Mid-Market is a neighborhood and development area in San Francisco

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

.

Location

It is focused on Market Street

Market Street (San Francisco)

Market Street is an important thoroughfare in San Francisco, California. It begins at The Embarcadero in front of the Ferry Building at the northeastern edge of the city and runs southwest through downtown, passing the Civic Center and the Castro District, to the intersection with Corbett Avenue in...

 starting at Fifth Street, ending at Ninth Street, and including a number of buildings down to Mission Street

Mission Street

Mission Street is a north-south arterial thoroughfare in San Francisco, California that runs from the city's southern border to its northeast corner. The street and the Mission District through which it runs were named for the Spanish Mission Dolores, several blocks away from the modern route. Only...

. It effectively creates a sub-neighborhood of the Tenderloin, SoMa, and Civic Center neighborhoods for the purpose of redeveloping the area.

History

Decimated by the 1906 earthquake and fire, the entire neighborhood was quickly rebuilt and for decades served as vibrant portion of the Market Street corridor.

For the last 40 years, it has been a blighted and crime-ridden area despite being a major thoroughfare for motorized, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic. Noted columnist Herb Caen

Herb Caen

Herbert Eugene Caen was a Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco journalistwhose daily column of local goings-on, social and political happenings,...

 referred to the neighborhood as 'le grand pissoir' because of the amount of public urination, defecation, and vagrancy due to a consolidation and expansion of homeless social services in the area, starting in the mid-1980s.

2011 Initiative

Past initiatives such as sponsored street murals have had little effect in revitalizing the neighborhood and in 2011 the city government turned to tax incentives to encourage businesses to move to the area.

The largest and most noteworthy of businesses to date has been Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

, who plan to move into the SF Furniture Mart building at Ninth and Market Street in 2012. The move by Twitter was initially met with a great deal of controversy, while other businesses such as Zendesk quietly took advantage of the tax break and moved to the area. A number of arts groups, such as the Black Rock Arts Foundation

Black Rock Arts Foundation

The Black Rock Arts Foundation was established May 2001 in order to promote public, community-based art installations. It is a not-for-profit organization, founded by several people who also direct Burning Man...

, are working to move to Mid-Market.