Ehrenfeld is the president of the Inner Sunset Park Neighbors, a role that sits somewhere between municipal watchdog and block captain, and she came to it the way most people come to neighborhood associations: she cared about something specific, then couldn't stop caring about the next thing, and the thing after that. Plants, in her case, are something of an entry point — the Inner Sunset's fog-friendly microclimates produce a genuinely strange variety of front-yard botany, and she has opinions.

What she describes as being "the perfect amount of nosy" sounds, in practice, like sustained attention. She notices when a storefront goes dark, when a new family moves in, when the park furniture gets rearranged without explanation. This is, more or less, the job description for anyone who wants a neighborhood association to function rather than just exist on a dot-org domain.