Jefferson Square Park

July 28, 2026

I arrived at Jefferson Square Park from the North East and remembered that I had been there before. It was at night, by Waymo, and I hadn’t gotten out of the car. Nick and I were on our way home to the hotel (this was before we got an apartment) from a dinner out somewhere in the Mission. It was one of our first rides in the Waymo, and we spent a lot of the ride giggling about how futuristic San Francisco feels. I don’t remember where we ate for dinner, but I remember driving between the sports courts and the park and thinking to myself, ‘damn, this city has so many parks.’ 

When I arrived today, I noticed a few people who seemed like they were on drugs. They weren’t together. One was stumbling a bit as he walked slowly down a path that ran the length of the park from west to east. Another was sitting on a bench, with slumped shoulders, slightly swaying. Not far from either of these men, there was a young woman sunbathing on a towel on the lawn, and a couple walking a dog together, talking animatedly, iced beverages in hand. I walked down the park from top to bottom, towards the sports courts. 

Perhaps in part because of the angle of the hill, and in part because of the free entertainment, that most people were facing the courts. For this reason, the park seemed definitively directional. 

Homelessness was something I had heard about often when I mentioned the plan to move to San Francisco. I had heard about the Tenderloin, the contentious set of blocks between highways from Market Street to Eddy Street, considered to be an epicenter of open drug use and hardship. I had pictured that there would be signs of homelessness everywhere, and that the city itself would be very difficult to navigate safely as a result. 

This has not been my experience, but homelessness is certainly present. In this gorgeous park, surrounded by sun-soaked laughter and lighthearted banter, there are people here who may not be able to go inside for relief from the bright sun.

When I was a graduate student, in the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I received a Harvard-sponsored fellowship through the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services and the Interagency Council on Housing and Homelessness to develop materials for their homelessness prevention programs.

I developed infographics for their youth homelessness prevention program, ‘Problem Solving’, and generated GIS maps and an accompanying presentation with recommendations for addressing one of the major contributors to homelessness in Massachusetts: a lack of adequate subsidized transportation. 

I care about homelessness, because it hits a little close to home. I never spent any time on the streets, but when my grandparents died while I was a student, I hadn’t budgeted for moving into an apartment on my own, and so I stayed with my boyfriend when I lost my home. We had been dating for only four months, and it was hard on our relationship. I wonder what it would have been like for me, if I hadn’t been so lucky as to have someone willing to sacrifice their space for me like that. This boyfriend is now my husband.

In preparation for the fellowship, I had read extensively on the topic of homelessness and familiarized myself with current and ongoing initiatives undertaken by social support systems, shelters, and police. I learned through this process that at one point (in recent history) it had not been uncommon in Massachusetts for police to slash tents in order to dissuade people from staying in certain areas of the city. I had learned in my architectural studies about competitions and public projects that had been designed to be explicitly friendly or unfriendly (or subversively friendly or unfriendly) to homeless populations. 

I worked extensively with Krzystof Wodiczko, an artist and industrial designer who had initially achieved some acclaim in the 1990s for his Homeless Vehicle Project, which strove to provide a forum for homeless individuals to share their stories. 

Despite it being ‘not as bad as I thought,’ I still find the extent of homelessness in San Francisco bewildering. While I prefer the kindness of the practices here to tent-slashing, I don’t think anyone is arguing that we have reached a good solution yet. I feel a little guilty that I am giving so much real estate to this topic while writing about Jefferson Square Park, such an otherwise vibrant community treasure. 

But this is what I promised you, right? I will tell you my impressions, my thoughts, and my experiences of these parks. I trust that yours will be very different from mine. Maybe when you visit, there won’t be anyone there on drugs. On the whole, my impressions of this park are overwhelmingly positive, with the exception of the unexpected recurrence of my existential woes related to the housing crisis.