Kezar Gardens, our combined community garden, recycling center, and native plant nursery, at 780 Frederick Street, remains open despite the misguided efforts of the City’s Recreation and Parks Department (RPD) to evict HANC from the site. Eviction proceedings began on December 2, 2010, after a meeting of the Recreation and Parks Commission (RPC). The agenda item at that meeting was to approve the design for a community garden, with no mention of HANC’s recycling center. Yet, despite overwhelming public support for our recycling center, RPC voted to approve the plan, and also indicated that inherent in the approval was the eviction of our recycling center.   RPD served us with a 90-day eviction notice within a few days, which led to an eviction lawsuit filed on March 8, 2011.

       On that same day, the Board of Supervisors passed a “Resolution requesting the Recreation and Parks Department and the Department of the Environment collaborate to establish a comprehensive Parks recycling program using the expertise, volunteer base, and facilities of the HANC Recycling Center in Golden Gate Park, for the Department of the Environment to establish and Independent Recycling Center Master Plan, and requesting the Recreation and Parks Department to rescind the eviction of the HANC Recycling Center from Golden Gate Park.” Click here for the full text of the resolution.

       Despite this resolution and despite a letter from HANC’s attorney to RPD explaining that the eviction notice was served on the wrong day to effect an eviction, RPD proceeded with its eviction lawsuit. RPD must have eventually realized its error, because on May 26, 2011, (through its attorney, the City Attorney’s Office), it dismissed the eviction. But that’s far from the end of the story.

        RPD served us with a new eviction notice on May 31, 2011, and filed a new eviction lawsuit on July 1, 2011. This time, the Court issued an eviction judgment on September 26, 2011. HANC believes the Court wrongly issued the judgment and filed an appeal on October 3, 2011. We asked the Court to suspend the eviction while the Court of Appeal was considering our case. On October 13, 2011, the same judge that issued the eviction judgment granted HANC a stay pending appeal.

       While the appeal was pending, HANC transformed our Recycling Center and Native Plant Nursery into Kezar Gardens by building a community garden on our site. (Remember, the initial justification for evicting us from the site was so that RPD could build a community garden). RPD had planned to spend $250,000 to build a community garden. HANC built a community garden on the site with no expenditure of City funds.

       On June 29, 2012, the First District Court of Appeal denied our appeal. We believe that the Court of Appeal based its decision upon a misunderstanding of some of the facts. For example, we argued that the eviction was in retaliation for HANC exercising its First Amendment rights by criticizing then Mayor Gavin Newsom and for opposing the sit-lie ordinance that he supported during the November 2010 election. The Court of Appeal found that RPD was discussing the concept of a community garden with neighborhood groups by the spring of 2010, well before the 2010 election. What the Court of Appeal missed is that RPD at that time was not discussing putting the community garden on our site. In fact the minutes of an October 2009 RPC meeting indicated that RPC had approved funding for a community garden right outside McLaren Lodge. The Court of Appeal also found that Gavin Newsom’s motives were irrelevant to our eviction because the second eviction notice was issued while Ed Lee was mayor. We believe the second eviction notice was simply a continuation of the first eviction notice. The full decision of the Court of Appeal can be found here.

       HANC has asked the California Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeal’s decision. We expect that the California Supreme Court will decide whether or not to take our case sometime between late August and mid October.

       If the California Supreme Court refuses to hear our case, will RPD really go forward with evicting a community garden so that they can build a community garden? HANC is still willing to work with RPD, the Mayor, the Department of the Environment, and with other City agencies to find a solution to the recycling needs of Golden Gate Park and San Francisco and to determine the best use for our site. We also ask our readers to support HANC’s continued use of the site by calling or writing the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors, the Recreation and Parks Department, and the Recreation and Parks Commission.