Video of Community Clean Team event

Shannon sent us the link to this YouTube video of our big day - check out all the hard workers in action!

Dumping

Rob and another neighbor for 1025 17th St yelled at a guy attempting to dump mattresses on the newly cleaned street last night. The guy took off, but someone else dumped some wood on the opposite side of the street.

Today I put up 3 "WARNING: DO NOT DUMP" signs. I have more (from DPW) but I need more zipties to fix them.

More ideas!

A great deal of ideas for the 17th and Penn area were talked the at the street cleanup on Saturday.  Mostly focusing on the HIGH cost of a retaining wall, but the real need for it as a means of flattening the slope at the North end of the street and making it inhospiotable to those who'd like to sleep, camp, start fires and do drugs there.

One idea that came from Stephen was putting boulders in the spot, inestad of a wall. This would accomplish our goals for a lot less cash. We'd also use rocks to create a barrier to cars parking on the street getting up onto our sidewalk. Here is a very quick and dirty sketch of both a side and front view (click for a larger version):

We could then plant the area with cacti and agaves to create a Southwestern feel - perfect for the very dry spot and in keeping with our nickname for the street when we moved in - the Wild West!

What do you think?

Street cleanup day a success!

We had an astonishing turnout at the 17th and Pennsylvania Urban Renewal (SPUR) project's first official clean up today! We enjoyed homemade cupcakes and scones (baked by Claudia and Arum), as well as coffee and sodas, and more sodas, water and baseball caps from Fregosi Paints, and afterwards a BBQ put on by DPW! Regent Cab let us use their parking lot, Brickley Production Services loaned us tables and chairs and Hilti their deck, and Fregosi their bathroom.

Who else was there? Too many to list! (And to remember... my feeble memory - someone help me!)

Emily, Elliot, Matt, Eddy and Maile, Gina and Ron, Ben, Jan, Stephen, Jo, Janet, Alison, Jeff, Shannon, Cat, Stacey, Tony, Steve, his dad and nephew, Melissa, Meka, Renee, Maya, Kuzauri, Anne, Eddy, Jan, Leslie, Will and Claudia, Monisha, Marie, Eric, Malia, Nathan, Alisou, Theo, Shannon, Rudy, Jeff, Oliver, Marie, Bruce, Rodney, James, Steven, and ALL the awesome folks from United Playaz!

And from DPW we saw Sandra, Mike, Ed, Larry, Mohammed and the team who made it all happen: thank you guys!


We also collected vital pledges from the volunteers. We need 25% in matching contributions from the community in order to get the Community Challenge Grant, and today we secured a great deal of our match from you all generous people.

All in all, an extremely successful day: thank you all SO much for all your hard work: you made a real difference. I am so excited about what's to come!

More debris clearing pics

Emily and I stopped by to thank the DPW crew and took some more pics at lunchtime today. As you can see they took out that traffic barrier and a lot of weeds!

Debris clearing has begun!

No parking enforcement on Pennsylvania Ave began today, and DPW sent heavy machinery to the street. This morning they were ripping out the old traffic barrier, scaring up lots of very large rats, and tearing out weeds. I expect things will look very different later today, but here's a peek of the guys at work:

Announcing: SPUR!

We've come up with a new name, and acronym, for this project! We needed one for grant applications so this is what we came up with:

Seventeenth and Pennsylvania Urban Renewal - S.P.U.R.

Not bad at all.

Volunteers Needed to Help Plaster Posters for Clean Up Day

Hi Everyone,

Next Saturday June 19th is the big Community Clean Up Day on our Pennsylvania and 17th Street. Tomorrow we're going around the neighborhood plastering posters. If you have time between 2-3pm please join us.

We'll meet up at my place at 1020 Mariposa St. #2 and head off from here. Afterwards we'll meet back up at my place again for coffee, tea, and yummy baked bribes (I mean goodies)! If you have a staple gun and/tape gun please bring those.

If you can't make it this Saturday, but want a poster to place in your building or in your neighborhood, I'll be around this weekend if you want to pick some up.

You can also download these digital files and print them yourself:

11x17 size http://www.box.net/shared/static/0gitp2kj19.pdf (approx. 50MB)

8.5x11 size http://www.box.net/shared/static/6nlpkeao2q.pdf (approx. 50MB)

If you have any issues downloading the files, please email directly at arum@onehouse.net.

Thank you everyone for all your support!

Arum Ahn

Cleanup day! Volunteers NEEDED.

DPW has organized a cleanup day on June 19th and we need 20-30 people to come by and pick up the debris left when their machinery goes down Pennsylvania and scrapes up all the weeds and trash!

Come down to Mariposa x Penn at 9am, get free coffee and snacks, and spend an hour or two with us cleaning up your neighborhood!

Lunch (BBQ!) will be provided for volunteers AFTER the cleanup at 11:30am at Showplace Square, 8th and 16th Streets.

Let's show DPW what we can do!

Diagrams

Emily Gogol, Josh Schechtel and I applied to the SF Parks Trust to have them become our fiscal agent for the project. This means that we can accept donations and grants to fund the project as if we are a 501(c)3 but without all the paperwork! Donors get the tax write-off, and we give 5% of donations to SFPT.

This was approved yesterday, and I'm signing some more paperwork for SFPT but it's basically done. Great news.

I also met with representatives of Saturn Construction to get some ideas for what can be done on the street to improve it. We need to get several more quotes - does anyone know a landscaping company who could work on this? The quotes we'll get will give us an idea of what grants to pursue.

I created some images to show Saturn the sort of things we could do. The images are in the Google Groups' files section, and also here:

If you have comments, questions or ideas, now is the time to share them. These are just ideas, and do not cover the entire scope of the project. Let's start the conversation here: when we have a good idea of the direction to go, we will hold another meeting at the NABE. Not everyone interested in this project is on the email list - at the next meeting we will ascertain who needs to be on this decision-making list, as I feel it's too difficult to coordinate ideas on and off list. Let people know: if you want to be part of the decisions made, get on the list! Click here!

We also have some other fundraising ideas in the works that will be fun, but will need volunteers for. We need a volunteer coordinator who, as the need arises, will get hold of DPW, the neighbors and businesses, and other volunteer groups, to let them know when/where we need people (for a planting day, trash clearing day etc.) If you think you can do this job, please let me know. The work will be sporadic, and not difficult! UPDATE: Arum has volunteered to help with this. Thank you Arum!

OK, let's hear your thoughts!