Parks & Rec
We have great parks. That’s just the beginning.
Every resident in San Francisco lives within a ten-minute walk of a park. That’s a 100% access score, and it’s tangible. D8 has more publicly accessible stairways per square mile than any other district, we have volunteer networks that maintain stairway gardens and run neighborhood cleanups, and Dolores Park draws 10,000 people on a sunny Saturday. The bones here are excellent.
What’s missing is the connective tissue. When the Parks Alliance ended in 2025, over 80 community groups lost their fiscal sponsor overnight. Those 80 groups are the organizations that actually program and maintain the spaces people use. The city has patched some of the funding, but nobody’s built the replacement infrastructure yet. On top of that, basic maintenance has a backlog of about 1,600 open tree cases via 311, and they’re operating on a median 866-day case age.
To put some of this in perspective, Dolores Park runs on the same staffing model as a neighborhood playground.
Other cities have figured out pieces of this. NYC inspects every park twice a year and publishes scores across 17 features. Pittsburgh secured $7 million in federal funding for its public stairways, while D8 hasn’t applied for a single dollar. Los Angeles spent $3.3 million on after-dark park programming and prevented an estimated $11.4 million in crime-related costs. The full report will have proposals for an open data scorecard, a destination management plan for Dolores, and a stairway network investment strategy. We have great parks and great neighbors. The system just needs to catch up.
In the meantime, if you know something I should know, tell me. I personally read every submission.
Prefer to talk about this in person? I hold regular office hours and am also happy to meet one-on-one.