Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a greenway?
Greenways are corridors of undeveloped land preserved for recreational use or environmental protection.
Greenways are often created out of abandoned railroad right-of-ways. In fact, the 4.5 mile Ohlone greenway, connecting Berkeley all the way to Richmond, was formerly a railroad!
Some examples closer to home: the Glen Park Greenway which runs along the former banks of Islais Creek and the Visitacion Valley Greenway.
Several parts of this parcel’s railroad, built in the 1860s to connect San Jose and San Francisco, have already been turned into green spaces, which creates a kind of scattered greenway: Parque Niños Unidos across the Street (23rd between Treat and Folsom), and Juri Commons, diagonally connecting Guerrero St. and San Jose Ave. The ‘Bernal Cut‘ was created to accomodate the railway: now the heavy-trafficked San Jose Avenue, feeding the 280 highway. Imagine, before this cut, Glen Park and Bernal Heights were connecting neighbourhoods! Up along the cut, on both sides, greenways have sprung up too. See all the embedded links for more information.
Are you trespassing?
People have shared with us that adjacent business owners (the ones who use the parcel for parking) have told them that we are trespassers. Fact is: this land has no owners according to city records. Thus trespassing is not possible. We are merely showing the community, who have for so long been lead to believe this parcel is private, that in fact, it is not, and that everyone should feel welcome to pass through here, or enjoy the garden. We see this as a public service. In fact: until relatively recently, this was a publicly accessible parcel and used by pedestrians as such.
One of many examples from throughout the decades: “I remember walking on the tracks at 22nd & Harrison before they put up a fence as a short-cut to school Horace Mann Jr High late 50’s”.
How long has the greenway been in the works? In the media, the neighbours claimed not to know about the project.
Decades.
As Tree describes in his November ’22 blog entry: sometime in the 1980s he obtained a lease from Southern Pacific Railroad, for the symbolic amount of $1, to start a garden, on the spot we recently placed the planter boxes. Sadly, the warehouse owner at 931-933 Treat Ave pressured Southern Pacific to terminate the lease with Tree. We have also reached out to adjacent property owners throughout the years, who have mostly been unresponsive.
Mission Kids preschool has claimed in the media that they ‘need’ the parcel for teacher parking.
Proposals for a greenway were covered in the press as early as 2017, and numerous articles covered the project throughout 2018. Tree attended a “pre-application meeting” with Mission Kids preschool in 2018, in which the preschool introduced themselves and discussed their proposed building project on property adjacent to the greenway parcel, prior to them purchasing said property. The Planning department requires these meetings, which “provides neighbours an opportunity to raise questions and discuss any concerns about the impacts of the project before it is submitted for the Planning Department’s review”.
Tree discussed his longterm goal of creating a greenway, and specifically asked the school about the parcel. This question is transcribed in a document included in the school’s building permits, publicly accessible from San Francisco’s Planning Dept. website, see the snippet (and link) below. Below that is a required environmental traffic management plan, in which again, the school claims to need zero parking spaces and zero staff/visitor parking. They ticked off every single “transportation related measure”, meant to “encourage the use of transportation modes other than the automobile“.
In all their official documentation, permits, environmental evaluations, etc, supplied to the city and the public, the school claimed to need zero parking. As shown below, they even went as far as leading their future neighbours to believe that they wouldn’t use the parcel for parking at all, right as Tree was reviving the idea of a greenway and said news articles had come out. Currently, about 20-25 cars occupy the parcel during school hours. These are mostly parents’ cars, not teachers.
A few months prior to placing the first planter boxes, we discussed a future greenway with the school’s directors, including specifically where we wanted to put the planter boxes, and they did not oppose the project. Tree described this meeting in a blog post.
More links: