Vol. I, No. 57 · San Francisco — Friday, October 30, 2026 · Price: free on request, while funds last
BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL
Amoeba Music has sold records at 1855 Haight Street since 1997, on the last block of Haight before Golden Gate Park. Since January 2022, an inspector from the city Controller’s office has walked it four times and counted the graffiti.
Each time, the count on private property passed 100, the most the inspection form records. Each tag or sticker on private property or the sidewalk in front of it counts as one; murals an owner appears to allow do not. Two visits, two and a half years apart, fell during a 2022 pilot offering free graffiti removal on commercial streets like this one. The last came after the board made the offer permanent in October 2025. The private count never came off the ceiling, and above it the form stops counting, so the block could be cleaner than in 2022 and still read the same. Whatever the program has done here, the city’s own inspection cannot see it.
City law makes owners responsible for graffiti on their property. After a notice from Public Works, an owner has 30 days to remove it or ask for a hearing. Otherwise the city may do the work and bill at least $500. The board suspended the rule during the pandemic, 311’s notes say, and the first inspection fell in the pause.
The 2022 pilot, a bill by Supervisor Myrna Melgar, offered owners that work free instead. Its commercial zoning puts this block in the program. On October 7, 2025, the board voted 11 to 0 to make it permanent. Bilal Mahmood, the supervisor for the Haight, was a cosponsor. The board found the pilot had produced “meaningful abatement,” or removal, “of graffiti in commercial corridors,” and the program runs “provided that Public Works has sufficient funds.”
The city owned the corner at Stanyan throughout. It bought the McDonald’s there in 2018, and the site sat cleared, then under construction, at all four inspections. Its 160 affordable homes opened July 28.
Last fiscal year all 12 of the Controller’s inspections on six blocks of the Upper Haight, Central Avenue to Stanyan, hit the private ceiling. They averaged at least 161 marks in all, against 95 on 75 Mission blocks and 46 on 75 in the Tenderloin. The office found data from clusters as small as the Haight’s “insufficient to support concrete findings” about a neighborhood, so this story draws none.
311 took 178 graffiti reports for the block’s addresses in 2025, not counting duplicates, against 71 in 2019. This year it has taken 199 through October 19, against 125 by that date last year. Since January 2025, 319 of the 377 concerned public objects such as poles and mailboxes; 58 concerned private property.
The count can fall. In the Tenderloin, whose sample the office calls its most representative, two community benefit districts funded by local property owners remove graffiti from private walls with the owners’ permission. There the average per inspection dropped from 75 to 46 in a year. The report does not credit any one cause.
An inspection is a snapshot: the office says it shows what a pedestrian would meet on a given day, not how much cleaning was done. In 311’s notes, 10 reports here since 2025 were closed as “abated before notice,” the graffiti gone before a notice went up; three were at 1810 Haight. This year the notes record repair notices posted at eight or more of the block’s addresses, 1810 among them. No public list shows which owners here have used the free program. The likeliest reading, and the desk is only moderately sure of it, is that the marks go back up faster than anyone takes them down.
Castro Halloween police reports fell from 20 times a normal night to 1.5 times
After a 2006 shooting the city ended the street party. A four-block night market on 18th Street returns Saturday.
BY EMMETT GRADY, ARCHIVES
Between 6 p.m. on Halloween 2005 and 6 the next morning, San Francisco police wrote 50 incident reports within a few blocks of Castro and Market Streets. On the eight nights around it, they wrote about two a night.
That night was the Castro’s Halloween street party, which drew “several hundred thousand people,” the Advocate reported in 2007. Police reports count what officers wrote down, not crowds or danger. In 2006 a gunman wounded nine people at the party, on a night with 26 reports, the fewest of the party years. The city shut the party down. It has since come back as a night market on 18th Street, which returns Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m., free. Last Halloween, police wrote five reports in the same area.
From 2003 through 2006, Halloween averaged 36 reports in the area, about 20 times the nights around it. For 2007, the city said no. That August, Audrey Joseph, president of the Entertainment Commission, told the Chronicle, “There will be no party.” Supervisor Bevan Dufty wrote to 110 business owners asking them to stay closed. Halloween had become “a night in which the neighborhood is overrun by people who come to gawk, not celebrate,” he said.
From 2007 through 2017, Halloween still averaged eight reports, more than three times an ordinary night. Since 2019 it has averaged three, against two on the nights around it. In 2018, the first year in a new police records system, it was still nine, so the switch does not explain the drop. The reports cannot say what does.
The Civic Joy Fund and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence brought Halloween back in October 2023, as a daytime event with no closed streets and the costume contest indoors. “Just because something terrible happened doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it another go in a different way,” Manny Yekutiel, a founder of the fund, told CBS News that year. Yekutiel is one of four publicly financed candidates for District 8 supervisor on Tuesday’s ballot. The Castro Night Market held its first Halloween edition on the night of October 31, 2025. Police wrote five reports in the area, against 1.5 on the nights around it. Counts this small swing by chance, so five against 1.5 says little either way.
The department changed record systems in 2018, so the desk compares each Halloween only with the nights around it in the same file. The twentyfold spike is gone in both, and of that much the desk is confident. Smaller crowds, a closing time and different policing would each fit, and the reports cannot say which mattered.
ON THE CALENDAR
City Creatures. Pestec IPM, a pest control company, fills a Rincon Hill gallery with art about urban wildlife, talks by day and a DJ by night. Evening ticket money goes to a University of San Francisco family-business program. By 1:46 a.m. Thursday, 252 people had registered, up from 10 on August 27. It is a one-off, not a series.
Friday, October 30, 5 p.m. · Terra Gallery, Rincon Hill · $15 evening ticket; the daytime exhibit is free · lu.ma/4zcbs4yk
From the desk’s calendar: public Luma pages, counts as of 1:46 a.m. October 29. Tell the desk about the gathering it missed.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. Registered businesses, DataSF g8m3-pdis: Amoeba Music, since November 15, 1997. 2. Controller’s street inspections, DataSF qya8-uhsz (2022–25) and 8kn2-p6vj (2025–26), route 2331: private 101 on all four dates; both files enter more than 100 as 101. 3. Controller, standards manual (2024). 4. Public Works Code Article 23; Ordinances 174-22, 195-25. 5. sfbos.org District 5 page; zoning map, DataSF 3i4a-hu95. 6. Controller, FY26 standards report and data description. 7. 311 Cases, DataSF vw6y-z8j6, graffiti at 1800–1899 Haight, duplicates excluded; 2019 to 2025: 71, 128, 131, 282, 327, 212, 178; case notes. 8. Mayor’s Office, July 28, 2026; KQED, July 29, 2026. All queried October 30, 2026. Queries in receipts.json.
2. SFPD incident reports, DataSF tmnf-yvry (2003 to May 2018) and wg3w-h783 (2018 on): longitude −122.4395 to −122.4300, latitude 37.7575 to 37.7665, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., one count per incident. Halloween 2003–2006: 33, 33, 50, 26; the eight nights around each (October 24 to 30, November 1), 1.7. 2007–2017 averaged 8.4 (2.5); 2019–2025, 3.3 (2.2); October 31, 2025, 5 (1.5). 10. The Advocate, August 10, 2007, citing the San Francisco Chronicle. 11. CBS News Bay Area and KTVU, October 28, 2023; Mission Local, October 30, 2025; Castro Halloween 2026 page on Eventbrite. 12. Ethics Commission public financing, DataSF 5sxz-kk66. All queried October 30, 2026. Queries in receipts.json.
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