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| Urban greening by local residents in San Francisco has brought a welcome splash of colour to places such as Harrison Street |
Her windows remained intact, however, and her garden thrived. In fact it attracted the attention of the local community and passers-by for positive reasons. People stopped to chat when she was out weeding and several neighbours asked her how they might go about planting their own front-of-house gardens.
Indeed this modest patch of succulents, evergreens and native flowers in one of the city’s densest neighbourhoods became the launch-pad for an ambitious greening project that has seen significant expanses of pavement replaced with gardens across San Francisco.
Martin, a landscape architect with her own practice, Shift Design Studio, had turned bare paving into an oasis of urban greenery before. A year or so earlier she effected a similar transformation on a 14ft-deep pavement in front of her former studio on Shotwell Street, a few blocks north of her current home. Fed up with the cavalier attitude taken by drivers who mounted the curb to overtake or even to park right outside her window, she decided to take action. “I was almost run over three times when stepping out of my door,” she says.
In San Francisco pavements are city property but it is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner to maintain the area directly in front of their homes. Martin soon discovered, however, that making any significant changes to the paving involved negotiating a complex web of red tape. “I persevered but I wouldn’t recommend going through that process to anyone else. It was onerous,” she says.
Then a problem in her neighbourhood’s combined sewer system proved serendipitous. It led the city’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, to see the advantages of introducing more permeable landscaping: the logic being that the more rain that goes into the ground, the less likely it is that sewers will become over-capacitated. With the support of the mayor’s office, Martin drafted a new, simple permit that allows residents to apply to landscape their pavements for a reasonable cost. The maximum one-off fee is $215 but this decreases to $160 when several households band together.
Lisa Zahner decided to do something about her rubbish-strewn pavement after picking up one discarded drinks can too many in front of her San Francisco home. Zahner lives on a busy street close to Alamo Square, a popular tourist destination due to its collection of Victorian “Painted Lady” houses. Her pavement was commandeered by pedestrians, dog walkers and cyclists and people stopping by at the bodega on the corner would routinely leave a trail of litter outside her front door.
Before she began the project Zahner asked her neighbours whether she could plant some of the space in front of their properties and offered to pay for the work herself. Several decided to get involved and the result was 65ft of landscaping and two extra tree wells on the street corner.
Zahner admits the plan stalled when the estimate for pulling up the 100-year-old paving came in. “It was more than $2,000,” she recalls. “I phoned my husband to see what he thought and he said: ‘What we put out in cash we will recoup in goodwill’. He was right. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.”
Although she originally envisaged a sea of wildflowers, these didn’t take well and the bed outside Zahner’s home is now a profusion of hardy, native plants that need little watering. There are Douglas Irises, various grasses, daisies, yarrows and a huge Acacia tree. “I love looking out of the window and seeing plants and grasses rather than concrete,” says Zahner. “But it’s more than that. We’ve got to know many more people – neighbours, regular dog-walkers and others who just stop to talk about the flowers.”
As a near-neighbour of Martin’s in the Mission, Anne Wintroub found inspiration close at hand and she helped orchestrate a community planting project that brought together 20 local homeowners. Martin helped to mentor the group but insisted that the participants should do the lion’s share of the work. “We spent evenings together working on the permit, choosing plants and applying for a grant to help fund it all,” says Wintroub. “The co-ordinated approach paid off because we had real buy-in from everyone involved.”
Today half of Wintroub’s block boasts drought-tolerant pavement landscaping and she says the effects have been palpable. The garage door that used to be a graffiti canvas has remained untarnished for months and neighbours who met while working on the planting keep an eye out for one another. “This has made people much more respectful of the neighbourhood,” she says.
There have been more than 500 applications from San Franciscans to turn paving into micro-gardens in the three years since Martin helped usher in the new sidewalk landscaping permit. Martin has also launched PlantSF a volunteer body to help promote permeable landscaping in the city. The many residential projects have been mirrored on public spaces such as traffic islands and street meridians with the help of initiatives such as the city-backed Pavements to Parks organisation. Martin estimates that in the past five years more than 15,000 sq ft of concrete along pavement and street meridians have been converted into sustainable gardens.
This greening of the urban landscape has proved beneficial on many levels, as well as the obvious aesthetic one. It has brought a sense of community into areas where neighbours might not have known each other before; the permeable landscaping creates a habitat for birds, butterflies and other wildlife; it reduces global warming by absorbing heat rather than reflecting it; anecdotal evidence suggests it has helped reduce crime; and local estate agents say the gardens are helping to boost property values.
Martin’s own pavement garden on Harrison Street has expanded to include a bulb of paving that juts out on the corner of her street as a traffic calming measure. Previously a magnet for the illegal dumping of old furniture and garbage, it is now a beautiful small park where locals such as Carlos Lopez, who has lived in the Mission for more than 20 years, stop by to pull out some weeds or sit on one of the built-in benches to chat to neighbours.
The planting includes purple Hibiscus, sage, lavender, Torch lilies and Californian poppies, which attract bumble bees and hummingbirds. “It was design by potluck,” Martin says. “Over time people have brought cuttings or flowers from their own gardens.” In one planter someone has hung a couple of translucent baubles that catch the sun in the breeze. Half embedded in the soil nearby is a toy dinosaur.
For Martin, whose mother was a gardener and who grew up with a large garden in suburban Iowa, this is how it should be. “I see the earth as potential. And it seems strange to me to seal off all that potential under concrete,” she says.
www.plantsf.org
www.shiftdesignstudio.com
sfpavementtoparks.sfplanning.org
