing tactics.
In an op-ed in The Standard, the Mayor’s chief of health, homelessness, and family services, Kunal Modi, announced that the administration will no longer pursue a specific number of beds. Instead, they will shift funding to overhaul coordination, address root causes, and integrate health services.
The Context
San Francisco spends over $1 billion annually to fund more than 25,000 beds across homeless shelters, mental health treatment centers, and drug treatment centers, yet unsheltered homelessness remains stubbornly high.
Critics argue that setting an arbitrary bed-count goal ignored the complexity of addiction, mental illness, and the city’s fractured network of service providers. While others say not prioritizing emergency shelter necessarily means people will stay in tents rather than indoors. Still others have argued that the only long-term solution is permanent supportive housing that is expensive and slow to build.
The GrowSF Take
Whether you consider this a strategic pivot or a failure depends on how you think about homelessness. If, like GrowSF, you acknowledge that SF’s homelessness crisis is a mix of poverty, mental health problems, and drug abuse, then this change makes a lot of sense. Our existing system does work quite well for those who are just poor or down on their luck, but it fails those who lack the capacity to care for themselves.
If you think that simply giving people a bed to sleep in without treating their illnesses is enough, then you can consider this a failure. We think the reality is more complex than that, which is why we have repeatedly called for expanding the availability of drug treatment beds in addition to adding more shelter beds.
The outcome we seek is to get people off the street, into the services they need, and through our supportive housing system. If a metric like "beds" isn't going to get us to that, then we should pivot. Should the Mayor have known "beds" wasn't the right metric? Maybe. But campaign promises rarely stand up to the facts you learn on the job. In politics, one man’s flip-flopper is another man’s adaptive problem-solver.
SFPD will hire retired officers to staff events and homeless shelters
The Facts
The City and the police union have agreed to recruit an estimated 50 to 100 recently retired officers—working part-time without benefits and paid hourly—to staff concerts, parades, festivals, navigation centers and homeless shelters beginning this fall, reports the Chronicle.
The idea is to free up current officers for patrol and investigative duties and reduce reliance on overtime, which has been surging amid a roughly 500-officer staffing shortfall.
The Context
SFPD still faces a shortage of officers, with just 1,466 sworn officers against a 2,074 goal. Special events and dedicated patrols take officers off of normal duty and rack up expensive overtime pay.
The GrowSF Take
It’s a nice idea, and we’re glad it’ll cut down on the massive overtime spending while freeing up police to do police work. We’ve heard SFPD is also working on recruitment improvements, too, and hopefully we’ll have more to share on that soon.
Recent & upcoming openings
A great city is constantly changing and growing, let’s celebrate what’s new!
Al Pastor Papi’s new permanent home
WHERE: 232 O'Farrell Street
WHEN: 11am-3pm Tues-Thurs, 11am-8pm Fri & Sat
Longtime food truck favorite, Al Pastor Papi, has a new permanent home thanks, in part, to the City’s Vacant to Vibrant program, first started under former Mayor Breed.
They’re taking over a former Chipotle to bring their signature al pastor tacos and burritos plus his take on a filipino quesabirria, called “quesadobo.” According to EaterSF, they combine “tangy-sweet chicken adobo, melted Oaxacan cheese, and calamansi-vinegar slaw tucked inside a crispy tortilla, with a dusting [of] crushed chicharrones on top.” See you in line!