Night markets are about as close to a free-market success story as you'll find in San Francisco governance. Small vendors, low barriers to entry, communities showing up voluntarily to spend money and enjoy their city after dark. No billion-dollar bond measure required. No five-year environmental review. Just people selling food, crafts, and goods to other people who want to buy them. Revolutionary concept, we know.

The expansion into new neighborhoods is smart for a couple of reasons. First, it distributes economic activity beyond the usual downtown-and-Marina corridor that gets all the love. Small business owners — many of them immigrants and first-generation entrepreneurs — get access to foot traffic without signing a soul-crushing commercial lease. Second, night markets do something that tens of millions in "activation" grants have failed to do: they actually get people out on the streets, spending money, and feeling safe in their neighborhoods.

There's a broader lesson here that City Hall habitually ignores. When you reduce red tape and let entrepreneurs do their thing, good things happen organically. You don't need a task force. You don't need a czar. You need a permit process that doesn't take six months and a health code framework that's rigorous but not punitive.

The real question is whether the city will let this momentum build or slowly strangle it with bureaucratic creep. We've seen it before — something works, so the Board of Supervisors decides it needs more "oversight," which means more fees, more delays, and eventually fewer vendors showing up.

For now, though, this is a win. More neighborhoods getting night markets means more economic opportunity spread across the city, more reasons to walk around your block on a Friday night, and more proof that the best things San Francisco does are the things it gets out of the way of.

Go find your local night market. Spend some cash. Support a small vendor. That's civic engagement that actually works.