Quantifying the Value of San Francisco’s Unaccepted Streets

As we have reported, Berkeley Professor Nicholas de Monchaux’s Local Code proposal for activating San Francisco’s “Unaccepted Streets” called for transforming the patchwork of 529 acres of underutilized alleys, street-ends, and pathways into a network of green spaces. Were San Francisco to build out the more than 1500 identified sites, de Monchaux estimates that the city would save $4.8 million in air pollution mitigation, $6.9 million in energy savings, and a staggering $1 billion in stormwater infrastructure.

From the proposal:

The final outcome of our proposal is a pedestrian network of
places, and a virtual network of spaces as well. A focused web threaded
through real and virtual fabric; our systematic interventions turn away
from the idea of urban infrastructure driven by cars and highways to a
more robust, and perhaps natural, notion of urbanity. Instead of the
old metaphors of lungs and circulation, we propose a robust, networked
logic of health and social welfare, a distributed immune system for the
21st-century metropolis.

While the project didn’t win UCLA’s WPA 2.0 design competition, Professor de Monchaux and the five other WPA 2.0 finalists were afforded an audience in late November with President Barack Obama’s Director of the Office of Urban Affairs Adolfo Carrion and HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, who both apparently showed great interest.

“My goal now is to initiate some of those conversations with local agencies,” said de Monchaux. “I think a very interesting next step would be to implement some of the
designs locally, create a community based laboratory to see how these designs
would perform.”