SoMa and Tenderloin Residents Back Plan To Spread Homeless Services Across San Francisco

When Ei Kay Khine Zin closed her SoMa restaurant for Thanksgiving two years ago, she returned to find someone had taken up residence inside. They’d broken in, eaten everything they could get their hands on and left behind a mess. It’s just one effect the Bay of Burma owner has felt from living in what she and her neighbors call a “containment zone” for the city’s unhoused residents.

Khine Zin blames the city for making the area a hub for shelters and services. “We really need to stop the city dumping all of those facilities in the same neighborhood. This really is not fair,” she said.

While she loves her city, working in SoMa means sweeping used syringes off the restaurant doorstep many mornings, and fending off drug-addled passersby who wander in to yell at customers and snatch food off their plates. Living here means that friends who live outside the city refuse to visit. “All my girlfriends are afraid,” she said. “That makes me really sad.”

Across SoMa and the Tenderloin, business owners, residents and service providers echo the sense of living in neighborhoods long compelled to absorb what the rest of the city has refused. They describe exhaustion, fear, economic strain — and tentative hope that something might finally shift as city leaders push legislation aimed at spreading homeless housing and services more equitably across San Francisco.

A recent assessment by the controller’s office found shelters are concentrated in the eastern part of the city, especially the Tenderloin, while there aren’t any shelters in the western half of the city.

That’s in part because of the high density of single-room occupancy hotels and aging buildings in the Tenderloin and SoMa, which have tended to be easier for the city or nonprofits to lease or buy. As District 8 supervisor in the early 2000s, Bevan Dufty learned how hard it could be to bring services to other areas. “I couldn’t get department heads to work with me,” he said, of an effort to build permanent affordable housing in the Castro. “They were not interested. They were like, ‘This is far too expensive. We can get much more mileage for dollars spent elsewhere.’”

Plus, adds Dufty, now a member of the Homeless Oversight Commission, “Folks that live in the TL traditionally have not had a lot of sway with politicians.” Facing opposition elsewhere, officials repeatedly located shelters in these neighborhoods — until they became default zones.

With a proposal expected to be introduced Tuesday (PDF), Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin, said the goal is to correct decades of imbalance. “It’s time for the rest of the city to do their fair share,” he said.

When Patrick Eggen moved to SoMa a decade ago, it felt like a neighborhood on the rise. It was a hub for startups, and businesses were thriving. Since then, the area, already home to the city’s largest shelter, on Fifth Street, saw several new shelters and permanent supportive housing sites open.

“There was such an obsession with just pushing housing at all costs without thinking about the incredible damage it has to our sidewalks, to our children, to our small business owners, to elderly,” said Eggen, a SoMa West Community Benefit District board member. “There is no meaningful investment back in the community to offset the impact.”

The pandemic worsened conditions as startups left, followed by their employees.”All the vices became much more visible,” Eggen said. He and his nine and five-year-olds now regularly have to navigate feces, syringes and people doubled over in a fentanyl-induced stupor.

He said he’s spent years trying to negotiate with the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, often with little success, so he welcomes the new proposal and calls the city’s new leadership, especially Mayor Daniel Lurie, “a beacon in a sea of historical indifference.”

In the Tenderloin, Rev. Paul Trudeau runs a supportive housing program and cafe through his nonprofit City Hope SF and sees how the city’s strategy has frayed the fabric of the neighborhood around him.

“When we’re not really caring for the Tenderloin and we’re containing drug activity in open-air markets, that’s horrible. That’s just so unfair,” he said. “The things you can get away with in the Tenderloin are ridiculous compared to if somebody did this in Pac Heights. Why does one neighborhood get health and accountability and the other doesn’t?”

For Trudeau, the burden is personal. He’s been physically attacked by one of his own customers — a man split his head open with a metal rod after he announced the cafe wouldn’t be able to feed everyone waiting in line.

Still, he believes in the work and in his neighborhood. And while he’s encouraged by the spirit of the proposed ordinance, which would require each district to approve at least one facility by next summer and bar new sites from opening within 1,000 feet of an existing one, he’s torn on the specifics.

“You’re kind of handcuffing yourself,” he said of the 1000-foot limitation, explaining that he’s been trying to purchase an abandoned hotel next door to City Hope SF’s facilities. “That’s an opportunity,” he said. “No, we don’t want all services to be in the Tenderloin. But I don’t think we should only be thinking outward.”

Trudeau thinks the Tenderloin needs sober living facilities to better support people who are in recovery. “It’s not just trying to get more services out to a different neighborhood, it’s getting different services because we’re listening to those we’re serving.”

Joe Wilson, who leads shelter and services provider Hospitality House, agrees that the city needs to diversify — both the location and type of services it provides. “If the treatment programs are all concentrated in the very places that have the most incidents of drug-related behavior, that makes recovery extremely difficult,” he said, while acknowledging that facilities that take a harm reduction approach are also a vital part of the city’s tool kit. San Francisco’s first drug-free housing facility is slated to open this summer.

While Wilson anticipates push back from neighborhoods that haven’t historically housed services, he sees models for success in longstanding programs like the Delancey Street Foundation, which runs a treatment program, restaurant and moving company, centered on the Embarcadero, that have won over neighbors who were initially skeptical.

“There are a number of examples of anchor institutions in various communities that could rally together to promote the best of what’s possible when the community is engaged, involved, and we try to really appeal to the better aspects of our nature,” he said, “rather than knee-jerk prejudices and reactions.”