Pretty much everyone who walks or rolls on San Francisco sidewalks has seen them: Big ol’ planters, either shaped like long metal tubs or short barrels, sitting on the concrete like boulders in a desert.
Sometimes they look like they’ve been around forever, with healthy plants and neat, symmetrical placement on the edge of a walkway. More frequently, they look like the half-finished work of a drunk contractor, placed in strange angles, covered in graffiti, and devoid of flora.
Much has been written about these planters, as well as early efforts by critics to challenge the rise of “hostile architecture” designed to block unhoused people from parking their tents on city sidewalks.
But after months of planning, a group of activists is finally going public with a campaign to stop the spread. They argue the vigilante vibes of property owners installing planters are counter-productive to addressing the city’s homelessness woes. And they say the city has failed to enforce its own rules, perhaps because they’ve been coordinating with pro-planter efforts all along.
The group has launched a new website, GardensNotBarricades.com, and are calling upon other residents and advocates for unhoused people to join the fight.
“The misuse of planters has already reached a saturation point in neighborhoods like the Castro, the Mission, and Lower Polk. They're ugly, most are barely maintained, and they obstruct far more space on the sidewalk than the tents they were meant to squeeze out ever did,” Scott Feeney, a representative of the project, told me. “Anyone can see this is a non-solution that's backfiring badly, but the city Department of Public Works doesn't agree.”
The launch comes as DPW is on the cusp of finalizing its new policy on “beautifying” SF streets. The “Love Our Neighborhoods” ordinance got the green light from the Board of Supervisors in December, and its intent is multi-faceted: Through a new permitting process, residents will be able to install amenities like “free” libraries, benches, murals and more, all with less red tape and bureaucratic confusion than in the past.
Some projects will only require self-registration with the city, while others — like murals, tiled staircases, and “minor landscape infrastructure” — will require a permit and a fee. Despite their bulk, planters are currently considered a “tier one” amenity that only requires self-registration and no fee if installed by a single property owner, according to Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon.
The laissez-faire rules are why Feeney and other activists are so critical of the “Love Our Neighborhoods” plan: The city is using looser rules to “institutionalize” a tool of displacement after failing to enforce existing guidelines on planters, they argue.
The group showed Gazetteer a map documenting hundreds of planters around the city, many of which appear in violation of city rules on sidewalk installations, including by being cemented to the ground, blocking curb access, and occupying a majority of the sidewalk.
Naturally, the people who are installing the planters see it a slightly different way.
Francesca Pastine, an artist and longtime San Franciscan who has lived in the Mission for decades, has been instrumental in bringing more planters to the streets as president of the Inner Mission Neighborhood Association.
In the last few years, Pastine has organized a variety of neighbors to buy and place wine-barrel planters, using volunteer labor and donations to pay for it. That keeps the cost down to about $100 a planter, she tells me.
“My block is so improved, and it’s not only because of the planters. I’ve had bad conditions in my neighborhood for eight years. We’ve had a lot of drug use, drinking on the street, throwing trash, a lot of tents and unsheltered people. And we did put down planters, but they don’t stop people from sleeping in public. It’s not a solution for homelessness. Only the city can figure that out,” Pastine said. “What the planters have done is allow residents to feel that they have shared public space again. They give a signal that we love our neighbors and we have commonality, we’re a cohesive community. And we’ve had fewer problems over time.”
(Pastine is quick to assure me that the planters aren’t really about displacing anyone, but public records demonstrate that it’s often a part of a broader anti-homeless strategy. In the case of the Inner Mission Neighborhood Association, the planters are discussed in emails to city officials alongside efforts to deter encampments and even a request to shut down a “safe sleeping site” operated by the nonprofit Dolores Street Community Services for unhoused people.)
And despite activist criticism that the city’s upcoming “Love Our Neighborhoods” policy is too loose, Pastine is equally critical for the opposite reason: She calls it a pointless example of “bureaucratic morass,” and she’s still annoyed that nobody from DPW reached out to the Inner Mission Neighborhood Association. (DPW’s Gordon claims the department did multiple outreach efforts around the city.)
“Who are they going to prosecute over this?” she said with an incredulous tone.
In protest, Pastine launched her own petition last month, urging DPW to allow “unpermitted” planters around the city. While it’s only received 292 signatures as of press time, it’s indicative of how the planters have become a source of energy for residents to organize for political, and practical, change.
Some entities that installed planters, including the Pacific Vision Foundation on Van Ness, have been “cited” by DPW for not leaving enough room on the sidewalk. But critics note that the city is only responding now, on a case-by-case basis, after numerous complaints — and as activist and journalist Hazel Williams unearthed, there’s proof some city offices and departments coordinated with property owners repeatedly to install planters as a response to homeless camps in their neighborhood.
Bodycam footage obtained by Williams from the San Francisco Police Department in April show workers from the Lower Polk Community Benefit District, a group representing area property owners and businesses, waiting with metal planter troughs as police throw away an unhoused woman’s tent. Williams noted the inconvenient context: The city is under a federal court order to limit “sweeps” of unhoused people unless they are offered immediate housing options.
“The issue here is that the city fails to house people, so we’re left with this tension where residents are incentivized to complain about unhoused people who need somewhere to rest,” Williams tells me. “Of course the city needs more green space and little libraries. But public records show the real purpose for installing these big metal containers is to circumvent a federal injunction and abuse Public Works policy and displace people, violating the Americans with Disabilities Act in the process.”
The tension symbolizes the myopia of San Francisco’s fight around street conditions and homelessness, and you can expect to see an arms race in tactics to fight over planters in 2024. Although the Gardens Not Barricades group is sticking to its public advocacy campaign, other activists unrelated to the effort tell Gazetteer that they’re considering escalating the opposition by using graffiti on planters or even covertly destroying plants, which would leave property owners in violation of upcoming rules.
Meanwhile, stakeholders are shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to install and maintain planters around the city. While Pastine’s wine-barrel planters are a budget option, the large metal troughs reportedly cost $675 a pop. An effort to fundraise for planters along Harrison Street has brought in over $25,000, including $5,000 from a single anonymous donor.
As for what unhoused people think? It depends. A few people I spoke to in the Mission expressed a kind of resigned exhaustion, saying they were working around it. Meanwhile, a man camping along Harrison and 20th streets told me that the planters helped clear a rowdy encampment on a nearby block — “I’m just a middle-aged guy trying to sleep,” Hernán said with a grin.
So, not exactly the rhetoric one might expect. But Hernán’s eyes did grow big when I told him about the expense of the planters and how $20,000 fundraisers were floating around.
“Jeez. They should’ve just paid me!” he said, giggling.
