Walk the hillside cut along 22nd Street between Missouri and Connecticut on a foggy morning and you will understand why a resident named Doumani calls it "an absolute nightmare." Loose gravel. No lights. No rail to grab if your foot slides on the rock. Jennifer Serwer, who co-directs Friends of Potrero Hill Recreation Center, says she has personally heard from two neighbors who slipped and hurt themselves on that same stretch of dirt. This is the only pedestrian connection between Dogpatch and the crest of the Hill on the park's north side, and residents have been falling on it for years.
That dirt cut is finally becoming a real staircase. Construction started earlier this year and is still underway, with more work likely stretching into fall. What took so long, and who actually paid for it, says more about how Potrero Hill operates than any festival flyer or restaurant opening ever could.
A Decade to Build a Staircase
Friends of Potrero Hill Recreation Center started planning a proper stair here almost ten years ago, working alongside the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. The idea was straightforward: replace the dirt with a real staircase linking the Potrero Annex housing complex and Dogpatch to the Rec Center, the 22nd Street Caltrain stop, and the T Third Line.
The plan stalled for reasons that had nothing to do with community will. In 2021, FOPHRC board member Maulik Shah says the group approached both RPD and the Department of Public Works about co-applying for a city grant that required a government sponsor. Both departments declined to take that role, and the funding window closed. The staircase everyone agreed the neighborhood needed sat unbuilt because no city agency wanted to be the one holding the paperwork.
So the neighborhood built it anyway, largely with money that had nothing to do with San Francisco's capital budget. According to a December 2025 accounting from the Dogpatch and Northwest Potrero Hill Green Benefit District, which now serves as the project's fiscal sponsor, the funding stack looks like this:
- $500,000 from UCSF, by far the largest single gift
- $27,500 from the Power Station Foundation
- $27,500 from Keith Goldstein and Donna Warrington
- $5,000 from a donor listed as Russel Simmons
- The remainder from smaller neighbor contributions collected over years
Julie Christensen, the GBD's executive director, put it plainly: the finished stair "would be a huge improvement over current conditions." Potrero View reported earlier this year that Lanier Construction had begun the physical build. Anyone walking or biking between Dogpatch and the Rec Center this fall should expect that hillside cut to still be an active job site, not a finished amenity yet. It has been ten years in the making. A few more months of fencing is not the part of the story that matters.
The Same Instinct, a Much Bigger Crowd
If the staircase is the neighborhood quietly funding infrastructure the city wouldn't sponsor, the Potrero Hill Festival is the same instinct dressed up for a Saturday. This year it turns 51. The festival takes over four blocks of 20th Street between Wisconsin and Missouri on October 17, 2026, running 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and every dollar it raises goes to after-school programs at Daniel Webster and Starr King elementary schools and to the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House.
That last part is worth sitting with. The Neighborhood House was designed by Julia Morgan and has operated as a settlement house on the Hill for more than a century. It has never run on a reliable city line item either. It runs, in large part, because a street festival has been passing a hat for it every autumn since long before anyone currently fighting for the 22nd Street stair was born.
Last November, more than 350 people, the largest crowd the event has ever drawn, packed into the repurposed Building 12 at Pier 70 for the 26th annual Potrero Hill and Dogpatch History Night. Edward Hatter, the Neighborhood House's executive director, told the crowd how a building meant as a settlement house still functions as the one place where every part of the neighborhood ends up in the same room. The same night, Philip DeAndrade told the story of Goat Hill Pizza, which turned 50 on November 16, 2025. He was one of five friends, along with Joel and Loris Lipski, Karen Clark, and Ruthann Dickinson, who opened it in the first place. Fifty years later, the restaurant that still runs its Monday all-you-can-eat night is being talked about by one of its own founders at a neighborhood history event. Institutions here don't get built, sold, and forgotten. They get built, and then they stay long enough to tell their own history back to the people who show up.
Even the Newspaper Runs on the Same Fuel
The pattern shows up in the neighborhood's own press. Potrero View is 56 years old, San Francisco's longest-running neighborhood newspaper, still delivered to doorsteps and stoops across Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, Mission Bay, and SoMa. In May 2026, publisher Steven Moss sold the paper to Gazetteer in an asset sale. A clean handoff would have ended there. Instead, Moss is staying on as editor and publisher through the rest of 2026 before stepping back into a columnist role in 2027, specifically so the transition doesn't feel like a transition to the readers who've been picking it up at Farley's and Good Life Grocery for decades.
"It's hard to let go of something I've been dedicated to for almost 20 years," Moss said.
Under the new ownership, the View's 12,000-copy print run combines with Gazetteer SF's own quarterly circulation of 10,000, putting 22,000 copies of neighborhood journalism into circulation under one operator. Even here, the deal was structured to protect the person behind the institution, not just the asset itself. That is not how most media acquisitions work. It is how things tend to work on this hill.
What This Actually Means for Your Fall
None of this requires you to do anything differently. It just changes what you're looking at when you walk past the construction fencing on 22nd Street or grab a flyer for the festival at Farley's. The staircase is not a city project running behind schedule. It's a decade of a resident-run nonprofit refusing to let a bureaucratic technicality kill a safety fix, then finding $500,000 from a research university and a short list of named donors to finish the job the city wouldn't fund directly.
The festival on October 17 isn't just a street party with roller rinks and R&B on the main stage. It's the 51st installment of the same neighborhood habit, still funding two elementary schools and a century-old settlement house because that's simply how funding gets done here.
If you're headed to Goat Hill Pizza for a slice, picking up ube pandesal at Milkbomb, or grabbing the latest Potrero View at the Boba Guys counter on 16th Street, you're standing inside the results of that habit. Worth knowing, next time someone calls this just another quiet residential hill.
If you're a longtime Hill resident curious what all that neighborhood durability has done for your home's value, Tracy Hsieh knows this stretch of San Francisco block by block and is happy to talk through it. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever you're ready.
