8/18/2016 Update

We had a successful meeting on Saturday with our neighbors and with Supervisorial candidate Joshua Arce and Carolina Morales from Supervisor Campos's office to discuss our concerns about, hopes for, and past experience with trying to improve the condition of the Tompkins Stairs.  

In addition, the DPW/SF Parks Alliance "Clean and Green Crew" came and cleaned out a lot of trash and trimmed back trees and bushes.     

We have an invitation out to Supervisorial candidate Hillary Ronen (who recently stepped down as Chief of Staff to our current supervisor, David Campos) to take a tour of the stairs as well.

We discussed several options:

  • Getting DPW to turn the property over to SF Rec and Parks and have it turned into a park.
  • Turning the property into community gardens (similar to Ogden Gardens). 
  • Petitioning DPW to "accept" the property and take responsibility for cleaning and maintaining it (it is currently an "unaccepted" or "paper" street, and according to city code they are not legally responsible for keeping it clean).
  • Working with DPW, SF Parks Alliance, candidate Arce, Supervisor Campos, and others to try again to get grants and in-kind donations to improve the stairs; including: 
    • Getting a water meter and irrigation system installed
    • Getting lighting
    • Having a new and more ambitious landscape design developed
    • Getting grants and donations to implement the design
    • FYI, the Athens Avalon Greenspace, in the Excelsior, is a similarly-sized set of stairs that were recently renovated in this manor.  I went by the other day and they look pretty good
      • To that end, we are interested in developing our own "vision" for the stairs/park:  
      • Create different tiers, or levels?
      • Playground?
      • Dog run?
      • Slide?
      • Community gardens?