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About

Our Mission

Livable City works to create a San Francisco of great streets and complete neighborhoods, where walking, bicycling, and transit are the best choices for most trips, where public spaces are beautiful, well-designed, and well-maintained, and where housing is more plentiful and more affordable.

How we work

Livable City engages San Francisco in three ways – as the City’s livability advocate, as the City’s Open Streets provider, and as a people’s planner.

Livability Advocate. We advocate for policy changes, programs, and projects which make San Francisco more sustainable, livable, and equitable. Over the past decade, Livable City has become one of the City’s most effective advocates. We champion complete streets, a citywide greenway network, parking reform, improved transit, more affordable housing (including legalizing accessory dwelling units), keeping arts and artists in San Francisco, and keeping neighborhood commercial districts vital, diverse, and walkable.

Open Streets Provider. Livable City organizes and manages Sunday Streets, San Francisco’s open streets program, providing 15 yearly miles of car-free open space on City streets across seven neighborhoods. Sunday Streets serves over 100,000 people yearly with free activities, resources and recreation and is produced in partnership with City agencies and neighborhood and nonprofit partners.

People’s Planner. We work directly with residents and small businesses to make San Francisco neighborhoods more livable, including helping enact planning and zoning changes responsive to neighborhood needs, helping plan and secure funding for street and open space improvements, preserving housing and local landmarks, and helping neighborhood-serving small businesses and community services thrive.

Our Values

Our campaigns and our programs are informed by our values.

Sustainability and Resiliency. A livable city respects the living planet, and is in harmony with the natural systems that sustain all life. It uses earth’s resources wisely, and meets current needs without compromising the well-being of future generations. It fosters biodiversity – the local communities of animals and plants unique to its place. It embraces a ‘cradle to cradle’ ethos, minimizing pollution and waste.

Health and Happiness. A livable city promotes the health and happiness of its residents, providing opportunities for quality health care, active living, healthy eating, human connection, and the experience of beauty. A livable city promotes health in all its policies.

Equity. A livable city provides equitable access to the necessities of life, including housing, mobility, food, services, education, and meaningful work. It gives all residents an opportunity particpate in the civic, economic, and cultural life of the city. It doesn’t impose undue environmental or health burdens on individuals or communities.

Democracy and Community. A livable city provides all residents the right to participate in decisions which affect them. It allows decision-making and planning for community needs at various scales – the individual, the household. the block, the neighborhood, the city, and the region. It’s policies, laws, standards, and practices are clear, transparent, and user-friendly.

Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Policy Statement

Members of the Board of Directors of Livable City and Sunday Streets serve the entire City and County of San Francisco. This Board strives to enhance the quality of life and wellbeing of all members of every San Francisco community. This Board recognizes that structural inequities including racism, ageism, ableism, anti-LGBTQIA, in the United States, in California, and in San Francisco result in unacceptable injustices. These injustices have divided racial and ethnic groups, and neighborhoods, between those that have good access and those that have poor access to wealth, education, employment, entrepreneurial opportunities, adequate safe and affordable housing, child care, health, healthcare, healthy food, clean air, public safety, open space, greenery, transportation, community amenities, cultural spaces and programming, low-stress environments, social cohesion and quality of life. This Board’s mission is to improve access to all of these things throughout the entire city to create a truly livable city.

Livable City’s Board of Directors and staff commit to prioritizing its efforts in neighborhoods of San Francisco with poor access to these things, to help address racial and ethnic injustices and socioeconomic inequities. This Board is proud of the work the staff has done so far towards this priority and it supports increasing staff’s resources devoted to working with groups and programs in Black-, Indigenous-, and Persons of Color- (BIPOC) communities and neighborhoods that have historically lacked investment, care, and service. This prioritization of resources should be measurable in the organization’s budget and reportable as a higher proportion of the organization’s work efforts. As a result of this newly stated prioritization of Livable City’s work efforts, this Board invites BIPOC community members to join us on staff and on the Board of Directors.

Staff

Darin Ow-Wing, Executive Director

Amy Lin, Deputy Director

Tom Radulovich, Policy and Planning

Tom joined Transportation for a Livable City as executive director in June 2004. He has been an urban environmental activist since attending college at UC Berkeley, advocating for urban environmental restoration, better public transport, and the greening and revitalization of public streetscapes and open spaces. He played an important role in voter initiatives to create the Octavia Boulevard and to create a “Grand Central Station” at San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal that connects regional and intercity rail and bus lines.

He served as an elected director of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District from 1996 to 2016, where he has advocated for reinvestment and renovation of the BART system, and improving BART practices in the areas of sustainability, accessibility, customer service, architecture and urban design, and the creation of transit villages at BART stations.

Jessica Tovar

Board of Directors

Justin Bigelow, President

Justin Bigelow is an attorney in Oakland at Goldfarb & Lipman LLP, where he represents a variety of local governments, affordable housing developers, and other nonprofit clients throughout California.  He assists clients with a range of issues relating to real estate transactions and compliance with planning and environmental laws.  He has experience in affordable housing, landlord-tenant, municipal law, tax-exempt entity law, property management, entity formation, and employment law.  Justin is originally from Minnesota where he earned a bachelor’s degree at Macalester College.  He earned a Juris Doctor from U.C. Hastings (cum laude) and a Masters in City Planning from U.C. Berkeley.

José Campos 

José is a Project Manager with San Francisco’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure.

Fay Darmawi

Fay Darmawi is a film festival producer, community development banker, and urban planner interested using all forms of media to create lasting social change. She is the Founder and Executive Producer of the SF Urban Film Fest, a film festival focused on civic engagement inspired by great storytelling. Her 20-years of experience as a leader in affordable housing finance, including managing the low income housing tax credit platform for Silicon Valley Bank, as well as 5-years of screenwriting training, informs her media-related work.

Bert Hill

Bert is a bicycle advocate specializing in transportation and secure storage. He is currently developing a Bay Area intermodal bicycle sharing program, and teaches safety courses as a League of American Bicyclists certified instructor. Bert also serves as Chair of the San Francisco Bicycle Advisory Committee. Formerly, he worked in engineering and construction project management. He is a graduate of the University of Washington, where he studied Urban Development.

Melyssa Mendoza

Melyssa is a bicycle advocate, and a resident of San Francisco since 2004. As a law student in San Francisco, she realized bicycles not only move people around cites, but they also help save the planet, provide exercise, create communities, and assist with mental health. She was a board member of Lyon-Martin Health Services starting in 2011, then upon merger, of HealthRight 360 until early 2020.  Currently, she is the Secretary of the San Francisco bicycle advisory committee, and was a founding member of San Francisco Bike Party. She sees her work with Livable City as an extension of her prior work with community health centers.

Sasha Magee, Secretary

Sasha Magee works for the City and County of San Francisco to help the city serve its residents better online. A long-time activist, Sasha came to Livable City through causes like rent control, affordable housing, workers’ rights and environmental justice. When not working for San Francisco Government or Livable City, Sasha is usually reading, riding his bike, building trails or making pizzas in his backyard oven.

Michael T. Nguyen, Vice-President

Michael T. Nguyen is Director of IP Operations and a patent attorney at Patent Law Works and specializes in protecting software inventions.  Born in Chicago and raised in the suburbs of many cities around the country, Michael has always loved the energy of city living, and has enjoyed living in the Twin Peaks neighborhood of SF for over 10 years.  Michael sits on the LGBTQI+ Advisory Committee of the San Michael T. Nguyen is Director of IP Operations and a patent attorney at Patent Law Works and specializes in protecting software inventions.  Born in Chicago and raised in the suburbs of many cities around the country, Michael has always loved the energy of city living, and has enjoyed living in the Twin Peaks neighborhood of SF for over 10 years.  Michael sits on the LGBTQI+ Advisory Committee of the San Francisco Human Rights Commision and is Chair Emeritus of the GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA), an advocacy organization that envisions a powerful Queer, Trans, Asian and Pacific Islander community that is seen, heard, and celebrated (www.gapa.org). Michael’s alter-ego drag persona, Juicy Liu, performs regularly in the Castro and was crowned Miss GAPA in 2016. Over the years, Michael/Juicy has personally raised thousands of dollars for community organizations in the Bay Area, including the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, SF AIDS Foundation through AIDS/Lifecycle, GAPA, and Prism Foundation. In 2022, Michael was nominated by Sen. Scott Wiener as a Pride Month Honoree for his community work. Michael holds a JD from University of California Hastings College of the Law and a BA (cum laude) in Computer Science and Music from Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX.

Betsy White

Betsy has lived in San Francisco for 18 years, during which time she has lived in at least eight different neighborhoods. She is a product attorney at Apple and recently completed her six-year term on the Advisory Board at One Justice, a non-profit that facilitates pro bono legal services to under-served communities in California. As a parent to two young kids, Betsy believes that cities are foundational to raising tolerant, accepting, and curious children; and in order to realize this potential, a successful city must have dynamic public spaces where people from different neighborhoods and backgrounds may interact in meaningful ways.

Becks Wood, Treasurer 

Becks is a Product Management Director at Google. Becks has been an SF resident for 17 years and is passionate about Livable City’s values of creating shared public spaces, 15-minute neighborhoods, and greening the city. Becks also loves skiing, reading, bike riding, spending time with her partner Mark walking around the Mission, and finding ways to create connection and community.