Three San Francisco tech engineers purchased a neglected Sunset District alley for $26,000 and launched a crowdsourced pavement art project — outside any city program — inviting the public to submit designs to be permanently painted underfoot.

The alley between 23rd and 24th Avenues off Kirkham Street in the Sunset has a name Patrick Hultquist, Theo Bleier, and Riley Walz gave it when they bought it: Dirt Alley. The price was $26,000. Now they are trying to fill it with 1,280 pavement paintings, submitted online by anyone who wanted a piece of the block.

The project runs through paintastreet.com, which the three engineers launched after acquiring the alley. Submissions were invited from the public; the top 1,280 designs are to be permanently painted on the pavement. Hultquist described the purchase to the San Francisco Chronicle as something other than a deliberate plan. "We were not on the lookout to buy an alley in San Francisco," he said. Once they had it, they decided what to do with it as publicly as possible. "We hope a lot of kids have fun with it," Hultquist said. "My 5-year-old self would have loved to draw something and have it end up on a street."

The project operates entirely outside the city's public art infrastructure. The San Francisco Arts Commission does not list it in its public art collection database, and no DPW mural permit or Arts Commission authorization for the installation was located in public records. That is not necessarily a problem — the alley is privately owned — but it also means no city maintenance agreement attaches. Under DPW rules for permitted street murals, the installer bears responsibility for repairs if infrastructure work damages the art. How a private alley owner navigates that over time is their own arrangement with the pavement.

The crowdsourcing has reached beyond the neighborhood. This month, a post appeared on r/AskSF from an artist based outside the United States who said their drawing had been featured in a project in the alley — off Kirkham, between 23rd and 24th — and was looking for a local photographer to document it. "I'm too far away to visit and take photos myself," the post read. The artist cited a Notion social media post as project reference; that link returned no content. The connection between the submission and Paint a Street could not be independently verified, but the detail has its own logic: a crowdsourced project draws strangers, and some of those strangers cannot make it to Kirkham.

Hultquist framed it in the key of deliberate optimism: "San Francisco embraces public art and is uniquely suited for these kind of random, joy-infused projects." Whether 1,280 pavement designs underfoot constitute public art or participatory novelty is a question for whoever walks through. The current stage of painting — whether designs are already underfoot, in progress, or still in the selection queue — could not be confirmed from available records.

Walk the alley between 23rd and 24th off Kirkham, and that is what you would be checking.