The Ambassador Hotel houses 134 residents, serves as critical affordable housing

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / November 22, 2023 / U.S. Bank

The Ambassador Hotel was built in 1911 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. (Photo by Toolbox Video Services)

Originally published on U.S. Bank company blog

The historic Ambassador Hotel has played a role in San Francisco’s history for 112 years, including serving as an informal hospice during the 1980s and 1990s AIDS crisis, and housing low-income individuals today.

Time along with wear and tear left the building in need of a comprehensive rehab, and San Francisco’s Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., which acquired the Ambassador in 1999, is in the midst of a such a rehab project, which includes funding from U.S. Bancorp Impact Finance.

Impact Finance invested $67 million in Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) and provided a $71 million construction loan. It instituted a financial structure involving LIHTCS that included tax exempt and taxable construction financing.

“The Ambassador Hotel holds a rich and cherished history in the heart of San Francisco, particularly among the Tenderloin community,” said TNDC CEO Maurilio Leon. “During the 1980’s and 1990s, it served as a vital sanctuary for numerous AIDS patients, extending compassion and support to those who were without the means to care for themselves or connect with support networks. In the early 2000s, TNDC assumed the stewardship of this historic place, and today, in 2023, we take great pride in continuing its enduring legacy by preserving affordable housing for our community.”

Constructed in 1911 and on the National Register of Historic Places, the Ambassador Hotel is a six-story building with 134 single-room apartments that include full bathrooms and kitchenettes. The property houses very low-income individuals with an area median income between 30-60%.

Located on the corner of Eddy and Mason Streets, the Ambassador’s rehab included a mega structural upgrade featuring structural steel plus life safety upgrades, code upgrades and replacement of building systems.

Story continues

“At a time when other financial partners hesitated to move forward with an investment due to the complexities, we leaned in,” said Lisa Gutierrez, director of business development, affordable housing, for Impact Finance. “We’ve specialized in complex developments like this for over 30 years. The coordination to get to the finish line was intense, from understanding the relocation plan of this vulnerable resident population to aligning with the many public funding sources and rental subsidies, all while managing the building rehabilitation needs of this historic building.”

In addition to this financing, since 2005, the U.S. Bank Foundation has provided $225,000 in grant and corporate contribution funding to TNDC.

The project is expected to be completed in 2024, and Ambassador residents said they are excited about the changes.

“I really like the new modern features at the Ambassador – especially the additional cabinet space in my room,” said one resident.

“I enjoyed returning to my newly rehabbed unit. Everything is so new and works well,” said another.

“I especially like the outdoor furniture on the Ambassador’s courtyard patio,” another resident said. “I’m planning to do my schoolwork out there at one of the new tables.”

Over nearly 30 years, Impact Finance has provided $1.25 billion in debt and almost $800 million in equity within San Francisco’s larger five-county metropolitan statistical area.

Gutierrez said the bank’s motivation to be involved in the Ambassador project is the investment’s high impact.

“We’re investors with heart,” she said, “and our primary goal is to create lasting change in our communities.”

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SOURCE: U.S. Bank

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SAN FRANCISCO — In recent years, international attention has been focused on San Francisco’s Tenderloin and the immense challenges there. There is homelessness, which surfaced acutely decades ago. There is the drug dealing and drug abuse that has exploded on neighborhood sidewalks in recent years claiming a record number of lives.

While San Francisco has tried to tackle all of that there is one byproduct of those larger challenges which is a tremendous challenge in its own right. That is the trash, food, furniture, bicycles and whatever else winds up on city sidewalks during the overnight hours. Someone has to clean it up.

“At times it feels like, you know, our efforts are for none,” said John Mello, operations manager with the Tenderloin Community Benefit District. “‘Cause we will knock out this block and someone will come back and dump it right back out on us. Almost seems like a thankless job. Because, look at it!”

At daybreak in the Tenderloin Mello’s job doesn’t so much get underway, as it picks up where it left off.

“The trash is all over the place,” he said. “It’s enormous.”

The Tenderloin Community Benefit District is just one of the groups mobilized against this neighborhood’s blight.

“We do pressure washing,” Mello explained. “We do graffiti removal. We do trash pick-up. We do loose garbage, debris, pan and brooms.”

On another corner, San Francisco Public Works crews are starting their day.

“We have animals and pets and pedestrians and all that,” said Al Matus, describing who he’s trying to help.

Matus, a San Francisco native, is among those who get up every morning and tackle a wave of trash so relentless it can overwhelm the storm drains.

“Especially during the rainy season all this debris can flow down into the catch basins. So we have to make sure all that is taken care of so it doesn’t flood,” Matus said.

Over the week of Sept. 22, city crews collected more than 36,000 pounds of trash in the Tenderloin. That’s only what Public Works crews hauled away and doesn’t include what was picked up by the Benefit District workers or Urban Alchemy. It’s just one average week.

The trash never stops.

“So we try to collaboratively work with everybody we possibly can,” Mello said of the challenge. “Because it’s a group effort to keep this place clean because not one agency, you know, not 10.”

On any given block you can find residents putting up their own fight and the city says it’s trying to stop some of the trash inflow with outreach to those who may be piling on the problem without knowing it.

“Residents who live in single-room-occupancy hotels where there might not be sufficient garbage service for them, some of those people try to do the right thing by putting the garbage bags, tying it up, putting it outside … hoping it gets picked up,” explained  Rachel Gordon with San Francisco Public Works.  “But what happens then is that people come through at night or, sometimes, during the day, open the bags and spread all the garbage everywhere. It makes a big mess on the street.”

Another problem is that these pickups are full after about an hour’s work and currently have to drive out to Recology on the Peninsula. So the city is getting some larger dump trucks that can offload the pickups in the middle of town.

“So the trucks don’t have to go and spend an hour back-and-forth going there,” Gordon said of the plan. “They can keep on the streets to keep cleaning.”

For the Tenderloin, trash and litter have become a generations-spanning challenge, just like the larger issues facing this neighborhood. All of these things intersect and the people trying to keep the sidewalks clean are in the middle of all of it.

“There’s somebody sleeping over there,”  Khaled Shehadeh with SF Public Works said, pointing to a person under a blanket. “We’re not just going to go disturb them and move them.”

Some public works crews are tied directly to encampment resolution teams. That involves things like determining the legal number of bicycles someone can have on a sidewalk and making sure batteries and other kinds of hazardous waste don’t go out with trash. Every cleaning crew works around similar issues. In this case, someone claimed what looks like trash as their belongings.

“Bags, paper bags ripped apart,”  Shehadeh said. “But there’s nothing we can do. We have to respect her wishes. She says that’s hers so we can’t clean it up.”

“It is very complicated,”  Mello said of the situation. “It’s very complicated. It’s just what the Tenderloin is right now. Hopefully we can, all here together, make it better.”

“Being brought up here in the city and everything,” Matus added. “For me, it’s not just work, it’s a little more personal than that. So I go about my day, go home and feel like I put in a day’s work and it keeps me satisfied and keeps me going.”

More from CBS News

Wilson Walker

Wilson Walker joined KPIX 5 in July 2007. After 10 years producing newscasts, Wilson became a Multimedia Journalist (MMJ) in 2012, meaning he shoots, writes and edits all of his own stories.

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Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

A homeless encampment is seen in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, California, on June 6, 2023.

San Francisco
CNN
 — 

The California Highway Patrol may best be known for freeway chases and the Hollywood glamour of its motorcycle cops in television shows like “ChiPs.” But now the storied agency is patrolling the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin as part of a multiagency effort to crack down on rampant drug dealing that’s decimating the 50-square-block area.

On one day recently, CNN watched as task force members arrested a suspected drug dealer accused of selling meth and fentanyl. Inside a plastic bag: 33 grams of fentanyl that CHP officer Andy Barclay estimates, at its worst, could potentially kill thousands of people.

“We’re looking at around 16,500 fatal doses of pure fentanyl in that small bag. Yes, 16,500 people could potentially die,” Barclay said.

A mother was raising her son in a city she loved. Then San Francisco changed and stole her boy

California Governor Gavin Newsom is spearheading the crackdown by adding resources to a problem that isn’t unique to San Francisco but has entered the national spotlight as the city’s liberal politicians face scrutiny over a perceived rise in crime.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s office says the CHP has made 100 drug-related arrests since May 30. In the last three months, according to her office, local agencies have arrested 300 suspected drug dealers, and local and state agencies have seized 103 kilos of narcotics, including 56 kilos, or 123 pounds, of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin.

“I’m proud of the CHP and CalGuard’s lifesaving efforts to shut down the Tenderloin’s poison pipeline and hold drug traffickers accountable,” Newsom said a month after shifting some CHP resources from the state’s freeways to the city’s streets.

The Tenderloin is considered ground zero for San Francisco’s open air drug market, which only expanded after Covid-19, forcing Breed to declare a state of emergency in 2021. It’s commonplace to see people using and selling drugs. Human waste, used needles and bullet casings litter the sidewalks. All the squalor is a short walk from the city’s popular Union Square – the central shopping district that attracts tourists to its upscale hotels and stores.

It’s not just crime: What’s really going on with San Francisco’s shrinking retail district

Despite the major crackdown, residents and business owners told CNN they don’t see the results in their everyday life.

No one CNN spoke with wanted to go on camera for fear of retaliation and harassment, except for Martha Hughes. She’s lived in the Tenderloin for 24 years. “I’m not scared of them; I’m not scared of anything,” she said. She’s seen the deterioration of the area firsthand. “More drug addicts, more drug dealers,” she said. “It’s just bad.”

She supports the police crackdown but doesn’t think it’s working. Her plan is to leave when she can find a more affordable living situation.

“I’m moving in a couple of years. I had to have surgery this year so I don’t have the money, but I’m out of here as soon as I can afford it. I blame this all on the politicians and they don’t really seem to care. They have a lot of big talk but there’s not enough action really,” Hughes said.

One of those politicians is San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. She was elected in 2022 after voters, fed up with crime, recalled previous district attorney, Chesa Boudin.

“We appear to be failing as city leaders,” she told CNN. “I want them to know that I am working every day to ensure that the situation changes. But I’m only one part of this system. I have had to be very vocal about the fact that there is another part of the system right now that is failing them.”

Watch: What happened to San Francisco?

Jenkins says her office has filed almost 1,000 drug dealing cases, and she’s tried to detain the most serious offenders pending trial.

“Unfortunately, they’re cycling back out onto the street almost immediately after the arrest in our case is filed to date,” she said, pointing a finger at Superior Court judges.

CNN was unable to independently confirm Jenkins’ claims. The San Francisco Superior Court had no comment.

In the last year, Jenkins said her office filed motions to keep 200 of the most egregious drug dealers behind bars while they await trial. Of the 200 motions to detain that were filed, only 17 were granted, according to Jenkins. Judges allowed the rest out on their recognizance. In these cases, the defendant agrees to appear in court when required and to comply with any imposed restrictions or conditions. In some cases, Jenkins said, the suspects did not return for hearing dates or broke the law while released.

“I’m not going to take the blame when my prosecutors are going in and arguing that these people have to remain in custody. The judges are not doing their part and that has to be revealed,” Jenkins said.

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By: YIMBY Team 4:30 a.m on May 15, 2023

New plans have been proposed for the restoration of the Sierra Madre Apartments at 421 Leavenworth Street in Tenderloin, San Francisco. The project proposal involves the restoration and rehabilitation of the six-story apartment building that caught fire in 2021.

Levy Design Partners is the architect of the project.

421 Leavenworth Street Elevation via Levy Design Partners

The project site is a 5,777 square foot lot. The scope of the project includes the restoration and refurbishment of 47 social housing units and a common room. The proposed works include stair repairs in kind and window repairs. Replacement work includes replacing doors, electrical feeds, damaged galvanized sewer pipes and water supply lines. New interior finishes are proposed, as well as new plumbing and lighting fixtures. Also proposed are gas line removal and repair, voluntary earthquakes, ground floor reorganization, a new fire safety system, new fire alarm system, new exhaust and HVAC system, and new mobility and communications units.

421 Leavenworth Street rear view via Levy Design Partners

The building will have 20,187 square meters of living space. In addition, an open space of 80 square meters will be available. The six-storey building will have 42 studio apartments and 5 one-bedroom apartments.

The Sierra Madre Apartments were built in 1913 and the historical street facade is preserved. The proposed project will create new fire water supply, service water and sanitation connections.

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421 Leavenworth Street Levy Design Partners

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SAN FRANCISCO — In early 2022, San Francisco mobilized to tackle the problems that had been building over decades in the Tenderloin District: Homelessness, an exploding drug crisis, the growing presence of drug cartels and a sense that things were spinning out of control. Sixteen months later, what has changed? 

What is happening in this neighborhood has drawn attention around the world over the past year. The Tenderloin is a dynamic neighborhood and conditions on any given corner can change abruptly. Exactly how things are changing over time depends a lot on whom you ask and when.

“It’s almost every day,” Jorge said referring to a mound of trash on the street. “Every single day they have a mess over here.”

“It’s been nice,” Azalina Eusope said of recent conditions. “I would say about the last four weeks.”

Every day is a little different here and there are some changes unfolding but lasting change was always going to depend on finding ways to help the people that are struggling here.

“Nobody should have to live like this,” said Mark Mazza with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, as he looked over a sidewalk encampment. “No one should have to walk through this. This is a pathway right here kids take to the playground up the street.”

Mazza is taking on a challenge some might think impossible. As the Tenderloin Streets operation manager, he sees a lot of these streets.

“I do a lot of walking,” he said. “Probably about 50 miles a week.”

All that walking reflects a shift in city strategy — this one driven by the Dec. 2022 closure of what debuted as the Tenderloin Linkage Center.

“When the Tenderloin Center closed, we had to focus 100 percent on bringing those services to the street,” Mazza explained. “So that’s when we just divided the neighborhood into four areas and every day we work that area, seven days a week. HSH, DPH, DPW — we’ve divided the Tenderloin into four different zones. We come through, we offer to get people to shelter with wellness checks. If someone has somewhere to live already or they’re in a shelter, we try to get them back there.”

It’s a slow, day-by-day, case-by-case process that often means revisiting the same people in the same tents for months with occasional breakthroughs. 

“We had somebody, it was a couple, and we had a couple navigation center beds down in the Bayview,” Mazza said at one stop.

Then there is the scale of the challenge in a city with an unsheltered homeless population of about 4,400.

“We can’t keep up,” Mazza acknowledged. “There’s so much need out here and not enough of us to help and everybody out here doesn’t want to be out here.”

“They just started contacting people when COVID happened,” said Abe, who lives on Tenderloin streets. “Before that, there weren’t any people really offering. Occasionally if the police caught you nodding off, they’d take you to a navigation center.”

Abe has been in San Francisco for 10 years, almost all of it on the street. He says he is seeing more offers for help.

“So they just started going after people, during COVID,” he said.

Why is he still on the street? He says it comes down to the available options and that is something Mazza hears just about every day

“This group, they would go inside if they were eligible for what they want,” Mazza said, talking about another group on the street. “They want hotel rooms and they don’t meet the eligibility requirements so they want to stay out here.”

“It’s totally BS,” Abe added. “They come up and they want you to throw away all your personal property, drop everything and go with them and go to a, like, a dorm where they’re just stacking everybody It’s like a metal house in there. For real.”

“I can’t blame them for not wanting to go into a congregate shelter,” Mazza said.”That’s their decision.”    

And that’s just one example of how resolving any single case can be difficult, under difficult circumstances, for everyone.

“These guys are out here every day, often getting yelled at, working hard,” Mazza said of his team. “People are mad at them. People who are on the streets are mad. People who are housed are mad at them.”

“It’s the people that are actually the hardest workers are the ones that are being shafted in this,” said homeowner Alex Alvarado.

Alvarado may not be yelling at city workers but he is frustrated. He was one of the neighbors KPIX met last year. At the time he was encouraged by the street-cleaning efforts. One year later, he’s disappointed.

“If we didn’t clean here, this place would be a complete disaster,” Alvarado said.

In 2022, Stu Barkouki spoke to KPIX about the struggle to run his deli. One year later, he tells us it was just too much, He sold and moved on.

Others are digging in.

“You know people have been loving and caring for the Tenderloin since probably the beginning of time.” Eusope said, pointing to her restaurant wall collection of Tenderloin photos. “You can see all these little signs and you don’t get that in any other neighborhood in San Francisco.”

Eusope proudly boasts of being a fifth-generation street food vendor. Opening the restaurant means running a gauntlet of city fees, rules and regulations — an stark contrast to the disorder she was seeing just outside. After being spit on by someone camping in her doorway, she joined a group of business owners demanding help from the mayor’s office.

“If you’re placing a regulation or rules or a process that needs to be followed,” Eusope said. “It has to be equally distributed and everybody has to act the same way and I just feel like that’s what is missing here.”

Saving the Tenderloin has meant different things over the years. Now for entrepreneurs like Eusope, that means finding a way to make this neighborhood a viable place to run a business.

“Should I say fight?” Eusope asked. “Maybe that’s not really a positive word but it’s gonna take a lot of loud voices from small people like us.”

When Mayor London Breed announced the Tenderloin emergency initiative, her language around the use of law enforcement drew a lot of attention but significant policing changes haven’t really come until recently.

KPIX observed a typical drug bust made by a six-member undercover team, launched in late November.

“Extra baggies,” said an SFPD officer, going through a bag of evidence seized in a drug bust. “More fentanyl”

Days later, more arrests at the very same corner. There are new rules. A uniformed officer must be on hand but it’s not slowing them down. At the start of April, Tenderloin Station had made 217 arrests, putting it on pace to pass last year’s total by more than 50 percent.

“We have recovered triple the amount of drugs year to date as opposed to last year,” said Tenderloin station Captain Sergio Chin.

“We have charged almost double the amount of cases in the period since I took over compared with the previous year,” explained San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.

Jenkins began her tenure by coming to this neighborhood and promising action against drug dealing. While the busts are really old-fashion police work, they’re hitting challenges. A complaint was filed against one officer alleging that Latinos are being unfairly targeted. Officers say they’re simply targeting fentanyl and problematic corners. As for prosecutors, their drug arrest cases are just now reaching courtrooms. The first two cases ended with hung juries.

“The defense that was offered in both of those cases is that the defendant had been trafficked and that’s why they were selling narcotics,” Jenkins said. “This is a new issue. When I was handling drug dealing cases five years ago, there was no allegation that anyone was being trafficked so it’s something that we are having to adapt to rapidly.”

“We’re not gonna have any more luck arresting our way out of that crisis by arresting street-level dealers than any prior administration of that or that this country has had,” countered District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston, who now covers a portion of the Tenderloin. “If you have an addressed the underlying causes and reasons that folks are out there and dealing if you have an investor in the community you’re just moving people around.”

Out on the street, it’s not hard to find those who say the stepped-up presence alone is long overdue — at least on their corner.

“We’ve tried to call the police many times before,” said Jessica, a travel agency owner. “Sometimes they come, sometimes not. Right now, it’s really better with the police on the streets right now. I prefer to have the police on the streets.”

In the same way Urban Alchemy only patrols some of the neighborhood, police can’t be everywhere at once.

“They’ve moved them all the way up to Post Street,” observed Tony Kushmaul. “So they move them block-to-block or they move them around the block.”

“Even though the sellers may move around and others engage in criminal activity, we’re going to stay on top of them and on top of what they’re doing regardless of where they go,” promised SFPD assistant chief David Lazar

So the police are making more arrests, taking on a wave of drug dealers as residents watch and wait to see what it might accomplish.

“The police, they need to make more walking routes, you know,” a man named Gordon said of what he’d like to see from SFPD. “Walking around — at least scare these guys.”

Another part of this story that has stretched on for decades is neighbors trying to find their own ways to push back against problems. Lately more of them are doing that by making some noise.

“Before I started doing this, all these people that’s over there, that’s using drugs,” said resident JJ Smith of his sidewalk-clearing. “They all were using their drugs, right here.”

For Smith, it started with things like clearing paths for school kids, checking on neighbors, building relationships with those on the street. After a while, he too hit something of a breaking point.

“It’s not normal,” he said of the neighborhood’s condition. “But it is normal.”

He set out to change that “normal” by showing it to everyone. He turned his Twitter account into a raw, no-apologies chronicle of life and death in this neighborhood. The suffering on the street, the violence, the drugs and the casualties.

“I just want my voice to be heard,” Smith said. “I want people to be able to see what I see. Understand what I deal with every day when I walk out my door.”

“I felt I had to use the tools that I had to do something,” said another resident who chose not to be identified for obvious reasons. “To sort of fight back”

Turning several lenses on a problem: a now-growing collection of neighbors who are connecting via closed-circuit security cameras.

“Been in San Francisco for 30 years and I’ve been a resident of the Tenderloin for 29 years,” they explained. “Basically, shock that what I saw was going on. Nothing was really being done about it.”
   
So they turned the focus on the blatant, open-air drug trade that had consumed their blocks and put it online.

“There’s a regular. He’s out there all the time and there he is using a mule,” they explained, pointing to some of the videos they had collected. “It was something that people would just deny — that’s not going on — but there it is, you know? Just look at it. You can see the drugs. You can see what’s happening.”

They say the dealers eventually saw what was happening as well and a funny thing happened.

“They are well aware of it,” they said of the dealers. “They have moved their operations up a block.”

The cameras shuffled the problem down the street so now more neighbors are building similar systems.

“So it does give me hope that you know how to make change.” they said of the camera deployment. “I would not recommend anyone just do this. It’s a very dangerous activity.”

But, for a lot of people, the current situation has created a sense that, even if risky or unpopular, they have to say something.

“I can place myself in everybody’s shoes because I’ve been there,” Smith said. I can put myself in the tenants’ shoes because I am a tenant. I can put myself in the business people’s shoes because I was once a business owner and I can place myself in the homeless — or addicts’ — shoes because my family has been like that. My brother was like that so I understand what everybody’s going through. I can see it. I can feel it.”

A centerpiece of the initial emergency effort was the Tenderloin Linkage Center, which closed in December.

“People were — initially — they were directed to services to some capacity but you know that wasn’t always happening,” Mayor London Breed said of her decision to close it. “We had all of the different services at one location and that wasn’t completely translating to help and other locations.”

“I mean, this Tenderloin center was not perfect,” countered Supervisor Preston. “There were many things, if I were running it, that I would’ve done very differently but we should’ve — when we closed it — had two more opening in the community.”

The Tenderloin linkage center opened and closed with controversy. It was the city’s first de facto, safe-use site and the discussion over how or where to open another one continues. The drug crisis isn’t just complicating the effort to get people off the streets — it’s driving it in many cases. 

“Urban Alchemy is on the lower TL so that’s moved a lot of things up,” Mazza said of the shifting neighborhood. “So now, Ellis, O’Farrell — we’re seeing a lot more people. You know, people go where the drugs are.”

In the day-after-day, camp-by-camp effort to connect people on the streets with some kind of shelter, there is the one element that looms over just about everything.

“There’s complicated pieces and there’s some that are pretty obvious,” Mazza said. “And people out here will be clear with us. They are addicted to drugs that they need to be using constantly.”

“Like, I’m surprised that I’m not dead yet and I’m 40 years old.” said Phillip who lives in a tent by Polk Street.

Phillip arrived in the city from Puerto Rico with his mother when he was two years old.

“Ever since then I’ve been out here in San Francisco,” he said. 

He ended up homeless when he was 11. Twenty-nine years later, he says, the street is all he knows and when he’s been placed in shelter or housing, he has struggled..

“It is very weird because it’s like I’m not used to this inside environment they’re trying to give me,” Phillip said. “I wanna be somewhere where I’m comfortable.”

Part of being comfortable, he says, means staying alive.

“The drugs that I do, because I do heavy drugs — I do opiates and, for people who do these types of drugs, they can end up living and dying on the street, you know. It’s really easy,” he explained.

“That’s why they’re out here,” Mazza said. “And that’s why we keep coming back to try to catch them at the right time, when they’re ready to do something different.”

There are, of course, other challenges to keeping people in housing.

“Hoarding and cluttering disorders are a real thing,” Mazza said of the challenges.

That’s exactly the kind of case the team had been struggling with recently and an individual they were trying to help agreed to go into housing. Only the man came right back to the same corner and familiar ways, collecting an entire sidewalk full of items pulled from garbage cans and recycle bins. So the team asked if he’d like to go back home.

“He agreed.” Mazza said. “He said he didn’t need any of this stuff. He had gone through it. He didn’t want to take any of it with him. He gets walked home by outreach. He’s somewhere warm now. The street is clean. People can pass through.”

So there are a lot of steps forward and backward for any number of reasons.

“What happens out on the street and what keeps people safe out here get them kicked out of the housing,” Mazza explained. “If you want to stay out here, you need to be scary. You need to be able to yell at people. You need to be loud to keep people away from you. So, unless we’re working on that out here on the street before people go indoors, the same things that kept them safe out here get them right back out on the street.”

As hard as it can be to find housing and get someone placed in it, the city is having a much harder time with something else: Getting people into successful drug treatment or recovery.

Phillip was asked if he was interested in any kind of drug treatment

“That’s funny because it was asked to me a couple times and I gave a blank answer to that,” he answered. “Because it’s hard. The opiates that I do, the detox and withdrawal, it’s not a good feeling. So I would  probably leave that as an unanswered question.”

“If we’re ever going to make a dent in this, we need some type of quality treatment that people are interested in going into,” Mazza said of the drug challenge. “People are out here because they’re on drugs. There’s places for people to go when they’re ready. There’s housing, there’s money for people that aren’t eligible for housing. We’re trying to get people off the streets but the drugs are keeping them out here. “

“It’s a wonderful community,” said Tenderloin worker Andre Harris. “I love my city. Don’t get it wrong, I was born right here. I love San Francisco but it’s complicated sometimes.”

Harris was sharing a thought many San Franciscan have said to themselves at some point and “complicated” is something this neighborhood has been for a long time.

“My overall goal is to see the Tenderloin be a place where people can live in peace and safety,” Mayor  Dianne Feinsten said shortly after taking office in 1978.

Not just peace and safety. Neighbors and the city have been trying to corral trash and litter on the streets here for generations.

“But it is still the same,” Jorge said. “No changes. It’s still the same, you see? You see the broken glass? A lot of mess every day.”

The Tenderloin is where fixing problems can feel like turning back the tide and measuring progress can be difficult..

“Business owners come to my officers on a daily basis and they thank them,” Captain Chin said. “You probably say ‘you guys are pretty successful at this location and why not at this location?'”

“We can’t keep up,” Mazza said of his work. “There’s so much need out here and not enough of us to help. 

The city has been placing as many as 200 to 300 people, sometimes more, into some type of housing every month and those numbers are a bit higher than in years past.

“I think we’re starting to see some visible differences on the streets,” said Jennifer Friedenbach with the Coalition on Homelessness. “We can’t qualify that until the count but it’s — certainly if you look at the numbers — they’re doing a lot of placements.”

Then there is how to take some control of the drug crisis. Discussions on that topic now pack community meetings with residents increasingly frustrated by the lack of better outcomes for those on the sidewalks.

“The people who are on the sidewalk should know that there’s people out here trying to help them get indoors,” Mazza said. “And when they get that opportunity, whether it’s to go into housing or go into treatment, whatever it is, they deserve something that’s high quality and they deserve people that will be there to help them get back on track. I just want people to see how much work is going on out here and how hard people are trying. The Tenderloin is going to be the Tenderloin but this is unacceptable.”  

That is one thing that has not changed since last year — the sense of urgency. The feeling that more people are paying attention and looking for ways to push the neighborhood forward

.”I know it’s a long shot but I feel like it’s a change that’s happening.” Eusope said. “If we all have that, we might get this balance. We don’t need to wait another 60 years.”

“I think we need to fix this matter in the Tenderloin,” Jorge added. “That’s all I can say.”

Wilson Walker

Wilson Walker joined KPIX 5 in July 2007. After 10 years producing newscasts, Wilson became a Multimedia Journalist (MMJ) in 2012, meaning he shoots, writes and edits all of his own stories.

The post San Francisco will get combined grades on effort to show round troubled Tenderloin appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO — As San Francisco tries to bring the year-long crisis in the Tenderloin District under control, the role of the police has been hotly debated. Mayor London Breed has promised more order on the streets and asked for more police money to make it happen.

“We as a city need to take a tougher stance on the conditions that are happening in this particular neighborhood where we have large numbers of families and children and immigrants and people who are businesses just trying to make a living and survive in San Francisco,” Breed told KPIX. “We can do better and we’ll keep trying.”

This now includes stepping up the fight against the district’s sprawling open-air drug market.

“Finally the police, I guess they just gave them the OK because they’ve suddenly made a lot of arrests in the last month,” said Kirk Gordon of Tenderloin. “I saw them blocking st and leading these drug dealers to different corners.”

It’s not Gordon’s imagination.

“Extra bags,” said a San Francisco police officer, combing through a bag confiscated from an arrest for alleged drug dealing. “More fentanyl.”

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It’s a typical bust of a six-man undercover team launched in late November. And just days later, more arrests on the same corner. There are new rules. A uniformed officer has to be on hand, but that doesn’t stop them. By early April, the department’s Tenderloin Station had made 217 arrests, exceeding last year’s total by more than 50%.

“We have seized three times the amount of drugs since the beginning of the year compared to last year,” said Captain Sergio Chin of the Tenderloin Station.

“Since I took office, we’ve billed almost twice as many cases as we did last year,” said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.

Jenkins began her tenure by coming to this neighborhood and promising action against drug trafficking. While the busts really are old-fashioned police work, they do meet challenges. A complaint was filed against an officer alleging that Latinos were being unfairly targeted. Officers say they simply target fentanyl and problematic corners.

As for prosecutors, their drug arrest cases are just reaching the courtrooms, and the first two ended in hung juries.

“The defense that was offered in both of those cases was that the defendant was a victim of human trafficking and that’s why they were selling narcotics,” Jenkins said. “This is a new topic. When I was handling drug trafficking cases five years ago, there were no allegations of anyone being trafficked, so we need to adapt quickly.”

Back on the street, it’s not hard to find those who say the increased presence alone — at least on their corner — is long overdue.

“We’ve tried calling the police many times,” said Jessica, a travel agency owner. “Sometimes they come, sometimes they don’t. At the moment it’s really better if the police are on the street. I’d rather have the police on the street. That’s better.”

But similar to the complaints Urban Alchemy unarmed safety ambassadors only partially patrol the neighborhood, the police cannot be everywhere at once.

“They moved them all the way to Post Street,” noted Tony Kushmaul. “So they move them from block to block or they move them around the block.”

“Even if the vendors move and engage in other criminal activities,” Deputy Police Commissioner David Lazar promised, “we will keep an eye on them and their activities wherever they go.”

“We’re not going to have any more luck clawing our way out of this crisis by arresting street dealers than any previous administration of this country or that country,” said District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston. “If you haven’t addressed the underlying causes and reasons people are out there and taking action, you’re only moving people when you have an investor in the community.”

So the police make more arrests and take on a wave of drug dealers while residents watch and see what they can get.

“Police need to create more walking routes, you know,” Gordon said of what he’d like to see from SFPD. “Walk around. At least scare these guys.”

Wilson Walker

Wilson Walker joined KPIX 5 in July 2007. After 10 years as a news producer, Wilson became a Multimedia Journalist (MMJ) in 2012, meaning he shoots, writes and edits all his own stories.

The post Effectiveness of police crackdown on San Francisco Tenderloin crime stays to be seen appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO – For decades, San Francisco’s Tenderloin District has been at the center of the city’s challenges, and that’s only become more apparent in recent years.

Since 2021, San Francisco has been mobilizing emergency response to save the neighborhood and bring relief to the many people who call it home. The drug crisis and the human desperation it brought drew the world’s attention, ultimately prompting this response from the city’s mayor.

“It’s coming to an end,” Mayor London Breed said 16 months ago, “if we take steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement that has destroyed our city.”

It was December 2021 when Breed announced the emergency response. There would be a linking center to connect people to services. There would be increased law enforcement and an uncompromising push to clean up streets of trash and unsanitary conditions. The announcement alone has brought new focus to the neighborhood and has everyone wondering what it actually takes to bring about significant change.

So what’s different? What works and what doesn’t? KPIX will be publishing a series of reports on the tenderloin and efforts to transform the neighborhood.

“It’s almost every day,” says Jorge Alvarado, who sweeps his sidewalk in the morning. “Every single day they have a mess here.”

For the people who live and work in the Tenderloin, every day is an attempt to address the immense challenges this neighborhood faces. And for some, more than a year after Breed declared a state of emergency, it will continue to be a struggle for survival. Measuring what has changed since then is not easy. There was initially a very aggressive push for sidewalk cleaning.

“It’s a blessing to have a clear path to be able to see a few blocks down,” Alex Alvarado said at the start of the effort.

One year later:

“If we hadn’t cleaned up here,” Alvarado said of the garbage problems. “This place would be a complete disaster.”

But clearing all the trash on the sidewalk was just a challenge.

“Well, what are you going to do with all the people that are here? I’m not sure,” a neighbor said in 2022.

A year later you pick the right corner and little has changed.

“How many months do you keep calling?” Alvarado asked. “See that place over there, almost no place for humans to survive, right?

The Tenderloin Center, controversial when it opened, was closed in December amid controversy. Efforts to provide aid are now proceeding block by block.

“He’s being brought home by deployment,” said Mark Mazza of the city’s emergency department, helping someone on the street. “He’s in a warm place, now the streets are clean and people can pass. Nobody walks through the street.”

But as the city’s approach changes, so do the conditions on the road.

“There are more people out here now,” resident JJ ​​Smith said. “More people deal in drugs and take the drugs.”

Overdoses continue at a slightly increased rate for the first two months of this year. And as for drug law enforcement:

“We need to be more aggressive with law enforcement,” Breed said of announcing the emergency.

That promise has materialized in recent months as police have stepped up arrests with a new undercover unit.

“Hyde’s 300 block has been one of our biggest challenges,” Deputy Police Commissioner David Lazar said. “Right now, things haven’t looked this good in a long time.”

“All of our alternatives to the police have a significant impact, getting people into treatment, getting them to the clinic, our street medicine team, our homeless team, our crisis response team,” Breed told KPIX. “They are on the ground every day to help people in crisis, but at the end of the day our officers have to arrest those who are breaking the law.”

“We’re not going to have any more luck clawing our way out of this crisis by arresting street dealers than any previous administration of this or that country has had,” countered Supervisor Dean Preston, whose District 5 now covers part of the fillet.

The expanded policing and increased cost of policing is causing some backlash. And there’s always been frustration that efforts to curb drug trafficking, law enforcement, or otherwise, will only postpone the problem.

“So they’re moving them from block to block,” observed local resident Tony Kushmaul. “Or move them around the block.”

So the tenderloin moves and changes, as does the effort to fix the problems here, while the residents wait and hope for progress.

“So I think we need to resolve this matter in the tenderloin,” Alvarado said. “That’s all I can say.”

Wilson Walker

Wilson Walker joined KPIX 5 in July 2007. After 10 years as a news producer, Wilson became a Multimedia Journalist (MMJ) in 2012, meaning he shoots, writes and edits all his own stories.

The post San Francisco steps up emergency effort to carry Tenderloin again from brink appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

A great record shop is like a time machine, a portal to another world. In the right hands, these spaces are capable of fostering a deep connection to the overlapping worlds of music and art, and nurturing a community around expression. In our ever more technological world, they stand as meaningful anachronisms made modern by new generations of listeners, reaching beyond the digitizing of music and performance and grounding us in the aural physicality of music.

Such is the scene at Dark Entries, a new shop and gallery in the Tenderloin. It’s the work of Josh Cheon, a longtime DJ and founder of the archival and reissue label Dark Entries Records. Housed inside a former tattoo parlor at 910 Larkin St., not far from where Cheon has lived and worked for a decade, in the historically queer Tenderloin neighborhood, the shop officially opens its doors to crate diggers Saturday, Dec. 10

“I always imagined this as being a place where someday we could host events,” said Cheon, who acquired the space in early 2021 when rents dropped amid pandemic uncertainty. “It’s a modular space, and I want to keep it in flux.”

Josh Cheon, a longtime San Francisco nightlife DJ and founder of the archival and reissue label Dark Entries Records, is opening a record shop in the Tenderloin. Photo: Carlo Velasquez / Dark Entries Records

This block of Larkin has become something of a “corridor of art,” Cheon said, anchored by the Magazine SF (home to the Bob Mizer Foundation) and the Moth Belly Gallery.

“Before the Castro was gay, this was the gay neighborhood — the first gay pride parade in America was on Polk Street, and the first gay riot was here as well,” Cheon said. “The Gangway, the oldest gay bar in SF, was right down the street. I knew I wanted to be here, in the tenderloin, to keep it queer… and to host artists and events in the space that reflect this history.”

To further the art gallery aesthetic, the record shop’s visual identity is anchored by two original collage works from Gwenaël Rattke, a Berlin visual artist represented by Romer Young Gallery of San Francisco.

Josh Cheon’s Dark Entries Records is located at 910 Larkin St. Photo: Carlo Velasquez / Dark Entries Records

The shop will offer titles from the Dark Entries catalog — more than 300 releases since 2009 — as well as favorites from Cheon’s expansive personal archives, collected over his decades of work as an archivist and DJ. But of particular focus at Dark Entries is the music of Patrick Cowley, a San Francisco electronic music composer and recording artist. Thanks to several posthumous releases, his body of work — and influence — has only grown in the 21st century, some 40 years after his death.

An early victim of the AIDS pandemic, Cowley became famous as a composer and performer in collaboration with Sylvester, the iconic San Francisco disco chanteuse. Cowley composed Sylvester’s 1982 hit “Do Ya Wanna Funk?” which rose to the no. 4 spot on the Billboard dance music chart, and toured the world as a member of Sylvester’s live band in 1979. Other notable Cowley tracks from the era include a remix of Donna Summer’s iconic Giorgio Moroder-penned single “I Feel Love” (dubbed the “definitive” remix by MixMag), as well as the original composition “Right on Target,” performed by San Francisco singer Paul Parker. It reached no. 1 on the Billboard dance chart shortly before Cowley’s death in the autumn of 1982.

Exploring the sonic world of the late EDM pioneer Patrick Cowley

Patrick Cowley, a San Francisco electronic music composer and recording artist, died November 1982. Now 40 years later, his music is a focus at Dark Entries, a new record shop in the Tenderloin. Photo: Dark Entries Records

In his lifetime, Cowley released just three solo LPs: “Megatron Man” and “Menergy,” both from 1981, plus “Mind Warp,” composed and released in 1982. And things might have ended there, if not for Cheon’s label.

In 2007, Cheon, then a member of local queer DJ collective Honey Soundsystem, was introduced to John Hedges, the former owner of Megatone Records, the San Francisco music label founded by Cowley and Marty Blecman in 1981. By the mid-1990s, the Independent label was sold to Unidisc Records, a Montreal company that owns the publishing rights to a diverse coterie of late 20th century performers.

But Hedges’ private collection included unreleased Cowley recordings on reel-to-reel tapes. Songs from those tapes emerged in 2009 as the album “Catholic,” issued by Berlin-based Macro. Cheon avidly spun Cowley’s music at underground parties across San Francisco, and his work with Honey Soundsystem put him in contact with people from Cowley’s inner circle, including family members, patrons and collaborators.

Patrick Cowley, a San Francisco electronic music composer and recording artist. Photo: Dark Entries Records

One was Maurice Tani, who met Cowley in the early 1970s at City College. “We just called him Pat,” recalled Tani, speaking from his home in Berkeley. Together the duo collaborated during late nights at the campus electronic music lab, and later in studios and early home recording setups across the city. Tani contributed bass and lead guitar work to dozens of Cowley recordings, and kept several boxes of reel-to-reel tapes of Cowley’s compositions following his death.

Another collaborator was John Coletti, who in the late 1970s helmed Fox Studios, a gay pornography studio in Los Angeles. Coletti worked with Cowley on the soundtracks to several films, offering a home for the composer’s original instrumental and atmospheric works, music little heard outside of the late 20th century gay film subculture.

Dark Entries Records is publishing Patrick Cowley’s personal journal, “Mechanical Fantasy Box: The Homoerotic Journal of Patrick Cowley.” Photo: Dark Entries Records

Over the last decade, Cheon has worked with Coletti, Tani, and others to restore, digitize, and release Cowley’s forgotten oeuvre to growing public interest. This work includes hosting nightlife events, promoting the music on social media, publishing Cowley’s intimate personal journal (“Mechanical Fantasy Box: The Homoerotic Journal of Patrick Cowley”), and making his work available to streaming services, all of it under the Dark Entries Records banner.

Along the way, Cowley’s life and work have been reappraised by the contemporary music and cultural press, with major features in Pitchfork, the New York Times, the Guardian, Art Review and on NPR. There are nine Cowley albums now available via Dark Entries, all prominently featured on the shelves at the new shop.

Dark Entries Records released Patrick Cowley’s “Malebox” last month. Photo: Dark Entries Records

The latest, “Malebox,” released last month, is a collection of demos — whose origin story reads like episodic television.

Tipped off to their existence by a follower on social media, Cheon went from haggling with distant descendants of a Megatone Records owner on Craigslist to poring over decaying boxes of tapes in a South Bay storage shed.

“The roof was collapsing, raccoons had made a nest inside, and every single box had some kind of excrement in it,” recalled Cheon. “It’s a miracle we were able to get any tracks from it.”

For Cowley fans, it’s roughly the equivalent of pulling a van Gogh painting from a garbage can.

The album’s centerpiece is “Low Down Dirty Rhythm,” recorded in the fall of 1979. The track wobbles and thumps with a palpable, unshakable sense of rhythmic sleaze; thrilling and sensual, it’s impossible to dislodge from one’s head, requiring repeat listenings. Accompanied by vocalist Jeanie Tracy (a backup singer in Sylvester’s live band), this track anchors Cowley not just as a burgeoning hitmaker cementing his powers, but as a pop compositional auteur nonpareil, evoking the better-known work of multiplatinum legends like Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder and Prince.

Tape loops and layered hand production help provide an organic feel essential to these recordings, what Tani describes as “a frothy combination of synth-based beats with traditional percussion layered on top.” Cowley’s music is a reflection of a place and time, of overlapping San Francisco subcultures and gay liberation, but it also expresses the fascinating sonic milieu of pre-digital dance music in the 1970s and early ’80s.

Patrick Cowley, a San Francisco electronic music composer and recording artist, was 32 when he died in 1982. Photo: Dark Entries Records

Tani calls it “a melding of art and science — experimental music in every sense.” A time of four-track analog tape recorders and magnetic tape sequencing cut by razor blade and splicing block, of great hulking synthesizers like something out of Mission Control. They say each of us now walks around with more computing power in our pocket than it took to land a man on the moon; one can only imagine what Cowley might have done with a copy of Pro Tools.

Cowley was just 32 when he died, with multiple songs on the dance charts and a herculean body of work already on tape. Cheon is keenly aware of the reactions his reissues have engendered from Cowley’s contemporaries: his bandmates; his surviving family; the people who knew him throughout his too-brief life as a composer, friend, brother and son.

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” he said. “There’s excitement but also incredible sadness because he was stolen so early. I feel like I’m a custodian for lost and unreleased music.”

Indeed, Tani believes “this music would have been lost without him. Without Josh, Pat’s stuff would still just be in my attic. He’s the curator. His work has been so incredibly important.”

Josh Cheon, founder of Dark Entries Records, said he chose the Tenderloin for his record shop because, “Before the Castro was gay, this was the gay neighborhood. … I knew I wanted to be here, in the tenderloin, to keep it queer.” Photo: Carlo Velasquez / Dark Entries Records

A great record shop is like a time machine, but no glimpse at the past is truly meaningful without the context of the present. Dark Entries Records serves as a hub of connectivity to San Francisco in an earlier era, drawing a through line to the role of art and music in city life today. It is a reverent platform for the work of Cowley, who at last is being recognized as one of San Francisco’s great composers.

“For a gay man who suffered from AIDS, whose music sat in boxes for decades after his death, the depth and range of his sounds are incredible,” said Cheon.

Forty years later, inside a new record shop on Larkin, San Francisco, can continue listening.

Dark Entries Records Grand Opening Party: DJ sets by Carlos Souffront, Topazu and Jeremy Castillo. 6-9 pm Saturday, Dec. 10. 910 Larkin St., SF Updates on Instagram @darkentriesrecords. www.darktriesrecords.com

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San Francisco’s Tenderloin Center, a building at UN Plaza where people on the streets can drop in and receive basic services, including connections to substance abuse treatment and housing, will close in December.

Conceived as a centerpiece of Breed’s state-of-emergency initiatives in the Tenderloin, the center opened in January as a safe harbor for homeless people and part of the emergency’s push to deal with skyrocketing overdoses. City officials used emergency powers to bypass the city’s typical contracting process and quickly secured a lease for the building, while Breed announced efforts to crack down on drug dealing in the neighborhood.

But the center met resistance early on after it came to light that the city allowed people to use drugs there. Critics argued that it enabled addiction and that very few people were connected to drug treatment through the site.

The news that the center will shutter in December comes at a fraught moment. Breed and the supervisors are hammering out a nearly $14 billion budget and must decide where to put resources to address some of the city’s most vexing problems, including homelessness, mental health and addiction.

Weeks ago, the supervisors voted to extend the center’s lease from June through the end of the year. And in early June the health department allowed the media, which had been shut out of the center, to finally tour it.

Breed spokesperson Parisa Safarzadeh described the center in a statement as an “immediate intervention to stabilize the community in the short term while the city developed its longer term plans for the tenderloin.”

“The declaration of emergency enabled the city to quickly launch a service center as a safe respite from the streets,” Safarzadeh said.

While it was framed as a temporary solution to a chronic problem, the center appears to operate at high volume, serving about 400 people each day at its fenced-in site, according to Safarzadeh.

“We reversed overdoses — we saved people’s lives,” Vitka Eisen, CEO of HealthRight 360, a nonprofit partner helping operating the center, said of her staff’s work.

“It doesn’t make sense to me that we would close one program without opening others,” she said.

Whether the center was cost-effective is difficult to know. In its first five months, workers logged more than 49,000 visits, but just 53 connections to substance-use treatment. The center has also made 900 placements into shelters and 150 placements into permanent supportive housing. Operating the center for the next six months will cost $10.6 million, though city officials haven’t in the past been able to say how much the first six months of operation cost.

Community organizer Del Seymour, founder of the workforce nonprofit Code Tenderloin, a partner in the center, is disappointed it will close.

Seymour said his organization has hired at least 40 people referred by the center’s case managers.

“Nobody ever said the word ‘permanent,’ and we understand that,” he said. “But now we’re seeing successes. So why give somebody something and then take it away?”

He said the site’s central location may have triggered resistance.

A new apartment tower and Whole Foods Market just opened in Mid-Market, signaling the possible turnaround of an area where businesses have long struggled with drug use outside their doorsteps. With more investment starting to pour into downtown, Seymour said he wouldn’t be surprised if complaints are piling up about the center. Seymour would like to see the concept continued but moved elsewhere.

Sara Shortt, a representative of the Treatment on Demand Coalition, also supported the model and methods of the center but questioned the execution. She remembered the bravado with which Breed announced her package of programs to clean up the Tenderloin and Civic Center.

Shortt wondered whether the city had just found an available space in UN Plaza — albeit one with a $75,000 a month rent payment — and “just jumped on it.”

“This was all done in a ‘grand gesture’ kind of way,” Shortt said. “For the mayor to just pull out of it at this point,” with no alternative for people who clearly rely on the services, “reinforces that it was perhaps only that — a gesture.” She worried the mayor, who is facing pressure to reinvigorate the local economy, may have buckled to neighborhood complaints.

Yet Breed’s spokesperson Jeff Cretan said residents’ misgivings never factored into the city’s decision to pull the plug. Officials anticipated strong feelings on all sides from the moment they announced the center, he said, which hasn’t stopped the city from methodically testing solutions.

The tenderloin emergency also added social workers and outreach staff to coax people into treatment. Breed has also publicly pushed for supervised drug consumption sites, a controversial strategy to alleviate the overdose crisis that has widespread political support in San Francisco.

Although the city’s behavioral health budget has enough money to support such sites, they are not sanctioned by the state or federal government and may face legal hurdles.

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, whose district spreads through downtown and the South of Market area, said Thursday that he needed more information before weighing in on the upcoming closure of the center, which is not in his district but is close to it.

Dorsey announced a plan this week for police to prioritize arresting drug dealers and seizing illegal drugs in areas where people are seeking help with addiction — such as outside a treatment center — that was partially inspired by neighborhood disenchantment when the city unveiled the center in UN Plaza .

He presented the plan as part of a “right to recovery” initiative intended to stave off overdose deaths and despair caused by fentanyl.

Residents and merchants “are going to be justifiably suspicious of anything we’re doing to encourage open air drug scenes and brazen drug dealing,” Dorsey said, standing at a parking lot near Sixth and Market streets on Thursday, where he’d attended the mayor’s press conference to announce a new housing ballot measure.

After speaking at the event, Breed declined to answer questions from reporters.

Despite city officials’ repeated assurances that they are pursuing a viable long-term plan to curb drug use, Eisen of HealthRight 360 said she scoured the budget for any alternative programs, and found nothing. She worries for the hundreds of people who rely on the center each day for everything from work referrals to overdose treatment to cell phone chargers. The demand, she said, is clear.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer JD Morris contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Sara Shortt’s name.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan

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