December 13, 2009
Joe Eaton,Ron Sullivan
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If you've converted a piece of your San Francisco sidewalk into a garden strip lately - or admired someone's plantings as you walked by - you can thank Jane Martin for making the process easier and cheaper. An architect and landscape designer who runs Shift Design, she's the godmother of the city's new Sidewalk Landscaping Permit.
View More ImagesMartin, founding director of PlantSF (Permeable Landscape as Neighborhood Treasure in San Francisco), got into the depaving act six years ago when she lived on Shotwell Street in the Mission.
Shotwell's sidewalk was wider than its driving lane, an invitation to drive or park on the sidewalk. "I was looking for more space to garden in," she recalled. She realized that turning part of the sidewalk into green space would help keep vehicles off it. However, getting a permit for the work required an onerous process and an $800 fee.
What she wanted to do was considered an encroachment on public space for private benefit, something city policy attempts to limit.
"But it's really a public use for public space," Martin said. "It shouldn't be lumped in with the other things they try to discourage. I became inspired to make that easier for people because of the positive response I got from people in the neighborhood." She floated the idea with her neighborhood parks council but got nowhere, in part because of maintenance concerns: "How do you maintain a linear park that involves all these individual people?"
The catalyst turned out to be a sewer backup after a heavy rain in 2004. "With San Francisco's combined sewer system," Martin said, "it all goes to a wastewater treatment plant, which is terrific if it doesn't exceed the volume the system can handle. In most of the city, storm water has no place to go naturally. My home/office was in a place where the storm water backed up, blew a manhole cover off, came overland and flooded. I woke up with a river of black water in my home." Her sidewalk garden had absorbed the runoff like a sponge. "I now had a connection to a sustainability aspect," she said, "and that's what gained traction for PlantSF. We needed a way to remove obstacles so we could start depaving access areas."
Long active in neighborhood advocacy work, Martin took her concerns to City Hall contacts she had made and got the attention of newly elected Mayor Gavin Newsom. Newsom and the heads of the Public Utilities Commission and Department of Public Works gathered at her office, where she showed them charts, graphs and video footage of the flood. "The mayor really took ownership of the issue," she said. "He turned to the department heads in the room and said, 'What are we going to do to solve this problem?' "
The result, in 2006, was a law creating a special permit that requires a sliding-scale fee of $160 to $215 and allows neighbors to collaborate. Martin sees depaving as "something simple that people can do, either piecemeal or systematically. I really feel that people want to do it themselves." To that end, she created a PlantSF Web site and has developed how-to information for translation into Chinese and Spanish. She's also partnered with the mayor's office, Recreation and Park, DPW, the PUC and the San Francisco Parks Trust (her fiscal sponsor) on neighborhood makeovers. So far there have been about 500 applications for the new permit, and tens of thousands of square feet have been transformed.
"You can do it almost everywhere," Martin said. "The PUC will tell you that nearly anywhere you can open up the sidewalk, water is perfectly appropriate to go into the ground. In addition to homeowners, schools and businesses can do this." She worked with Flora Grubb Gardens, which was facing a DPW order to replace 3,000 square feet of sidewalk. "This is a perfect instance of using the sidewalk landscaping permit," she said. In the end, 1,600 square feet went from pavement to garden. With help from PlantSF, sidewalk conversions have blossomed in the Mission, Haight-Ashbury, Bayview and Marina districts.
The benefits have been tangible. "The mayor and the board have a strong desire to green the city, not just for esthetic reasons but for the storm water management benefit," said Department of Public Works director Ed Reiskin. "What Jane is doing almost single-handedly is being a catalyst in support of these efforts to turn hardscape into softscape."
Martin has noticed other benefits: "Not only do you have more eyes on the street, but people are out more talking to each other because they have occasion to stop and look at the plants. They become magnets for social interaction - you don't even have to speak the same language to appreciate the plants." Renters and others with no space to garden have bought into the conversion projects. Sidewalk gardens can even be food sources, as long as gardeners are careful about soil conditions and avoid plants that store toxins.
Martin is particularly excited about a new direction for PlantSF. The group has a grant to take its sidewalk landscaping model to the Sunset District, where the PUC is looking at a low-impact-design strategy - depaving and rainwater harvesting - to keep storm water out of the combined sewer system and to recharge the aquifer.
Learn more
PlantSF: plantsf.org. Visit the site for Sidewalk Landscaping Permit application form and guidelines, and a gallery of projects.
Shift Design: shiftdesignstudio.com. See Planting page for more of Jane Martin's projects.
Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan are naturalists and freelance garden writers in Berkeley. Check out their Web site at www.selbornesurveys.com or e-mail them at home@sfchronicle.com.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/columns/thedirt/#ixzz0ZsqNGf9n
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