San Francisco rehabbed an area riddled with crime, stolen goods and drug overdoses by… building a small-scale skate park. Skateboarders and those in charge of city planning and maintenance have not always been easy friends. The relationship is starting to get warmer though, because the skaters have been instrumental in deterring the elements that drove the normies away from places like United Nations Plaza in SF. While the city had tried more expensive ways of improving the plaza, it wasn’t until they hit upon the relatively easy to implement idea of making it skateable that real change occurred.
A defining feature of the new skate park (or skate plaza, the name the city and skaters prefer) is that it’s a retreat from the grandeur that characterized earlier efforts. It also seems to be working better, with a $2 million price tag and just a few months of planning, than the catalog of failed projects, costing hundreds of millions, that preceded it.
The presence of the skateboarders practicing their craft acts as a protective watch in the area.
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