Guest Opinion: Milk plaza plan has broad support
While longtime San Franciscans tend to loathe large capital infrastructure projects, there is one project that neighborhood groups and neighbors agree on that deserves public support: the long-awaited reimagining of Harvey Milk Plaza and the Castro Muni station, at Castro and Market streets.As president of the Eureka Valley Neighborhood Association since 2020, an involved Castro resident since 2013, and a former board member of the GLBT Historical Society, I've gotten to watch and participate as the Harvey Milk Plaza redesign project began in its infancy and has now progressed to a fully formed, ready-to-go plan.
The Friends of Harvey Milk Plaza organization has engaged in a robust multi-year community engagement program that has unequivocally obtained and incorporated numerous layers of feedback from a wide swath of community stakeholders.
I've watched FHMP take tough feedback and truly listen to the Castro community's concerns and suggestions. What this process has created is a beautiful, popular, and most importantly usable space design that more than doubles the amount of accessible space in the plaza and creates a true public space for gathering, protesting, collective mourning, and many other functions important both to San Francisco's LGBTQ+ community and the Castro neighborhood in which it sits.Two particular people made it their life's work to convey a message that this project was controversial, that it violated environmental protection laws, that it was deeply unpopular.
One of them is the original architect of the current iteration of Harvey Milk Plaza (as well as the much-maligned Civic Center Station and others).
