A half dozen of those anti-homeless boulders that residents of a Mission District street copped to having installed in order discourage what they say was rampant drug dealing were pushed off the sidewalk with great effort Friday night.
As the Chronicle reports, six of the 24 boulders were shoved into the street sometime on Friday, and so far no one has claimed credit for the act of protest.
So, someone -- or someones -- in San Francisco rolled some of the Clinton Park boulders from the sidewalk onto the street. Photo by @LaurenPorFavor pic.twitter.com/kIyYMfAXdz
— Suzanne Espinosa (@suzyesp) September 28, 2019
The boulders were installed along Clinton Park, a two-block alley parallel to Duboce that runs between Dolores and Valencia, sometime in the last month. A rep for the Coalition on Homelessness alleged that the city's Department of Public Works was involved, though DPW has denied this, saying the group of residents pooled their money and paid for the boulders' installation themselves.
When the story about the boulders, which appear situated to block people from pitching tents on the sidewalk, went around the local media this week, the reaction was a mixture of praise for the neighbors' ingenuity — they cite a lack of help from police in discouraging camping or drug-dealing on the narrow street — and outrage at what many call anti-homeless design. The size and weight of the boulders seemed to make them a challenge to remove, even if anyone wanted to.
But someone did manage to push a few into the street, because they weren't cemented down in any way, and now there they lay.
As the Chronicle previously noted, a local artist put the boulders up on Craigslist on Thursday, in the free section, as an act of protest. But the post was flagged and taken down.
Some neighbors pooled together $2000 to dump 24 boulders into the sidewalk as a form of “anti-homeless decoration”.
— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) September 27, 2019
The city won’t remove them, so I put their rocks on the Craigslist free section. pic.twitter.com/yv5fsfodJ4
Now either the residents or DPW will have to move them back, remove the six that are out of place.
Previously: Anti-Homeless Boulders Appear In the Mission, Residents Admit To Putting Them There
Image: @samklew via Twitter