Land battles and falling windows

Good afternoon!

• There’s a border conflict in the heart of the Mission at Parcel 36 behind Parque Niños Unidos. The seemingly unowned wedge of former railroad is contested by several local groups: Mission Greenway, the “guerrilla gardeners” who want to make it into public green space, local business Monkeybrains, which borders the lot on the west, and wants to use it for loading and parking, and the Mission Kids preschool, on the eastern border of the lot. Mission Kids has called the cops on Mission Greenway at least twice, and said it would be happy to have the city plan any future park, parking, or housing on the site–as long as the process isn’t run by the gardeners. “It’s been incredibly challenging to work with them,” said Christina Maluenda, the preschool’s director. “They have failed to find common ground with us.”

As it stands now, Monkeybrains has applied for a permit to replace the old fence, and Mission Greenway has lodged an appeal against the construction. “They have a right to [their] warehouse,” said Mission Greenway member Jorge Romero. “But they don’t have a right to the adjacent lot.” Meanwhile, someone from Mission Kids puts a new lock on the lot’s west gate every week. And, every week, someone from Mission Greenway cuts it off.

• Asking the city to solve problems isn’t necessarily the quickest path forward. In the month of March alone, seven different downtown towers succumbed to intense windstorms, showering sidwalks below with massive plates of glass. In some cases, buildings failed spectacularly, losing windows from more than a dozen floors. But the Department of Building Inspection is turning the problem over to its two-person Façade Program–which is not only tiny, but glacially slow. Engineers familiar with façade reports, most of them made on older buildings, say it should take around four hours of work for DBI staff to review them. The average amount of time it takes for DBI to review and approve a façade report following its submission is 137 days.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin would like a little more attention to the problem. “You cannot have glass raining on human beings,” he says. “If they need more resources, more authority, a law —they need to tell us that.” The DBI plans to bring in a qualified outside engineering firm to study the spate of window failures and to “establish criteria for glazing system-specific façade inspections.” A firm may be hired as soon as this week–and perhaps the outside experts will get to getting the buildings secured before the next windstorm.

Hope to see you tomorrow at Manny’s for Joe Eskenazi’s talk with journalists from the Chron and the SF Standard.

More soon,

Sara