Next Three Events:
Download the Fall 2025 calendar as a pdf here.
Saturday, October 4, 12-3 pm
Freeway Plan Routes: Never Built—Panhandle
An Urban Walk & Talk
Join Shaping San Francisco and friends for a spirited hike and rambling conversation(s) as we traverse the Panhandle freeway route, seeing the hundreds of buildings that would have been destroyed, and imagining a world without the Panhandle Park, instead seeing a freeway interchange as it plunged into a tunnel beneath Golden Gate Park. A favorite theme for us to cover, the Freeway Revolt of the 1950s and 1960s, was one of the largest and most successful ongoing citizen protests in San Francisco’s history. The revolt against the California Division of Highways’ plan to extend freeways across the city became the first serious opposition in the nation to the post-WWII consensus on automobiles, freeways, and suburbanization.
RSVP to shaping@foundsf.org
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Saturday, October 18, 12-2pm
Ghost Streets of Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle
Our guest guide Nancy Botkin leads us by bicycle through various spaces in Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle that used to be roadways but have since transformed into open areas prioritized for people, welcoming pedestrians, equestrians, picnickers, and people on bikes. Visit the Rose Garden, 6th Avenue Skate Park, Marx Meadow, Hellman Hollow, and many other spots you may not have considered before. A short segment of the ride will be on gravel roads.
Wednesday, October 22, 7:30pm
Social Housing: Challenging YIMBYs and NIMBYs
Public Talk at 518 Valencia
What we’re doing on housing isn’t working. We’ve upzoned, streamlined, deregulated. We’ve chased the promise of supply-side solutions. And still, the crisis deepens. Across San Francisco and the state, we’re told that zoning and deregulation will solve the housing crisis. But real solutions require more than zoning maps — they need public investment, tenant protections, and community-led planning that puts people before profit. Deregulation is politically convenient. It makes headlines without asking the wealthy to pay. It shifts blame from capital to planners. It offers the illusion of action—without the substance of redistribution. But it doesn’t build homes for restaurant workers earning $40,000 a year. It doesn’t produce family-sized units. It doesn’t build trust, or coalitions, or equity. Because deregulation isn’t housing policy. It’s land-use policy. And land-use reform without capital isn’t a solution. It’s a stall... There is a movement waiting to be built—beyond the tired binary of YIMBY and NIMBY. One rooted in care, solidarity, and the belief that everyone deserves a place to live.
with Francesca Manning (SF Community Land Trust—SFCLT), Quintin Meicke (Council of Community Housing Organizations—CCHO), and Maria Zamudia (Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco—HRCSF)
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Explore Shaping San Francisco:
Ecology Emerges
Discussions and reflections on the history of Bay Area ecological activism, based on oral histories documenting the past 50 years.
Ecology Emerges is an oral history gathering project to explore the past 50 years of ecological activism in the Bay Area and the role that individual and institutional memories play in the development, policy proposals, and interrelationships that together make up the existing networks of ecological politics. We document the living ecological activist movement, in their own words, but also in a larger context of urban growth and globalization.
Oral Histories
Shaping San Francisco, as part of our ongoing work, sits down with people who have stories to tell and conducts oral history interviews.
Check them out here.
"Editor's Pick Tour" from FoundSF.org
Comprised of over 1,400 pages, and 2,500 historical photos, the wiki-based archive FoundSF.org is the product of hundreds of contributors, regular people who were compelled by the chance to investigate some piece of this City's past.
Shaping San Francisco is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media, a California non-profit corporation.