This May, we welcomed a new Slow Street to the network, considered a name change to a SF parks landmark and celebrated a renovation project on the beach. In case you missed it, read on!

SFMTA directors OK new Slow Streets in SoMa, reject Glen Park plan

Although Chenery was not added to the Slow Streets network this time, we’re glad to see SOMA gain new Slow Streets at Lapu-Lapu, Rizal, Tandang Sora, Bonifacio, and Mabini streets!

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San Francisco’s Decrepit China Beach To Get a Long-Overdue Facelift

The old rusting bathhouse is finally getting its makeover moment, with $25 million set to update what hasn’t been touched since 1954!

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SF leaders back name change for Golden Gate Park’s Stow Lake

SF Supervisors have called on the Recreation and Park Commission to find a new moniker for the Lake, removing the namesake of an antisemite. We hear Blue Heron Lake is an option…

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From hidden hilltops to epic playgrounds, mini parks are SF’s best-kept secret

Spy Muriel Leff (which we recently renovated) and the much loved Turk & Hyde in this list, as well as some lesser known gems throughout the city.

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How a San Francisco Housewife Gave Birth to a National Park

Amy Meyer’s determination to create ‘a park for the people, where the people are’ led to the nation’s first urban national park right here in the San Francisco Bay.

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How zoning can make or break a neighborhood.

Dropping off a library book, picking up a coffee, and grabbing groceries all in the same trip? Quick errands like these can feel like simple tasks or a frustrating mess depending on whether or not your neighborhood is ‘mixed-use’. 

Mixed use is an urban planning term that refers to a place or area that is “used or suitable for several different functions”. Jane Jacobs popularized the concept in 1961 as she urged cities to rethink the use of zoning ordinances, which at the time was a radical idea. 

Zoning ordinances are laws that determine if an area should be used for commercial, residential, industrial, public space, or a mixture. Historically, these area functions have been separated with hard boundaries. Instead, Jacobs advocated for intricate and localized areas that serve vast groups of people and functions. These areas, most commonly found in mixed-use zoned areas, can contain everything you need. Your home could be above a grocery store, which borders your office, which is next to your friend’s house, and so on.

Understanding why we do or don’t love the areas we explore helps us be better advocates for our city and our neighbors. Page Street, Haight Street from Divisadero to Stanyan, and Silver Terrace show the diverse array of outcomes that can come from different approaches to zoning within San Francisco. 

Page is a mostly residential street where the city has strategically allowed the placement of schools, libraries, and coffee shops. The residential feel of this street has led to a scattering of community gardens throughout, and its status as one of San Francisco’s Slow Streets has increased safety and local travel by foot or bike.  

Haight Street is more action packed. Famous for its iconic history, the street is a major tourist destination lined with eateries, shops, sidewalk sellers, and performers. A Neighborhood Commercial mixed-use designation encouraged housing to be integrated with ground floor businesses on Haight.

Across the city, Silver Terrace also has Neighborhood Commercial zoning at its center, but doesn’t allow for the mixing of housing and businesses. Despite a variety of zones within the neighborhood including residential, commercial, and industrial, Silver Terrace’s segregated zoning prevents it from meeting its potential as a bustling neighborhood. As a result, the neighborhood’s walkability, transit, and biking scores are lower than the city average. 

To create thriving neighborhoods, city planners need to prioritize what a community wants and needs, creating zoning plans in collaboration with neighbors. 

Next time you’re strolling down a San Francisco street, look around: are homes and businesses near each other? Is it strictly one or the other? How does this impact the feel of the neighborhood?

This April, two animals went head to head to be San Francisco’s official mascot, and San Franciscans were asked what they think of city services. In case you missed it, read on!

San Francisco’s fog is missing so far this spring. Here are two key reasons

The Bay Area is used to seeing an influx of spring fog, but Karl has been elusive so far. Hear from a meteorologist to understand what’s keeping him away.

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What makes the Lands End trail one of San Francisco’s best hiking trails

Just north of Ocean Beach, Lands End offers stunning views and hidden spots. Here are the top 7 reasons you should venture out to this magic trail.

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City Survey Reveals Opinion of SF Services Slipping

The Controller’s Office just conducted the first survey of SF residents since 2019. See how San Francisco’s parks are stacking up amongst other city amenities in public opinion.

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CA State Parks offers tips on how to not ‘doom the bloom’ this spring

With superblooms popping up all across California, CA State Parks are chiming in with some tips on how to enjoy these spring attractions safely.

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Wild parrots thrash sea lions, named SF’s official animal

The San Francisco Chronicle recently put on a contest to name San Francisco’s official animal and the people have spoken: wild parrots edged out sea lions with 51.3% of the vote.

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This March, winter storms brought spring blooms across the city, and a study showed people are happiest in parks. In case you missed it, read on!

Wildflower Superblooms Explode in SF Parks After a Winter of Big Rains

Although recent atmospheric rivers brought a range of issues to the city, our local flora has thrived! Check out the article below to learn where you can find these wildflower blooms.

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S.F. Bureaucrats Gave Woman a Choice: Remove Free Library or Pay $1,400 After One Anonymous Complaint

Little free libraries and benches in residential neighborhoods have popped up all over the country in recent years, but San Francisco’s complicated permitting systems are getting in the way of this Pacific Heights pitstop.

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SF Seeks Feedback for 2nd Car-Free Promenade in City’s 2nd Largest Park

Similarly to JFK Promenade, John F. Shelley Drive in McLaren Park first turned car-free in the beginning of the pandemic. The roadway now has the potential to become a full time promenade featuring programming and improved access for pedestrians and bicycles! 

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Where People Are Happiest — and Saddest — in Big Cities

An analysis of almost 2 million geotagged tweets indicates that people express most negative emotions in offices and stadiums, but where do they feel happiest? Spoiler: we agree!

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As Demand for Open Space Soars, New York Gets a Public Realm Czar

To help unpick their own tangle of bureaucracy, New York City’s Mayor has appointed a public realm officer to oversee parks, plazas and car-free streets.

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The 15 minute city. You might have seen the phrase floating around, and wondered what all the fuss was about. Carlos Moreno, a Parisian professor, came up with the simple idea: urban residents should be able to fulfill “key aspects of life” within a 15 minute walk or cycle from their home. The benefits are clear, but some people are wary of the implications. 

The idea can be summarized as living, learning, and thriving within your immediate vicinity. Work, stores, healthcare, education, and leisure would all be within a brief stroll or ride from your home base. Some have called this idea a return to village style living, while others point out that it would move society away from car dependency. Some conspiracy theorists even claim it is a cover for state surveillance and control, discouraging residents from moving outside their neighborhoods. However, Moreno’s theory is about improving access, not restricting it. The goal of the 15 minute city isn’t to take away the car but to bring more within biking and walking distance, giving people more freedom, rather than confinement.

The environmental benefits are plentiful: the nub of the idea would promote carbon neutral transportation methods such as walking and cycling. There would be health benefits through increased exercise, decreased emissions from personal vehicles, and the eradication of food deserts. Social benefits through increased exposure to neighbors and economic benefits for local businesses would also follow from the 15 minute city model. We would all benefit by having the option to walk or ride to the places we have to go rather than having to drive.  

This isn’t an untested theory. In 2020, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo vowed to implement the model and has since been recognized for their influential vision and implementation. In Canada, the mayor of Edmonton has laid out similar plans to “[bring] facilities closer to people… providing better connectivity.” In the UK, there are plans for major cities to discourage driving during peak hours, in turn encouraging sustainable transport and lower emissions. San Francisco is ripe for this type of bold change. Our existing neighborhood layout lends itself to the 15 minute model, and a recent study ranks us as the second most viable 15 minute city in the US (behind Miami!). San Francisco is one of the most forward thinking cities in the world: why would our innovative pedigree stop short of improving livability in our neighborhoods? 

The final pieces of the puzzle require political will:

• Dedicated connection corridors that encourage walking and cycling. The city needs to create safe routes to everyday amenities within neighborhoods, without the need for a car. San Francisco’s grid system lends itself to creating dedicated corridors for different types of transportation: public, active, and private (i.e. cars). Our streets can be more than car lanes.
• More mixed-use zoning that intertwines housing, commerce, and services. The 15 minute city calls for both density and diversity. If neighborhoods are monolithic rows of single family homes around a single commercial corridor, then the theory will fail. In a city weighed down by bureaucratic red tape and never-ending rezoning arguments, someone will have to lead from the front to achieve this shift.

Resources

Fast Company: The case for the 15 minute city

The Conversation: 15-minute cities: how to separate the reality from the conspiracy theory

SF Examiner: San Francisco’s many “15-minute” neighborhoods

Congress for New Urbanism: The 15-minute neighborhood gets its 15 minutes of fame

In a city where just about any issue can be contentious, it’s good to remind ourselves that there might be more common ground than we thought. 

San Francisco’s public spaces became the subject of great debate in the past 12 months. Whether it was JFK Promenade, Slow Streets, or the Great Highway, San Francisco wrestled with what to do with our public spaces as we began to move beyond the pandemic. Should we return to the status quo, or should we treat the public realm like the civic amenity it actually is? San Franciscans overwhelmingly preferred the latter, but the process revealed deep divides between us. 

Or did it?

Taking a step back, there is a theme that’s shared by both proponents and opponents on almost all of these issues regarding the future of the public realm: connectivity. 

In the simplest terms, connectivity describes our ability to get to where we need to go. Think about all of the places that make up your daily life, like parks, grocery stores, your home, your workplace, and your friend’s apartment. Is getting to those places easy and fast? Or is it difficult, frustrating, and even dangerous? When it comes to changes to the public realm, our opinions are often heavily shaped by these questions. Outside of work and home, our perception of our city and the world we live in is largely based on the experiences we have in public spaces we pass through as we head to our daily destinations. 

The joy of comfortably walking, rolling, or jogging along JFK Promenade on the way to nearby neighborhoods speaks to its strong connectivity. The struggles that our neighbors with mobility challenges face when trying to reach their favorite park amenities is an example of poor connectivity. When it comes to Slow Streets, whether we can safely and easily access our parks, schools, and grocery stores or not is a question about links between these places. Are they strong or weak? Slow or fast? Protected or unprotected? Even the issue of traffic on streets adjacent to Slow Streets reveals itself to be about connectivity, as the throughline of these complaints is about how these changes can make a street undesirable or inaccessible.  

When you start really listening to what people on both sides are saying, it’s hard not to see our public spaces through the lens of connectivity.

Over the past few years we’ve seen the many benefits of our parks and public spaces, not the least of which are the social health opportunities they provide for our increasingly isolated world. Yet connecting an isolated world through our public spaces means confronting sticky issues like who can access these spaces and how they’re used. It’s important to recognize that this stickiness is unavoidable. Public spaces are just that: public. They’re one of our few truly shared amenities, and sharing them fairly across a deeply diverse and often inequitable landscape is inherently difficult. How can we emerge from the fog of competing wants and needs?

The Slow Streets program has begun to reveal a few solutions. Over the past few years, SF Parks Alliance has become deeply involved in Slow Streets, where linear parkways have started to emerge from the pavement. Similar to our work with Street Parks, Slow Streets show what’s possible when we treat roadways like a public amenity rather than a thoroughfare. The result? Neighbors embrace these spaces and are eager to care for them, improve them, and build community among them, making for a more useful and enjoyable public realm. 

To help reimagine the roadway, we’ve raised more than $250,000 in support of community projects along Slow Streets. We helped author a community-driven plan to support and expand Slow Streets across San Francisco, as well as SPUR’s Temporary to Transformative report, which examines the impact of Slow Streets and Shared Spaces, and we began to imagine their future. We started working with our amazing Community Partners at Page Slow Street, and helped create playbooks, toolkits, op-eds, maps, and more in support of these new public spaces.

Through all of this, we’ve been reminded that neighbors are often the best stewards of their spaces. They are the experts. They know what’s working and what’s broken, who’s engaged and who’s absent, and how to connect the dots to make these public spaces even more successful. They reinforced the idea that connectivity is key to our happiness and well-being, and by extension, so too are our public spaces. Just the other day, we stumbled upon a pizza party in what was once a parking space, as our friends at Page Slow Street shared slices with their neighbors.

In short, connectivity is key. Occasionally, it’s even delicious. 

With 2023 stretching out before us, we’re continuing our work to ensure greater empowerment of our community stewards, more creativity from our city partners, more empathy for our neighbors, and through all of that, more pathways to a better and more connected public realm. 

The world of parks and public spaces was busy this month. A new park took a step forward, while love was shared for the city’s iconic views and little known spots. In case you missed it, read on!

San Francisco’s next park is an 11-acre beauty on Lake Merced that could include a restaurant

After years of delay, upcoming new park ‘Lake Merced West’ took big steps towards becoming a reality! The park is expected to include walking paths, a boathouse and dock, bird watching areas, sport courts, a skateboard park, a ropes course, and aspirationally, a restaurant. If all goes smoothly, the park could be complete by 2026!

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Why visiting San Francisco’s Twin Peaks never gets old

What keeps visitors coming back to the best view in the city from the spectacular hike up to the 360-degree views and rare mission blue butterflies.

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6 Perfect SF Parks You’ve Never Been to but Need to Visit

For the first time since 2019, the city released its SF Park Maintenance Scorecard, a report on the maintenance levels at 166 of San Francisco’s parks and public spaces. Overall, our city’s parks received an average score of 91%, but just six park areas received a 100% rating. Click the article below to find out where these ‘perfect’ parks are and visit these hidden gems.

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Two Cupids Are Spreading the Love All Over Page Slow Street

This Valentine’s Day, Page Slow Street was decked out with heart shaped love letters and signs written to significant others, friends, roommates and even pets. Read some of the submissions and hear from the two cupids making this a reality!

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Map shows exactly how walkable every Bay Area neighborhood is

Check out how your neighborhood stacks up in walkability and access to public transport according to The Environment Protection Agency’s (EPA) walkability index!

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There are a lot of street types in San Francisco’s city limits, including freeways, promenades, slow streets, arterials, and alleys. The rules guiding behavior on each are clear and understood for the most part, but ‘neighborways’ often confuse users.

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) defines neighborways as “…residential streets designed to give priority for people, young and old, to walk and bike”, aiming to tailor street designs to each neighborhood. So, a neighborway is a street that doesn’t give vehicular traffic priority. But how is that different to a promenade or a slow street? 

A promenade restricts vehicular traffic altogether, like JFK Promenade, or the Great Highway on weekends and holidays, while a slow street, like Page Street in the Haight, allows vehicle access but discourages and redirects cut through traffic, prioritizing active transportation, like walking or biking, instead. 

Neighborways on the other hand, allow, but deprioritize traffic. They do not try to discourage vehicular traffic, but instead aim to calm traffic using tools like speed bumps, pedestrian islands, and bicycle ‘sharrows’.

The other big difference is users on foot are encouraged to use the roadway on promenades and slow streets; however, on neighborways, pedestrians are not allowed to walk in the street.

Curious to see neighborways in action? The most extensive plan for a network of neighborways in San Francisco is in the Sunset District (map), due to be implemented in 2023. Plans are also being developed to incorporate neighborways into the roadway redesign at Lake Merced, with construction due to begin in Spring 2023 (map insert).

Resources

SFMTA Sunset Neighborways Network Project

SFMTA Slow Streets Project

SFMTA How to use Slow Streets Fact Sheet 

SFMTA Lake Merced Quick Build Project

SF Planning Better Streets Plan