When you think of nice sections of San Francisco, the one thing that they usually have in common is an abundance of trees lining the street. Whether it’s Upper Hyde, Upper Fillmore, Pacific Heights, etc., it’s a no-brainer. Have some trees and people like. Tear out all the trees and people don’t like. Such is the case with the vast majority of the Tenderloin. There are no trees which in addition to removing nature’s air purifiers, it makes all the streets look like crap. Every piece of trash stands out more and the street’s ass is exposed. I don’t care who you are, but an exposed ass in never a good thing.
Naturally, whenever I see a sign that they want to rip out trees in a specific place, I am annoyed. Sure, people are allowed their due course as an owner, but those sidewalks in front of their buildings are not theirs. They are ours and it’s more than a little frustrating that simply the threat of possible legal action by some ambulance chasing lawyer some day in the future due to some unknown future person walking by who might hit their head on a branch that doesn’t exist yet, will make people want to tear out the trees in front of their buildings.
It seems I am not alone in this and some concerned citizen put up notices that a couple of trees on Polk street between Bush and Pine (the ones pictured above) are set to be cut down. Here is the notice on the Polk Street trees:
There was a bit of information in these notices, but since seeing the one that I did on Post Street and going back the next day to take a picture, they have since all been removed. If anyone has any information on this campaign, please leave it in the comments section. I’ve seen far, far too many trees removed in the Loin to sit by idly and let more get taken out just in the name of whatever lame excuse people have to remove them. Oh yeah, bug David Chiu. It’s about time he did a bit more on the ground for his district in this area.
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11 Comments until now
I agree with you on keeping the trees, but doesn’t the property owner own the sidewalk space, too? I think so in SF.
The property owner is responsible for the sidewalk and there are very serious restrictions on what they can do there. But I don’t believe they technically own the sidewalk.
Is there a hearing scheduled? Taking down trees is a big deal in The City. In fact, The City just raised the fees to take a tree down. We have done several tree plantings in the TL, in conjunction with Friends of the Urban Forest — the building owner has to take responsibility for the tree on his or her sidewalk.
The sidewalk is public space, owned by the city. Property owners own the lot outlined in their property’s title, which does not include the sidewalk.
Hell, they just put some trees up a couple blocks down (btwn Hemlock & Post).
Here and there, new trees get planted, but it’s just idiotic to tear out older trees that are perfectly healthy as the new ones takes decades to get to the shady splendor of what they remove.
I don’t know when the hearing is/was for those trees as the quality for the camera on my phone is crap. Hopefully they’re still up on Polk, so you can stroll by and dig in to the details of it all.
Isn’t the takedown notice on the tree in front of City Kebab saying that it’s moving down a few doors? Or did I completely misread that a few weeks ago?
What happened to Tenderblog? I’ve been reading for a while in preparation for a move to the TL, and now that I’m here…no more updates?
Yeah, we have a problem in that we’re often out of the area for work. We loved writing on the blog up to the point where we stopped and would love to write more but the problem is that a) it’s kinda lame to write updates on other peoples’ updates and b) when we’re not here, our time is really strapped. We’ll put out some kind of more formal announcement in the next week or so.
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