‘A drug carnival’: Residents above 16th St. alleys say they’re afraid to leave home

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Wiese Street was never perfect. 

Twenty years ago, when one resident of an apartment overlooking the alley near 16th and Mission streets moved in, sex workers would hang out on the corner, addicts would smoke in alcoves, and unhoused people would spend the night. 

He brushed it off as “street culture,” and taught his daughter to be respectful of their “neighbors without roofs over their heads.” 

In return, he said, street dwellers were discreet: “You wouldn’t even hear them … They had a fear of the police. They had a fear of waking the neighbors.” 

His daughter grew up running up and down Valencia Street, listening to mariachi at Pancho Villa Taqueria, and playing in Kid Power Park. 

But this tacit agreement has lapsed in the last year. “Now, there’s adults hanging out there shooting up drugs.” 

He’s stopped recognizing familiar faces among those who hung out outside his building. The usual crowd, he said, was replaced by legions of strangers unfazed by the cops. Garden plots along the alley became public toilets. A homeless man told him he’s now afraid of the dealers. 

These days, the family is cautious about even being seen from their bedroom windows, much less descending their stairs onto Wiese.

“I have to get her out of here,” the father said. “You don’t realize what it does to people to walk out and see human degradation every day. To see people with open sores. People slumped over in a wheelchair with a dog licking their wounds on their foot.”

Inching a way through the throng of dazed people blocking your doorways, knowing the poop on the sidewalk is definitely human, pleading with users to be mindful of smoking in front of children: Such is the life of the residents of Wiese, Caledonia, and Hoff Streets and Julian Avenue, a handful of alleyways near the 16th Street BART plaza. 

The blocks between Mission and Valencia Streets have always been a little “crazy, noisy, and busy,” longtime residents acknowledge, with “ebbs and flows” of activity over the decades.

But in recent months, they say, it’s gotten worse. 

“It’s hell every single hour of every single day.” 

“A zombie graveyard.”

“A drug carnival.”

Earlier this month, the plaza became the home of the San Francisco Police Department’s “Mobile Command Unit No. 2,” part of what Mayor Daniel Lurie has described as a citywide effort to stamp out San Francisco’s open-air drug markets. 

Mission Local spoke to more than a dozen tenants and merchants who agreed that the 16th Street BART plaza has been visibly cleaner since the introduction of the bus-sized mobile command unit. 

Many, however, suggested that improvement came at the expense of the surrounding streets, which have absorbed the drug dealing and loitering displaced from the plaza. In an area where conditions can be dramatically different from street to street, one said, police setting up even three blocks away is too far. 

Dealers in plain sight 

The leading theory among residents is that the problem was pushed into the Mission by the city’s crackdown on drug use in the Civic Center, South of Market, and Tenderloin neighborhoods. 

Seven residents of Julian Avenue said they have witnessed drug deals occurring in broad daylight. They all pointed to the same locations along the street as hotbeds for dealing. 

While they asked for anonymity because of fear of retaliation, they said they have shared photos and videos with the police, examples of which Mission Local reviewed. (Mission Station Captain Liza Johansen, in a meeting held Wednesday with Mayor Lurie, urged neighbors to keep sending them in and calling the station’s non-emergency line as a means of data collection.)

The neighbors are a mix of people. Some speak English with heavy accents. Some have young kids. Some have lived here for decades. Others arrived in the last six years. 

They all repeated the same descriptions of life on the street: Insane. Intimidating. Nerve-wracking. Scary. 

One man said he starts to shake when he sees people on the sidewalk wearing face coverings. 

A woman said she asks her building manager to walk her to her car at night. 

A second man described sweeping away the rotten skin picked from a scab on another man’s leg. At a community meeting, a third described how street debris had attracted rats that “look like rabbits, they’re so fat.” 

A Julian Avenue landlord said only one of the 15 people who expressed interest in his vacant unit showed up for a tour. He was told the prospective tenant’s girlfriend would “never feel safe” visiting; he had to reduce his rent. 

The conditions, parents on the street said, leave their children afraid to leave the house. Mission Local spoke to five families on Julian Avenue. Even more kids, they said, live at 1950 Mission St., a 157-unit affordable-housing complex on the east side of Wiese Street. 

Veering around someone shooting up in the middle of the family’s morning walk to school isn’t always possible, said Jun, who has had a kid on Julian Avenue since the ’90s. 

Waking up in the middle of the night to loud music, shouting, or the blare of a police vehicle is common. So is having to call the police. 

‘Cat-and-mouse chase’

Officers have started making more frequent sweeps of the alleys in recent weeks, housed residents reported. 

This, they said, involves driving slowly down the block, requesting over a PA system that loiterers “move along” and, on occasion, stepping out of the vehicle and making an arrest. (At Wednesday’s community meeting, Captain Johansen noted that officers cannot issue a citation without witnessing a crime.)

Still, the drug activity and loitering is “relentless.” Neighbors described seeing Wiese Street eerily empty one moment, after a sweep, then teaming with almost 50 people the next. 

It’s sometimes only a matter of minutes before more people, many of whom are actively using drugs, housed residents said, return to the alley “like the ocean coming up on the sand.” 

On a recent afternoon, as police swept one block, a group shuffled around the corner to the next street over. 

The officer drove up Wiese Street, then down Julian Avenue, where he waited until a group of people had scattered. Meanwhile, dozens of people lined the sides of Caledonia Street a block away. Some sat on cardboard; others were unconscious on the cement.

Just a couple of men remained on Wiese, slumped over on a decaying mattress. One, who was awake, said he was unsure where he’d go: “All I do is move.” The police, he said, drove by every 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, Aleya and Santiago shared biscuits at a fried chicken and pizza place next to the BART plaza, where they had settled after being “harassed” by police. Having to “bounce around” side streets, they said, is nothing new. 

Authorities “should focus on people killing each other and gang-related violence,” as well as providing safe-use sites, said Aleya, who was open about being homeless and using drugs. 

It’s the same-old “cat-and-mouse chase around the block,” one neighbor sighed. The police come, added another, “but the game is just continuing.” 

“Blocks’ worth of trash” and feces follow the hyper-local migration, added Mari, a Hoff Street resident who said she’s had to call the police almost every day for the last two months. 

Moving isn’t a solution everyone can afford. “We’re stuck,” said Jun, who has lived in his rent-controlled unit on Julian for decades. 

‘Compassion fatigue’ 

But even those who could leave wouldn’t. They say they love their neighborhood for its vibrance, diversity, and community, which, some said, has been trauma-bonded by feelings of neglect. They’re just sick of seeing the blight. 

This frustration has manifested in different ways. 

One tenant said she primarily felt sadness for the “desperate people” spilling out onto the street below her apartment. “How do you stop the pain?” she asked. “How do you expect a cop to fix a public-health problem?” 

She asked a drug user what would help. He responded: “I guess what I need is to want to get clean.” 

Her neighbor, on the other hand, said the uninhibited drug use had “radicalized him;” he now wants to see users prosecuted, and SFPD raids like the one that led to 23 arrests earlier this month happening every day. 

Some housed people in the neighborhood blame local social-service providers for offering food and shelter that attract displaced people. 

In the past three weeks, the Gubbio Project, a nonprofit that offers food, cots, and counseling during the day from St. John’s Church on Julian Avenue, has served three times more people than usual, executive director Lydia Bransten said. 

Bransten could empathize with housed residents’ fears of being “under siege.” She noted that the Mission has long been home to a mix of SROs, residential apartments, BART traffic, and social services. Providers, she continued, are tasked with supporting people experiencing poverty, homelessness, and addiction through a “continuum of recovery that takes time.” 

“It is a huge crisis for these people,” Bransten said. “And at the same time, the people who are housed are exhausted from having to experience the vicarious trauma of seeing people in this condition when they feel like there’s nothing that we can do to help them.”

Several others said the same: They are tired of feeling ignored by the city. 

“We have no say,” said a longtime Julian Avenue resident as he watched a man stumble down Wiese. “We have no voice.”