But, despite the efforts of Park Service members, the place has been getting quite the reputation. And a new nickname: Frat Mason.

On a recent weekend afternoon, several hundred people – most of them young men – packed the lawn of the Great Meadow, an enormous expanse of green at the corner of Octavia and Bay (conveniently located across the street from the Marina Safeway).

Some were residents of the historic buildings, which were converted into upscale rentals in January 2012 – but most just came for the party. Young men in salmon-colored shorts lounged on a picnic blanket next to heavy red coolers. A few strung hammocks between the lawn’s palm trees. Others had set up corn-hole tables, horseshoe ranges, bocce ball and a volleyball court.

” ‘Cause it’s like the fratty, preppy Dolores Park,” said 24-year-old Armando Anido Jr., an investment banker who dropped in from his South of Market pad. “It’s where you find the all the frat stars, especially on a Fraturday.”

Grab some Buds

Dolores Park is known for its craft beer and proximity to Bi-Rite artisanal ice cream. Crissy Field is often packed with middle school birthday parties and Lululemon-clad joggers. The Great Meadow at Fort Mason is a Bud Light Lime kind of spot. There are hardly any children. And it’s almost all guys.

“I remember when the trash mobs first came,” said Alexandra Picavet, the public affairs specialist for the National Park Service, referring to the young men who congregate on the lawn. “It was right around Earth Day.”

Fort Mason – with 1,200 acres of greenery – has long been known for its Fort Mason Center, which houses music and arts nonprofits and Greens, the vegetarian spot regularly celebrated as one of the city’s best restaurants. But, over the past four years, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area has spent millions to make the old military houses habitable (and desirable).

A resident population

There are now 27 buildings, with a total of 38 units, where rents range from $3,600 for a two-bedroom to $12,000 for a three-bedroom. Like the best of fraternities, there’s a waiting list.

The unlikely party began when the GGNRA started renting out the apartments – and noticed something strange.

“It’s 70 percent men,” said Catherine Robles, the park’s realty specialist. “They average in their upper 20s, mid-30s. There’s the one house we call the Google Girls, but otherwise it’s majority male. We really don’t know why.”

Picavet, the park’s public affairs officer, is less than enthusiastic.

“We have a beautiful Phil Burton statue on the meadow – this is the man who saved the park, who started all of this,” she said of the GGNRA. “And now you’ll find party hats on him. I mean, you never know!”

Like any neighborhood

The new residents insist that partying is only a small part of what’s going on at Fort Mason. They say that the neighborhood feels like family, where residents borrow sugar from each other and troubleshoot for their startups while, yes, sometimes having margaritas.

“It’s a community and it’s almost like a club – if you’re having a party, you let the neighbors know,” said entrepreneur Darren Streiler, who works from home (usually on a lawn chair) along with his several single-guy roommates in a building residents call “the house of handsome.” “You always see a lot of guys you know out there playing football on the lawn.”

The few women residents of Fort Mason seem to enjoy the dynamics.

Denise Bertuccelli and her roommate, Mary Heindel, who met playing the drinking game flip cup in the Marina and moved into Fort Mason last January, host Sunday night “family dinners.”

“Yeah, it’s Frat Mason, but it’s a wonderful place to live,” said Bertuccelli. “It’s the first place I’ve been friends with all my neighbors. Steve’ll call and be like, ‘Guys, I made meatballs.’ You just don’t see that in the city.

“It’s the ‘sun’s out, guns (biceps) out; sun’s gone, shirts on’ crowd,” Bertuccelli said. “I’ll walk to the edge (next to her apartment) and just be like, ‘There are a thousand people here in our backyard.’ And the lawn games are great – we got a tepee last week.”

What’s for dinner?

At her whitewashed house one recent evening after work, Bertuccelli drank Chardonnay while young men casually sauntered in from next door looking for food – “we’re always cooking for them,” she said, shaking her head.

Bertuccelli thinks the community became tight-knit because 20 of them moved into the new apartments at the same time, making it feel like September on a college campus – “we all saw each other carrying boxes, all dealt with Comcast problems together.”

Meetings like happy hour

The property management group, Gaetani Real Estate, has started hosting its quarterly residents meetings as happy hours at the General’s Residence, an event venue.

Many of the residents, who work in tech or have their own startups, work from home during the days.

“It’s beautiful here and feels like a creative place to hang out and work – and a lot of us are entrepreneurs,” said Steve Long, who works in sales and frequently attends the “work from home parties” that residents organize on the lawn. “And there’s the hostel, so we have food.”

The nearby youth hostel cafeteria is where Long and Streiler eat most of their meals.

“I eat there whenever the girls don’t feed me. We’re all traveling or around during the day – a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of us work from home. So we all eat lunch at the hostel,” said Long, who had a BLT and a burrito earlier that day.

He jokes about how the police arrive on horseback: “We’ve got a corn-hole and a beer pong set up, and the horse cop will tie up outside and join in.”

Their own holiday

Streiler and his roommates created a holiday called Cinco de Derby, which combines Cinco de Mayo and Kentucky Derby Day. “So we’ll wear seersuckers and sombreros.”

They fall in to discussing Fleet Week plans. Bertuccelli and Heindel have a nearby storage unit “with nothing but costumes.”

In the 1970s, the lawn was a parking lot, and the buildings were decrepit.

“We used to have 10,000 people on that lawn every year for the Oyster Festival concert,” said Picavet. “And it was never as bad as this.

“Nothing’s changed on the lawn that would bring them. But then they just all started Instagramming it! I find a lot of social media happening there now,” she said. “I think it brings more of them, you know? And they’re hashtagging, but they call it the Green or something, which isn’t even its name. They like it because it’s close to Safeway where they can get their drinks.”

But Streiler, like many of his fellow newcomers, thinks the neighborhood deserves renown.

“Most of San Francisco doesn’t even know this exists,” he said. “I’ve lived in probably seven different neighborhoods, and this is by far the best.”

Nellie Bowles is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: nbowles@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NellieBowles

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/New-S-F-neighborhood-like-a-campus-fraternity-row-4814000.php

If we hadn’t been told over and over that it is an evil word that should never be uttered in San Francisco, even cynics would say it is the g-word:

Gentrification.

And it’s happening with surprisingly little grumbling.

“Or,” says 30-year real estate veteran Joske Thompson, “I think it is a different kind of grumbling. Even the long-termers in neighborhoods are appreciating the changes. Those people in the Mission like the fact that they can walk the neighborhood and feel safer.”

The difference this time is that the push is coming from the bottom up. Rather than fat-cat developers promoting ugly skyscrapers, the demand is coming from young techies who work here or in the Silicon Valley and want to preserve the feel of unique neighborhoods. Their presence is being felt not only in the Mission, where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg now has a home, but to areas that were once considered downtrodden.

“Young people with talent are the new movers and shakers in the city,” says Thompson, who says the city sells itself. “Last weekend I had some clients who were looking in the Mission. We drove by Dolores Park, and it was packed. They said, ‘Is there a street fair?’ “

Nope, just another afternoon in trendy town.

“This is a small city of 800,000 people,” says Supervisor Scott Wiener, who chairs the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Development Committee. “And 2 to 3 million people want to live here. We just need to make sure we don’t kill that quirkiness and uniqueness.”

Displacement in ’70s, ’80s

While the city experienced a similar boom in the ’80s, the concern then was “Manhattanization” – and that’s when gentrification became a dirty word.

“In the ’70s and ’80s there was massive displacement of residents in the Haight, Noe Valley and the Castro,” says Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. “But now you are seeing a massive influx of upper-income people into previously unoccupied areas.”

This boom has its share of concerned activists, but we have yet to see the stop-any-kind-of-development movement we saw in the ’80s.

Still, higher rents are higher rents, and if monthly rates top $2,000, that will affect the entire rental stock.

“In over 30 years of doing this, I have never seen rents like this,” says Delene Wolf, executive director of the city’s Rent Stabilization Board. “My surmise is those Google buses must be fueling that. The whole demographic has changed. I just think about what people on the low end of the economic ladder are feeling.”

Tenants feel at risk

Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Council of San Francisco, says the booming rents create a climate that encourages landlords to drive out rent-controlled tenants.

“I am hearing from people who are feeling like survivors in isolated pockets,” she said. “Don’t be fooled. There are still big-money real estate developers creating that market.”

But, those changes are largely happening in neighborhoods that have made the progression from urban blight to uber-hot.

Take Dogpatch, an obscure right turn off Third Street south of ATT Park. Until recently, it was best known as home to the clubhouse of the San Francisco chapter of Hells Angels.

In 2002, Arienne Landry moved her Just for You Cafe from Potrero Hill, but not before she parked her truck on the street for a few days to check out the vibe.

“It was pretty sketchy, almost industrial,” says Landry, who had to shoo drug users away from the cafe entrance after she opened.

Now there’s a line out the door for weekend brunch, and she says weekdays have gone from “whatever to craziness.”

Susan Eslick, an artist, has lived in Dogpatch since 1996. Now she can walk down 22nd Street and call out the changes on every corner. There’s Chocolate Lab, a local chocolate maker, Rickshaw Bagworks, which makes custom messenger bags, a cheese shop, a gourmet ice cream store and Olivier’s, a French butcher shop. And perhaps most important to the transformation, Puccino Restaurant. It opened in 2006, attracting both foodies and good reviews.

“When I got here, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a woman pushing a baby stroller,” says Eslick, vice president of the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association. “Now we have three preschools and a baby gym. It all happened around the time Puccino opened.”

Dogpatch hasn’t lost its funk. The Hells Angels are still there, and they’re active members of the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association.

So don’t try to tell her that upscaling of the neighborhood is a bad thing.

“The term gentrification is loaded,” she said. “I say bring it on. It just has to be designed well. There’s no tolerance for schlock.”

People mean change

There are surely more changes to come. The Tenderloin’s Shaw says the neighborhood has been relatively untouched by the surge, but thousands of residential units near Eighth Street are under construction, and with the arrival of both Twitter and Dolby Labs, it seems impossible that area won’t be transformed.

Those who have already ridden the wave say it is best to go with the flow. Now that her cafe has become a hot spot, startup millionaires stop by for lunch regularly.

“We just ignore them,” she says.

C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. E-mail: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cwnevius

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Gentrification-no-longer-a-dirty-word-4302093.php

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

Gagan and Jasmin Arneja in their 1,800-square-foot home, which attracted 22 bids and sold for $1.5 million, 40% over asking price.

San Francisco

A bidding war broke out in November when a small house in San Francisco’s tightly packed Noe Valley came on the market.

Twenty-two people, including employees of Facebook, Zynga, Google and Pixar, battled for the home. The winning offer was $1.5 million—40% higher than the asking price. The house had a great view, but it was only 1,800 square feet and came with an old kitchen which, like most of the interior, was covered in 1970s plywood paneling. Seen from the curb, there’s hardly any house at all—just a one-car garage and gate leading to small front courtyard.

View Slideshow

Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

Dolores Park, with a view of the Mission District and skyline of downtown San Francisco in the background, is a popular hangout for the new generation of tech entrepreneurs.

The inconspicuousness was part of the attraction, said Jasmin Arneja, 42, who bought the two-bedroom house with her husband Gagan, 40, a software engineer at a networking start-up. “It’s the antithesis to these outrageous bizarre Gordon Gekko-esque houses. It just incorporates so much of our values,” said Ms. Arneja, who runs a philanthropic advisory firm.

Housing prices in the San Francisco Bay area are once again soaring, thanks to an infusion of cash from the rising shares of Apple and Google and the initial public offerings by Zynga, LinkedIn, Yelp and soon Facebook, expected to be the largest in Internet history. But while a previous generation of dot-com executives opted for mansions in wealthy San Francisco neighborhoods like Pacific Heights and tony Silicon Valley suburbs like Atherton, this generation is gravitating to modest homes and condos in grittier parts of the city.

Ground zero of the current tech-fueled real-estate boom is the Mission, formerly a majority Hispanic neighborhood on the southern edge of San Francisco that’s close to the main arteries that link San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Median home prices in the Mission grew 44% in December compared with a year earlier. Adjacent Noe Valley had a rise of 31% over that same period, according to the San Francisco Association of Realtors. The average number of days homes sat on the market in both neighborhoods has almost halved over the past year.

That’s in sharp contrast to what’s happening nationally, where the housing market continues to flounder, with the Case-Shiller 20-City index down for the fourth straight month in a row. It’s even an aberration from the San Francisco area (including Oakland), which saw a 5.4% drop in home prices in December from a year earlier.

Newly minted tech millionaires in San Francisco are shunning mansions in wealthy neighborhoods and leafy suburbs in favor of modest homes and condos in grittier parts of the city. Geoffrey Fowler has details on Lunch Break. Photo: Jason Henry for WSJ

Real-estate agents say it’s a cultural shift. The new generation of Internet executives—younger than the last generation of dot-commers—eschews the trappings and responsibilities of expensive properties. They want to bicycle, walk or take public transportation. They like living near food trucks and dive bars.

“You can spend a lot of money on a great restaurant here or just $5 on a burrito,” said Christian Niles, 31, who bought a two-bedroom apartment for $585,000 in the Mission with his wife in August because he saw real estate as a good place to store the cash he’d made from selling his app called TrackerBot to Pivotal Labs last summer. He plans to never own a car.

StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp bought a 2,900-square-foot loft penthouse with four bathrooms and a patio for $3 million this past summer in the South of Market area. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams bought a $2.4 million house in Noe Valley in 2009.

The hottest properties are near corporate shuttle bus stops—where employees for companies like Google, Facebook, Genentech, LinkedIn and Apple line up daily for the ride to Silicon Valley. Real-estate agent Amanda Jones calls it the “Shuttle Effect” and said proximity can command as much as a 20% premium. Some real-estate agents said they’re dying for a map of where the buses pick up. “When a listing gets deluged with people—that tells me it’s close to a stop,” said Ms. Jones.

Some companies share a few of the same stops, occasionally leading to employees getting on the wrong bus. Discussions can get animated about adding or moving a stop, said Jessica Herrera, Facebook’s transportation coordinator who controls the stop locations for Facebook’s eight shuttle busses, including a new glass-topped double-decker the company rented to make space for the growing crowds. “Everybody wants a stop that’s next to their house that comes every five minutes,” she said, adding that discussions have remained civil.

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Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal

The Mission apartment building where investor Michael Barton bought a condo: ‘You can tell there is an upsurge going on here.’

Stephanie Pocino, 28, makes the 45-minute trip to Facebook every day from her rented apartment building in the Mission. She has no garbage disposal and no dishwasher, but the Victorian building has lots of charm and bay windows. She carries a wireless Internet card, which she uses to answer emails and work on presentations while on the commute, and her laundry, which she gets done free at the company’s headquarters.

Soaring rental prices—up more than 10% in the Mission and Noe Valley in the past six months alone—are also making buying more competitive, said Vanguard Properties broker Craig Waddle. He’s seen bidding competitions for rentals and rental offers coming in higher than the asking prices. At an open house for a one-bedroom offered for $1,400 a month, 40 people were filling out applications on the spot. One person walked up to the owner, offered $1,700 and got the place.

“It’s been kind of shocking,” said Raj Gajwani, 36, who has been looking for a house in Noe Valley for around $1.5 million for the past few months. A founder of two online companies, he and his wife are expecting twins and want a house close to a shuttle-bus stop for his wife’s commute but with “culture, interesting people and activities.” They also want something they will be able to sell for more money in five years, when they might have to move to the suburbs for better schools.

Mike Shaw, a real-estate agent who has worked for 15 years in the San Francisco market, said buyers often want something already renovated or vintage because they don’t have the time or the interest to hire designers and architects. “That person in jeans and a sweatshirt could be low on the totem pole or a multibillionaire. They haven’t realized the value of good design either in architecture or fashion,” said Suzanne Tucker, a San Francisco designer who has remodeled many of the most lavish homes in the Bay Area.

Buyers argue they have a different sensibility. Ms. Arneja, who snagged the sought-after house in Noe Valley, said she was drawn to the interior, which is covered almost entirely by dark redwood and brick, lending it a feel that lands somewhere between a den and a tree house. “This is clearly a ’70s house,” said Ms. Arneja. “I would like to think of it as a shining example of good architecture during a bad period of design.”

Pop-up restaurants with long lines, coffee shops that brew one cup at a time and shops selling curiosities like local honey have followed the influx of cash. Apple employee Amandeep Jawa, who takes the company bus to work, covered the driveway of his Victorian with a “parklet,” a public space registered with the city featuring seating and greenery. His crowning achievement: a topiary triceratops, dubbed Trixie, made of succulent plants.

But the gentrification is far from complete. A surge in violence between feuding gangs called the Norteños and Sureños claimed two lives in less than 24 hours in the Mission in August, and there was a shooting in front of a coffee shop. Noe Valley saw a rash of sexual assaults; residents there have also reported attempted carjackings and armed robberies.

“The key word is coexistence,” said David Campos, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors representing the Mission and Bernal Heights.

Blogs popular with tech workers keep track of the violence, and one UC Berkeley student produced a map called “Gangs and Cupcakes,” which overlaid Norteño and Sureño territory with the Mission’s most popular cupcake cafes. In recent years, somebody spray-painted “cafe gentrification” on the sidewalk in front of popular coffee shops.

The high prices and the changes in the neighborhood are only going to intensify, predicted Lawrence Coburn, 42, who first moved to the Mission in 1999 to found a start-up and has lived in an 1,100-foot rental loft there since 2003. “A lot of my friends are trying to hustle to buy a place before all the Facebook people get liquid,” he said.

Investor Michael Barton, 48, recently decided to buy because he wanted to lock in his investment before Facebook’s IPO money hits town. The area around his 950-square-foot, two-story loft is “kind of funky, and gritty and dodgy,” said Mr. Barton. But an industrial building next door has been taken over by Internet start-ups. “You can tell there is an upsurge going on here,” he said.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 16, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Hot Spot for the Rising Tech Generation.

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204781804577271491070580960.html

Parks are in peril across the country. The economic downturn has yielded closures and cutbacks from the national to the local level. Here in the Bay Area, 10 state parks may be shuttered in the fall, while services have been reduced in city parks from Oakland, which proposed significant programming reductions in its upcoming budget, to San Carlos, which last year outsourced maintenance.

In San Francisco, since the recession began in 2008, The City’s budget contribution to the Park and Recreation Department has decreased by $8.3 million, or 19 percent. Meanwhile, contributions from the Open Space Fund — funded by five cents out of every $100 paid in property taxes — declined by $6 million in 2010 due to falling real estate values.

Consequently, between 2008 and today, the department lost 100 employees. More than half worked in recreation, although department officials boast that last year they nonetheless managed to add 20,000 additional hours of programming. Gardening and custodial cuts have resulted in deferred maintenance throughout the system.

The solution proffered by Rec and Park has been supplementary revenue. Concessions, vendors and leases have been pressed into service to reduce the impacts of budget cuts. Yet a contingent of residents and park users hasn’t exactly embraced the changes.

At Stow Lake, the decision to bring in a new operator promising to invest $250,000 and hopefully earn The City an extra $50,000 a year was met with well- orchestrated complaints over the ousting of the previous tenant. At Dolores Park, proposals to bring in a coffee stand, and then a Yucatan-cuisine food cart, incited a group of protesters to stage a “puke-in” over what he deemed the privatization of a public park. And just this week, four progressive city supervisors introduced an initiative for the November ballot to ban new entry fees or leasing recreation center facilities to private entities.

But what about the alternative? Park and Rec General Manager Phil Ginsburg said the boost in revenues from concessions, leases and other fees has helped the department avoid severe service cuts. Without them, he said, things would be much worse. The department estimates that 69 gardener positions alone have been saved by new revenues over the last three budget cycles.

“We’re keeping our parks open, and we’re keeping our recreational facilities open,” Ginsburg said. “We’ve had to be a little more entrepreneurial in order to preserve our services.”

This entrepreneurship has taken a wide range of forms. A new citywide bike rental program is expected to earn $72,500 this year, and a Segway tour program in Golden Gate Park is projected to earn $35,000 this year and $100,000 in 2012. Then there’s the new antique fair at Candlestick ($120,000 a year), new leases with City CarShare and ZipCar in department parking lots ($150,000), and the granddaddy of them all, the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival ($1.1 million), now in its fourth year.

The department also is redoubling its efforts to encourage philanthropic support of its operations, a departure from the more common approach of funding capital improvements. Last year, the department earned $1 million in support of operations and maintenance, including a $160,000 grant to keep the Joe Lee Recreation Center in Bayview open one extra day a week for three years, and another aimed at employing a part-time gardener at one city field.

To foster all these new relationships, two years ago Ginsburg created a six-employee department focused on property management and philanthropic giving. He said their work — plus improvements in “administrative efficiency” around overtime and worker’s comp — have helped keep the department from introducing new service reductions, fee increases or layoffs in the 2011-12 fiscal year, despite a net reduction in other revenues of $6.8 million.

But not everyone is buying it. Neighborhood activist George Wooding publicly challenged the department’s revenue-generation tactics and rationale at a charged Commonwealth Club discussion in May. “Once the city decided that the parks would have to be self-sustaining, the whole notion of public space has been destroyed,” he said at that event. “The new RPD staff now cares more about the money that it receives than the public need or sustaining the parks.”

Ginsburg said his department has been in the earned-revenue business since its inception more than a century ago, and adds that recent efforts have been geared toward improving visitors’ experience as well as increasing revenues. “That vast majority of San Franciscans want a safe and clean and fun park,” he said. “Everything that we’ve been doing has been to that end.”

Ultimately, Ginsburg said, there’s a ceiling to the amount of concessions and rentals the department can squeeze out of its parks — and that a long-term solution is likely to take other forms. For now, private revenue is a budget fix the department remains committed to.

“The best way to avoid criticism is to do nothing,” he said, “but our park department can’t afford to stand still right now.”

Presidio sets the standard for financially self-sufficient parks

Long before there was a food cart at Dolores Park, there was the Presidio, the country’s first privatized national park. Created in 1994, the park was handed over to the newly created Presidio Trust by Congress in 1996. Because of the incredible cost of maintaining the Presidio’s city-like infrastructure and hundreds of historic buildings, it was determined that the traditional financial model for public parks wouldn’t suffice. The new trust would be called upon to preserve natural, scenic, cultural and recreational resources while gradually becoming financially self-sufficient.

This scenario bears striking similarities to today, when public parks across the country are seeing year-over-year reductions in public funding and becoming increasingly reliant upon private funding. Just as the Presidio will be weaned off government funding for good after next year, California and San Francisco city parks are making financial decisions that may determine their ongoing viability.

Depending on whom you ask, the Presidio is either a cautionary tale or a role model for park preservation. The San Francisco Bay Guardian, for example, predicted disaster in calling the arrangement “a classic case study in everything that’s wrong with privatization of a public asset” in 2001. Later, it suggested that the Presidio could spawn copycats by providing privatization advocates a proven alternative to public funding.

While it’s impossible to say where city parks would be without the Presidio’s role model, the trust has succeeded in generating income to support the 1,300 acres it oversees to an extent the federal government never could. With the help of real estate leases generating tens of millions dollars annually, it has rehabilitated and rented out more than half of the park’s 469 historic buildings, some of which date to the 1860s.

The Presidio Trust currently manages nearly 1,400 leases, including 225 organizations employing 3,500 employees and 1,150 units housing 3,000 residents. Nonresidential tenants are as diverse as in any small city, including businesses, foundations, educational institutions, recreation providers and restaurants, from the tiny Warming Hut cafe up to the largest and perhaps most controversial tenant, Lucasfilm Ltd.

Lease revenues have grown precipitously over the years, from $15.2 million in 2000 to $68.5 million today. And the trust will have to keep growing; the park’s federal subsidy of $15 million this year will be reduced to $12 million next year, and then zero in 2013. At that point, with the exception of the 200 coastal acres still managed by the government, the Presidio will become a fully privatized public park.

Doing more with less

While the Recreation and Park Department has lost funding and employees, it has added services.

$8.3 million: Cut from Rec and Park budget
$6 million: Loss in funding from Open Space Fund
100: Employees cut since 2008
$4.9 million: Earned revenue from concessions, leases and other fees
20,000: Hours of programming added by Rec and Park since 2008

Source: Recreation and Park Department

Select sources of earned revenue

Arboretum and Carousel
2009-10: $40,060
2010-11: $290,000
2011-12: $350,000

Bike rentals
2009-10: $0
2010-11: $72,500
2011-12: $127,000

Food carts
2009-10: $144,067
2010-11: $206,168
2011-12: N/A*

Parking garages
2009-10: $6,916,777
2010-11: $8,800,000
2011-12: $7,950,000

Segway rentals
2009-10: $0
2010-11: $35,000
2011-12: $97,200

Stow Lake
2009-10: $174,645
2010-11: $175,000
2011-12: $200,000

*Projection not available

Source: Recreation and Park Department

Article source: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/06/sf-parks-advocates-worried-citys-open-spaces-will-become-less-public