The Dirt Path Every Potrero Hill Local Already Walks Is Finally Becoming a Staircase

If you live anywhere near the north edge of Potrero Hill Recreation Center, you already know the shortcut. It runs along 22nd Street between Missouri and Connecticut, a stretch of loose gravel and rock that drops at close to a 26 percent grade, with no rail and no light. People use it anyway, because the paved alternative means walking several blocks out of the way to get to the same 300 yards of hillside. Residents have been quietly stepping over broken glass on this path for the better part of ten years, and this fall, that finally starts to change.

Real construction is now underway on the segment between Missouri and Connecticut, with Lanier Construction handling the work. It closes out a project that Friends of the Potrero Hill Recreation Center first started planning in 2015, which makes this one of the longer-running infrastructure stories in the neighborhood, and one of the few where the ending is actually visible from your front stoop.

Two Promises, Two Owners

The confusion around this path traces back to a single 2015 approval. When The Landing, the 256-unit apartment complex at 1395 22nd Street, went through city review, its developer secured a key exemption from a full environmental report partly on the strength of a pledge: build a public staircase connecting 22nd and Texas Streets up to Missouri Street, roughly 181 steps of it, opening a route between Dogpatch and the top of the Hill.

The Landing opened in 2019. The developer built its portion, a staircase that runs up the hillside on the land it owns. Then it stops at a chain-link fence. On the other side of that fence is city property, and the path there was never finished. A Dogpatch Neighborhood Association member summed up what that looks like in practice, calling it simply a staircase to nowhere. Anyone who has ducked through the gap in that fence to keep walking already understands the phrase without needing it explained.

That's the piece Friends of the Potrero Hill Recreation Center has spent the past decade trying to close, not the developer's stairs, which exist and work fine, but the city-owned gap beyond them that turns a five-minute walk into a genuine hazard.

Nearly a Decade of Grant Applications

Getting a dirt hillside turned into a permitted, engineered staircase in San Francisco is slower than most people assume, and the funding trail here shows why. Friends of the Potrero Hill Recreation Center, whose board has included Jennifer Serwer of Hibiscus Studio along with Kara Portnow, Maulik Shah, Tucker Kalman, and Lisa Tehrani, spent years assembling the pieces: a $102,000 planning grant from the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development, and a $500,000 construction grant from UCSF, whose own review process took eight months before the university concluded the project benefited its staff and students enough to justify the funding.

Serwer described the ambition in plain terms early on, saying the Hill would end up with contemporary steps that function like the Filbert Steps up Telegraph Hill. That comparison is a useful way to picture the intended result: less a utility staircase and more a proper neighborhood connector people are glad to use.

By late 2025, the pieces were in place. The Green Benefit District, which serves as fiscal sponsor for the project, confirmed that the design had cleared Recreation and Park Department review and was moving through final city permitting, with construction targeted for winter 2025-26. Lanier Construction is now the contractor executing that plan, and the work is visible on-site this season, which is the part of this story that's actually new: after a decade of grant applications and design review, there is now equipment on the hillside instead of another planning update.

What Changes on the Ground

The 22nd Street path isn't a scenic detour. It's the only direct pedestrian route from the east side, meaning it connects several destinations that Potrero Hill and Dogpatch residents already use constantly:

• The 22nd Street Caltrain station and the T-Third Muni line
• Potrero Hill Recreation Center itself, which covers close to eleven acres of ballfields, basketball and tennis courts, a gymnasium, and a designated dog play area open from 5 a.m. to midnight
• The Potrero Hill branch library
• The shops and restaurants along 18th Street, and the walk down toward Dogpatch's own commercial strip

A safer staircase here doesn't just tidy up an eyesore. It shortens the practical walking radius for anyone who currently avoids the path and takes the long way, which in a hillside neighborhood with steep, disconnected streets is a meaningful change to how far things feel from each other.

The Other Debate Over the Same Ground

It's worth being precise about something the staircase project sometimes gets confused with. The Recreation Center itself already has a legal, designated dog play area, part of that eleven-acre footprint. The contested ground is a few blocks over, at Jackson Park, which is zoned strictly as an athletic field. Dogs aren't allowed there, and that rule has produced one of the more persistent disputes in the neighborhood over the past two years.

A petition organized in 2024 by resident Paul Sears drew close to 700 signatures asking the city to open part of Jackson Park to off-leash use, arguing that private leagues like Volo Sports get regular access to a field that otherwise sits empty for long stretches of the day. Sears put the frustration simply: we're just trying to get a piece of that park when it's not being used. A counter-petition pushed back just as hard, arguing the field should stay reserved for organized athletics and pointing to Daggett Park, roughly half a mile away, as the neighborhood's actual dog-designated space. Neither side has fully won, and the standoff continues.

The reason it belongs in the same conversation as the staircase isn't coincidence. Both stories are about the same small footprint of shared hillside land, and both show a neighborhood where every square foot of public space gets used hard and argued over. The staircase is simply the rare case where that argument has an ending in sight.

What to Watch This Fall

The segment now under construction, Missouri to Connecticut, is the piece that closes the city's side of the gap. The lower stretch near The Landing, from 22nd and Texas down to where the developer's stairs meet that chain-link fence, is a separate piece of the puzzle and hasn't been part of the current funded scope. Worth keeping an eye on as the upper segment nears completion, since a finished staircase that still ends at a fence halfway down the hill would leave the original 2015 promise only partly kept.

For now, the more useful thing to know if you live on the Hill or in Dogpatch is that the path you've been carefully picking your way down for years is finally getting the treatment it needed a decade ago. That's worth something on its own, independent of anything it might mean for property values or foot traffic down the line.

If you're weighing a move in Potrero Hill or anywhere else in San Francisco or Marin, the team at The Golden Gate Group spends its time paying attention to exactly this kind of neighborhood detail, the kind that doesn't show up on a listing sheet but shapes how a place actually lives day to day. Schedule a 15-minute consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's next.