Ask the three viable candidates for District 10 supervisor how they'd revive Bayview's struggling Third Street, and you get near-identical to-do lists: grants, cleaner transit stops, more housing. What none of them puts front and center is the hardest fact facing the corridor — a bridge rebuild set to wall Third Street off from the rest of San Francisco for about two years.

The contest to succeed termed-out Supervisor Shamann Walton has become a referendum on fixing a commercial strip whose tax receipts still trail their pandemic lows. But the winner won't govern a stable corridor — they'll govern a work site. San Francisco has certified the environmental review to tear down and rebuild the aging Islais Creek Bridge, a job that stops the T-Third light rail and blocks cars, buses and pedestrians on Third between Marin Street and Cargo Way for roughly two years. That gap — between the candidates' revival pitches and the coming severance of the street itself — is the test their 100-word answers sidestep.

Third Street has been sliding for years. By late 2025 the Bayview-Hunters Point corridor was still taking in less sales tax than it had at the depths of the pandemic — roughly $100,000 under that floor, Mission Local found in March (external source, opens in a new tab). A strip that once lured restaurants with rare-for-SF affordable rent is now shedding them: Lucky's, Walgreens and Telos Coffee all gone, four grocers and no pharmacy left, and enough missing basics that residents shop outside the neighborhood — what the report called "retail leakage."

Dontaye Ball, who owns Gumbo Social and chairs the Bayview's business association, told the outlet the city has no "clear plan" to pull shoppers onto Third Street, and argued the corridor deserves the same attention officials are lavishing on a recovering downtown.

The city, meanwhile, is preparing to make that street physically harder to reach. Its Planning Commission certified the bridge project's final environmental report last November with no appeals, and San Francisco Public Works (external source, opens in a new tab) now projects construction starting in fall 2028 and running about 24 months. During that stretch, the agency says, nothing crosses Third between Marin and Cargo Way — no cars, no pedestrians, and no T-Third, whose riders would be pushed onto substitute shuttle buses while two Muni lines that serve the corridor, the 15 and the 91 OWL, reroute around the site. The drawbridge, built around 1950, would come down and rise again as a fixed span.

The prospect has rattled the corridor for years. When The San Francisco Standard first detailed the plan in 2023 (external source, opens in a new tab) — then pitched at around $60 million, with construction once floated for 2025 — merchants warned it would gut a neighborhood still clawing out of the pandemic. One of the sharpest voices was Theo Ellington, the Bayview Opera House director now on the D10 ballot. He called the plan "a devastating blow," and said cutting the community's main transit artery was, in his word, "mind-boggling."

Three years later, handed a Mission Local questionnaire this month, Ellington left the bridge unnamed. He promised to launch an economic-development planning process in his first 30 days, bring back beat cops and ambassadors, steady the T-train and expand vacant-storefront pop-ups. His pitch, he wrote, is personal: he grew up on Third and Newcomb, above a liquor store.

He called the plan "a devastating blow," and said cutting the community's main transit artery was, in his word, "mind-boggling."

His opponents kept to the same register. J.R. Eppler, a small-business attorney and Potrero Hill homeowner, floated tidier transit stops, storefront activation and a community benefit district to fund upkeep, plus mixed-use housing with groceries and pharmacies on empty lots. Dion-Jay "DJ" Brookter, who ran Young Community Developers, pushed capital access, workforce support and "growth programs, not just one-time grants" — a dig at the city's grant-first habit — and marketing the corridor beyond the neighborhood. Every one of them named thin foot traffic as the core problem. None laid out how a corridor holds its footing during the two years part of that traffic is detoured around a construction pit.

The questionnaire (external source, opens in a new tab) itself flagged the bridge as the looming risk, and limited the series to the three candidates who've landed a major endorsement or logged campaign money — three of a 10-person field. Their backers split along familiar lines: Ellington holds the San Francisco Democratic Party, former Mayor London Breed and Sen. Scott Wiener; Brookter has Walton, Supervisors Connie Chan and Myrna Melgar, and a bench of former progressive supervisors. Willie Brown, true to form, has endorsed both frontrunners.

The candidates agree on where the corridor should end up. What their 100-word answers duck is the detour in between.