Capp street in San Francisco has long been an area where prostituted, pimps and their customers in cars would congregate at night. Recently, neighbors who live in one stretch of the street have complained that the situation has gotten much worse. There are trafficked women walking around nearly naked night and day. The customers race up and down the street in cars at all hours, frequently waking people up and making it hard to sleep.

In many parts of America this would be dealt with by arresting people and the community would support the police in dealing with the problem. But of course that’s not how things work in California. A state senator helped change the law so that loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution was no longer a crime on the grounds that it could be used to target trans people. Police say that doesn’t leave them with a lot of options other than much more time consuming undercover work, but Sen. Scott Wiener doesn’t care about that.

And when neighbors on Capp street complained a city supervisors suggested the solution was to legalize prostitution and set up a red light district. She claimed this would reduce trafficking but how that would work wasn’t clear since legalization would almost certainly raise demand and create more incentive for trafficking while leaving police with few options.

Despite all of this, the city actually responded to the complaints and put up temporary barriers to make it more difficult for the customers to use Capp street as an open air brothel. Last week, they replaced those lightweight barriers with heavy concrete ones.

City workers moved to replace metal and wood traffic barriers on Capp Street with concrete ones over the weekend in another effort to slow prostitution on the street known for its sex trade after residents complained about the issues it created outside of their homes.

The new barriers, on Capp between the end of 18th Street and the beginning of 22nd Street, come just over a week after the city installed more temporary plastic gates at the behest of District Nine Supervisor Hillary Ronen’s office.

Santiago Lerma, a legislative aide to Ronen, said the new barriers are not permanent, but they “needed to install heavier barricades because the small ones kept getting run over or moved.”

Early reports suggested the barricades were working. A group of 170 neighbors signed a letter supporting the change.

“I think it’s the best thing they’ve done in… forever,” said Carl Connell, a longtime resident who lives on Capp St. “Now I can get up in the middle of the night and there’s no cars racing up and down the street, and no exploited women walking the street.”…

More than 170 neighbors signed a letter expressing their support for the barricades, adding they’ve reduced violence and restored peace in the area. The letter was presented to Mayor Breed and other city officials during a meeting on Tuesday discussing next steps.

But over the weekend the San Francisco Firefighters union took issue with the barricades on Twitter:

We want to work with DPW, MTA any other dept who wishes to close down a street in a safe and responsible manner. Parades, Sunday Streets, etc all do it in a way that keeps the residents safe. This is just the opposite.

— San Francisco Firefighters 798 (@SFFFLocal798) February 18, 2023

It’s not clear what fire the union was talking about but there haven’t been any fires anywhere on Capp since the barriers went up. Their complaints did get the attention of city supervisor Hillary Ronen who approves of the barriers and who is also the person recommending the city legalize prostitution.

I appreciate you all more than you know but trying to stop other really dangerous situations, violence, pimps assaulting sex workers, chronic stress and lack of sleep of residents. Hoping to work all together to consider and address all these threats to safety.

— Hillary Ronen (@HillaryRonen) February 20, 2023

It’s worth noting that these streets are still accessible. Each street is barricaded only at one end, turning it into a cul-de-sac which can be entered by cross streets from the opposite end. Here’s what it looks like:

Anyway, residents are happy and sleeping better for the first time in years. But of course this doesn’t solve the problem it just moves it somewhere else. Still, even a small, temporary win for order over chaos in the streets seems like a big deal in San Francisco. Here’s the story from a local ABC affiliate. As you’ll see, not everyone is happy about it.