Van Ness is a mess and it’s hurting businesses – Beaumont Enterprise

When construction started on Van Ness Avenue in 2016, the city said the transit improvement project would be completed by 2019. It is now June 2021, and construction is ongoing.

Local business owners say the construction has had an outsize impact on business.

"Oh my god, since we opened two-and-a-half years ago, we are in the middle of the construction," said Wael Naber, whose son Shadi Naber owns Salty's at 748 Van Ness. "It's really, really, very bad for business."

Wael Naber said customers intentionally avoid the restaurant given the construction. Online orders sometimes cancel because delivery drivers don't want to deal with the hassle that is Van Ness.

"What are you going todo?" asked Naber. "We have to be patient."

The Van Ness corridor is a vital connector between neighborhoods. It serves as the main artery between the southern center of the city and Marin, and it's dotted with restaurants, car dealerships and banks, among many other businesses.

In 2003, voters approved a proposition allocating tax dollars to provide rapid transit service on Van Ness. Supervisors approved the estimated $346 million project 10 years later. Construction broke ground in 2016, with the goal of being finished three years later. New projections say the project will be completed six years after its start date, in 2022.

A new report from the San Francisco grand jury attempts to make sense of the Van Ness mess. Therein, it describes how the estimated total cost of the project increased from $309 million to $346 million a 12% increase and attempts to make sense of the long delays.

The report traces the problem to three issues: It says that planning and design processes "failed to capture the scope of the project adequately;" contracting processes did not instill accountability; and ongoing project management "failed to remediate problems efficiently and effectively."

San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency has pushed back against the report's findings. The agency told the San Francisco Examiner that "the report tells a one-sided story with little emphasis on the contractor's roles and responsibilities."

Multiple key issues in the report have all been the subject of contractor claims which were resolved in a way that acknowledged shared responsibility between the SFMTA and the contractor," SFMTA spokesperson Erica Kato told the Examiner.

In the meantime, businesses on Van Ness are making do, and some say the impact of construction has leveled off.

"When it first started, there was a great, great impact financially," said Blanca Ramos, the manager at Peet's Coffee on Van Ness. "Right now, it's pretty neutral."

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Van Ness is a mess and it's hurting businesses - Beaumont Enterprise