While big stores close, La Cocina is building community in a neighborhood facing homelessness and addiction
From her coffee counter in La Cocina Municipal Marketplace, Santana Tapia has a clear line of sight into every gloomy prediction that has hitFrom the marketplace’s windows in the heart of the city’s troubled Tenderloin District, she notices the decline of foot traffic that has come from employees choosing to work at home rather than travel to their downtown offices, spawning some dire predictions of an economic “doom loop”.
While Whole Foods abruptly closed the store it had opened just a year ago in a fancy new apartment complex up the street, citing concerns for employee safety, La Cocina’s entrepreneurs are taking the opposite tack.
And in the downtown financial district, with its towering skyscrapers, high vacancy rates in the office buildings have infected the small businesses at street level, leaving vacant storefronts everywhere.Central to many of these problems is the now unreliable attendance of the 130,000 or so commuters, who used to swell the city’s population during the day as they flocked to their office jobs.
But, she argued: “That’s OK. Empty office buildings have fueled dire predictions about economic doom and screaming headlines about the death of downtown. Let’s keep some perspective. In 1907 [after the great 1906 earthquake], downtown was mostly rubble and ash. That’s considerably worse than today’s shift in how people work.”Photograph: Erin Ng/Courtesy La Cocina Kitchen
In the hours before La Cocina’s two-man security team arrives and conducts a daily cleaning, the sidewalks in front of the marketplace are often packed with people sleeping on cardboard and littered with discarded drug paraphernalia. Bahloul said there had been at least one drug overdose in La Cocina’s bathroom and her husband had once witnessed a shooting across the street.
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