Welcome to Infrastructure Week 2025!
This week, we are celebrating the places we love—and the infrastructure decisions that helped make them great. First up: Valencia Street, San Francisco—a corridor that’s constantly evolving to reflect the city’s changing values. And, it’s fitting to start with this street which serves as an infrastructure investment and economic development hub for SF, supporting many small businesses. Because, this week isn’t just Infrastructure Week, it’s also Economic Development Week!
Valencia Street, known for its mix of retail and housing, access to transit and public parks (Dolores Park anyone?), sits at the heart of SF’s Mission District. Over the last 250 years, the corridor has become home for Latinx families, LGBTQ+ communities, and small businesses shaped Valencia’s identity. Its mixed-use activity made it a hotspot for cultural expression, activism, and economic resilience.
But before there was concrete or cable, this area was home to the Yelamu, who walked and traded along the routes that now crisscross the Mission District. Later, Valencia was named after José Manuel Valencia, a Californio land grantee whose family was tied to Rancho San José.
In the late 1800s, electric streetcars and cable cars helped turn Valencia into a vibrant connector, fueling the growth of working-class housing and retail. But that promise of progress was halted with the 1906 earthquake, exposing deep infrastructural vulnerabilities when parts of the street collapsed. Even though transit returned to Valencia, service diminished in the 1950s with the removal of street cars.
Over the past two decades, Valencia has become a testbed for people-centered infrastructure:
→ Home to numerous parklets
→ A Slow Street during COVID to support safe mobility and outdoor life
→ And more recently, the site of hotly contested center-running protected bike lanes which are currently being dismantled in favor of curb-side protected bike lanes
Valencia’s not perfect. Its future is still being debated. But it reminds us that the investments we make in transit and place builds economic growth and community strength.
#InfrastructureWeek #EconomicDevelopmentWeek
#ValenciaStreet #MissionDistrict #UrbanInfrastructure
#PublicSpaceMatters #SlowStreets #ParkletPower #MobilityJustice
#BuildingBetterCities #ResilientDesign #TransitHistory