Invisible systems scaffold the City: buried people (unhousing), hidden economies (labor), and unseen material (waste) dot the urban landscape. These systems are systematically invisibilized by an intrinsically individualistic, capitalistic, and discriminating idea of value. 

As a result, mountains of waste hide under the ground, leaching toxins into the water and air we breathe. People meet a similar fate as bodies pile—unhoused and unequally burdened.

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This invisibility festers within the three pillars of Jobs, Justice, and Decarbonization. Their exhumation, through social ecologies, is the necessary first step for realizing the Green New Deal. The Street Mends Program uses the lens of home to address the challenge of visibility as we blur the line between home and the public realm at the site of all urban drama: the street. 

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San Francisco's city grid fragmentation has created obsolete spaces: street ends--uncashed, devalued, unused. This program reframes street ends as spaces for urban opportunity. Can the idea of "home" thrive outside the private realm? 

Street ends are forgotten rights-of-way not defined in the dictionary of urban form. They are the residuals from over a century of indigenous dispossession, growth and decline, and densified land capitalization. The result of heavily plotted single-family grids leaves scraps - too small, too steep, and too polluted to be considered fungible assets, thereby omitted and forgotten by developers. 

The fragmentation of grids lends to opportunities for urban design interventions. We call the process of transforming an unused street end into a community-designed space a StreetMend. We propose a democratized program that empowers communities to design and plan their own streetn ends using an open source design tool "StreetMends".