We Asked for a Park

The lot on 24th Street in San Francisco’s Noe Valley had been an auto repair shop, then a parking lot belonging to Noe Valley Ministry, the Presbyterian church next door, and from 2004 a farmers market set up there on Saturday mornings, stalls between the painted lines. In 2010 a group of neighbors calling themselves Residents for Noe Valley Town Square began asking the city to keep it open for good. The Recreation and Park Department bought the lot in 2013 for $4.2 million from its open space fund, the San Francisco Parks Alliance added a $450,000 grant on the residents’ behalf, and the square opened in 2016, with benches, a lawn, garden beds, and the market still there on Saturdays.

A neighborhood asked for a park and got one, Joni Mitchell’s parking lot run in reverse. What the families who used it asked for next was a bathroom.

A $1.7 million toilet

Matt Haney, the Assemblymember for eastern San Francisco, went looking for the money in the state budget. He asked the city what a single-stall restroom in the square would cost, and Rec and Park put the figure at $1.7 million, for about 150 square feet, with completion expected in 2025. “They told me $1.7 million,” Haney said later, “and I got $1.7 million.”

Nobody could say what the $1.7 million would buy, because no one part of the city was building the toilet. The departments’ explanation listed planning, drawing, permits, reviews and public outreach. The Civic Design Review Committee had to decide whether the restroom was “appropriate to its context in the urban environment.” Coordination ran through PG&E, Public Works, the Public Utilities Commission, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Mayor’s Office on Disability and the Arts Commission. The estimate was padded for the worst case, the city said, because of the onerous demands and unpredictable costs levied by PG&E. Two other single-stall bathrooms the city had recently built cost $1.6 million and $1.7 million, so the figure wasn’t even unusual.

There was also the labor agreement. In 2019 the Board of Supervisors adopted a project labor agreement requiring union labor on covered projects. The Chronicle reported that the bathroom shouldn’t have qualified, being under $10 million and not bond-funded, but the agreement shaped the conversation anyway. Haney said he’d be open to a prefabricated restroom if it didn’t violate the labor agreement. The head of the Modular Building Institute guessed, high, that one would cost about $200,000.

Once Heather Knight’s column in the Chronicle made the price public in October 2022, the planned celebration was cancelled, and the governor’s office said the money would be withheld. A Nevada company, Public Restroom Company, offered to donate a modular unit, and another firm offered the engineering and design. Both agreed to pay union crews to install it. A crane set it in place in March 2024, and on April 22 the toilet opened, at a cost to the city of about $200,000, most of it labor. It measures ten feet by five. The neighbors held a party and called it the Toilet Bowl.

One view into many responsibilities

Programmers have a word for what happened between Haney’s request and the crane. Indirection is reaching a thing through a reference to it, rather than holding it directly: a pointer to an address, which may hold another pointer, to another address. David Wheeler, one of the builders of the first stored-program computers at Cambridge, is credited with the line that any problem in computing can be solved by another level of indirection, and the usual sequel adds, except the problem of too many levels of indirection.

A citizen’s view of government works through indirection, and it gets one view. A Noe Valley parent sees an assemblymember, or a supervisor, or “the city,” a single face that seems to have promised a single thing. Behind it sit a department, a design committee, a utility, a building inspector, a disability office, an arts commission and a labor agreement, each holding one responsibility and each answering to someone other than the parent. Each could show it had done its part correctly. The toilet itself was nobody’s part. Follow the reference down and there was always another address.

So the promise and the result can come apart without anyone lying. The promise is made at the top of the chain, in words a voter can hold: a bathroom in the park, housing for people sleeping outside. The result is assembled at the bottom, by rules written for other purposes, and every layer rewrites the request a little in its own terms. By the time it reaches the ground, what gets built is what passed every review, which is not the same as what was asked for.

Who holds the layers

Indirection by itself doesn’t decide whose interest wins. Any large organization has it. What matters is who is organized well enough to write the rules at each level, and in California’s cities, as Labor Organization described for the state, the best organized constituencies of government are often its own employees and the building trades that contract with it. A project labor agreement, a prevailing-wage rule, a work rule against prefabricated parts: each is defensible on its own terms, each was won by people with a lasting stake in the outcome, and each sits in the chain between what voters are promised and what they receive. A voter shows up once, a union at every level of the process, every year.

Los Angeles ran the same chain at a much larger scale. In 2016 voters approved Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond for supportive housing for homeless people, with units projected at about $350,000 to $414,000 each. City Controller Ron Galperin’s audit in 2019 found a median of $531,000 a unit, and by 2021 the average for projects under construction was nearly $600,000, with some above $700,000 and one in planning estimated at $837,000. Galperin named several causes: the general cost of building in Los Angeles, the layered financing each project needed, city fees, accessibility rules, land use, and prevailing-wage requirements. No one of them accounts for the rise. Together they turned a bond sold as housing into fewer homes, later, at a cost per unit above the median price of a market-rate condominium in the city.

Neither the toilet nor the housing was stolen. Each passed through every layer it was supposed to, and in a government where the people staffing the layers are also among its strongest voting blocs, the layers don’t get thinner. Each one has a constituency that would notice its removal, and the voter who wanted a bathroom is not one of them.

The square itself

The town square came the other way. Neighbors with one concern, a market on Saturdays and a place for children to sit, kept at it for six years, and the city’s part was to buy a lot and get out of the way. Indirection was short. The residents could see what they were asking for, and they could see what they got.

The Myth of the Public Steward made the case that whoever has to live with what happens next takes better care of a place than an agency that doesn’t. Noe Valley is a small instance of it: those who lived beside the lot got a park, and the government that had to route a restroom through half a dozen offices, a utility and a labor agreement took three and a half years and $200,000 to set a ten-by-five box on a slab. On Saturdays the market still sets up where the parking spaces were.

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Sources

• San Francisco Recreation and Parks, Noe Valley Town Square
• SocketSite, Noe Valley Town Square funded, slated for 2016 opening
• San Francisco Parks Alliance, Noe Valley Town Square
• Wikipedia, Noe Valley public toilet
• Reason, San Francisco wants to spend $1.7 million on a single public toilet
• CBS San Francisco, San Francisco public toilet once priced at $1.7M opens to fanfare
• ABC7 News, Noe Valley neighborhood will finally get a public toilet
• Los Angeles City Controller, The High Cost of Homeless Housing: Review of Proposition HHH
• Reason, Audit finds cost of building supportive housing in L.A. exceeds median price of a market-rate condo
• LAist, Prop HHH homeless housing audit

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A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is mine. I chose the examples, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand.