Corner stores in parts of SoMa would be forced to close at midnight if the district’s Supervisor Matt Dorsey gets his way, as Dorsey proposes a corner store “curfew” similar to the one that’s been placed on parts of the Tenderloin.
Back during the London Breed administration, she proposed that corner stores in certain parts of the Tenderloin be forced to shut down between midnight and 5 am in hopes of discouraging the notorious drug trade and nighttime street circus in that area. That proposal became law in June 2024 (it went into effect the following month), and liquor stores on this 20-block area of the Tenderloin are now forced to close at midnight. The law is a pilot program that’s set to last for two years, until July 2026.
Supervisor Matt Dorsey says he likes the results he’s seen, and KGO reports that Dorsey wants a similar corner store curfew in his South of Market district. Just as with the Tenderloin curfew, this would mean that many liquor stores now open until 2 am would be forced to close at midnight.
"This is a strategy that's working. And it's not just displacing or pushing the problem around, it's actually reducing crime," Dorsey told KGO. “I think it's going to work to improve conditions on the Sixth Street corridor and elsewhere in South of Market."
Dorsey’s proposal is not yet submitted, and does not yet even have a map detailing which streets it would cover, and which stores would be forced to close early. Dorsey apparently hopes to introduce the proposal to the full Board of Supervisors in December, and get it passed in January 2026. In this case, the pilot program would be for 18 months, unlike the longer two-year curfew in the Tenderloin.
Naturally, SoMa convenience store owners think this is a terrible idea.
"Not just for me for example, the business owner, but also even the workers,” Habibi Market owner Abdulwahab al-Mehdhar said to KGO. “We're going to lose a lot of workers. A lot of workers, they're going to lose their money.”
The SF Standard points to a study conducted by Italian researchers that claims the Tenderloin liquor store curfew reduced drug crime by 56% during its first nine months, and did not push more drug crime to surrounding neighborhoods. (You can read that study here).
Though quite obviously, many people would dispute these Italian academics’ claim that Tenderloin drug crime is down by anything remotely approaching 56%.
"That's not true,” Habibi Market’s al-Mehdhar told KGO. “I have another business in the Tenderloin and that's not happening at all.”
Image: Kevin Y via Yelp
