On Tuesday, a land dispute in San Francisco got violent.
The fight is about who owns a one-block-long strip of land between 22nd and Harrison streets. No one knows for sure who owns it, and nobody agrees on how it should be used.
Rudy Rucker of Monkeybrains Internet Service, who had built a slab for his plants that Elizabeth Creely of Friends of Mission Greenway knocked over with a bag of Cheetos.
He knocks the camera out of her hands as she starts to record.
The woman then hits Rucker in the face with the other hand.
Alex Menendez, the CEO of Monkeybrains Internet Service, said, “We want to use this the way it has been used in the past.”
The strip of land is right behind the building of his business.
Mission Greenway has other plans for the right of way that used to belong to Southern Pacific. So do other nonprofits..
A San Francisco resident said, “The most obvious use would be open space, like a park or something.”
No one knows for sure who owns this land, which is a big part of the problem.
Over the years, these strips have been split up and put into dozens of trusts all over the country. Some people don’t even know they own some of this. And the city of San Francisco has no formal say in what happens out here.
Rucker said, “She kind of came up and body-checked me; she kind of bounced into me.” “All four of them had their cameras out, and I knocked one of them out of her hand… she came in and punched me in the face.”
Creely said that she was scared, so she fought back.
The land is in the area of Supervisor Hillary Ronen. Ronen’s spokeswoman said that she has offered to help bring the two sides together to talk about peace.
So far, she hasn’t heard back from either side.