The Civic Center Inn has not been a nice place for a long time. It was one of the cheapest hotels in San Francisco for a while, but even offering rooms at less than $60 a night couldn’t keep it in business: The 82-room lodge closed in 2023, and has been empty since.
After two years on the market, it’s only gotten worse: The abandoned inn is home to rats (dead and alive), squatters, and a considerable amount of garbage.
The Reverend Paul Trudeau wants to buy it anyway.
Trudeau runs the City Hope Cafe and community center next door on Ellis Street. As the hotel’s closest neighbor, City Hope gets a lot of the spillover. The front of the cafe, where people queue for a free coffee, is just adjacent to the front of the hotel, where people actively consume drugs and lie sprawled on the sidewalk.
The back entrance of the cafe, which leads to the community gathering space, is adjacent to the hotel’s trash receptacle, often torn open and overflowing with garbage. People can (and have) used the empty hotel to climb onto the roof of City Hope’s building to break in and vandalize, so the nonprofit had to board up its windows.
Even while the hotel was operating, Trudeau said, it was home to drug dens and sex work. Now, the overt substance use has proliferated on the street, he said, along with overdoses and the occasional fire.
“If the bones on this building are good, I would love to start a capital campaign and start sober living in this space and have over 60 people that are doing amazing things with their life,” said Trudeau. “It would change things.”
The city has made some efforts to deal with fallout from the abandoned lodge: Outreach teams approaching drug users with services, street cleaning a couple times per week, police and ambulances arriving to address incidents.
Just last week, new fences were erected to block off the building’s back parking lot, and crews cleared out the dumpster that is usually overflowing with trash and leaves the alley smelling like dead rats, according to residents. Supervisor Bilal Mahmood touted the cleanup, calling it a change “from grime to sublime.”
But Tenderloin neighbors of the hotel say it’s not nearly enough.
On a recent afternoon, people sprawled on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, passed out with their legs dangling into the street. Trash accumulates outside rooms that appear inhabited by squatters; some doors have been torn off and sit open, while others have been boarded up.
A dog, streaked red with spray paint, paced the top floor, while another dog sat and licked itself outside another door. At night, people can be seen walking in the brightly lit outdoor hallways. Graffiti is everywhere.
After the hotel closed in 2023, the owner of the building put it up for sale for $21 million. Last month, the price dropped to less than $10 million.
Neighbors agree that it’s up to the property owner to take action, and that if he doesn’t, the city should intervene.
Asked whether he would sell the building to City Hope, owner Vijay Patel said, “I don’t know, it depends.”
Patel declined to elaborate, saying he didn’t want to discuss the matter over the phone, and abruptly ended the call. An LLC named Dhyan Investments, which was the registered business owner until 2023, owes the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes; it’s unclear if Patel and Dhyan Investments are linked.
Supervisor Mahmood said he would be open to Trudeau’s sober facility idea. He would ultimately like to see the location become operational again as a hotel, but is open to “whatever is best for the vitality of the neighborhood.”
“The current conditions are not appropriate or sustainable,” Mahmood said.
The Tenderloin police station’s acting captain, Kevin Knoble, said that the police department has been working to get Patel to tidy up.
“We’re trying to get the owner to do something about cleaning it up,” Knoble said. “Either get it active, [or] get it in a condition where people can’t go in and loiter … so it’s not a blight to the community.”
In the meantime, neighbors are doing what they can to deal with the situation on their own.
To block hotel squatters from accessing their roof a couple doors down, high-end art gallery Modernism Inc. installed a massive steel fence on its roof. Trudeau recently locked up the hotel’s unmanned dumpster so that trash, which he said at times even grew algae, wouldn’t collect there.
Ysa Mohamat, who runs a barbershop across the street, said that when he and his wife, who has dementia, come and go from the shop, he always checks the curb for feces. On a recent morning, there were several piles within view of the barbershop — and Mohamat says that is much cleaner than usual.
And at Zen Yai, a popular Thai restaurant in front of the hotel, employee Mac Wessapraweenwech said he gives food, when possible, to people who ask. The restaurant, however, keeps the phone number and information for the homeless outreach team written in Thai on the wall by the counter — safety for interactions that go sour.
The Civic Center Inn’s closure, Wessapraweenwech said, was a key factor in the worsening conditions on his block: More and more people began loitering and camping out on the sidewalk, he said, and fewer customers came to the restaurant. He believes that if a hotel reopened on the corner, things would improve, because tourists would return, and the owner would have to take responsibility for the conditions out front.
But the hotel has been a hotbed of criminal activity for as long as Mohamat and his neighbors can remember. For things to change, he said, the right owner has to step in.
“The thing is, nobody cares. They see it, they know it. But they don’t care,” said a dejected Adam Le, who owns motorcycle repair shop City Cycle Werkes across the street. “It’s the same shit every day for the last 10 years.”
The hotel is a cancer, said Le — a cancer that is being given only Tylenol.
“It’s not easy to solve this problem,” he said. “But I know for sure there is a solution.”
Local resident billionaires (and millionaires) like Sam Altman, Joe Gebbia, Chris Larson or Garry Tan could stop wasting $$ by trying to control election outcomes and actually invest in life changing ventures by contributing to the city where they made their millions. What’s the point of having a billionaire mayor and supervisors with deep venture capital pockets if they don’t (and won’t) tap their broligarch buddies for ventures lije this one right here? Can you say “philanthropist”?
I don’t think they actually believe in the concept of philanthropy, they believe in PR. They only want to fund it if it’s something they want to put their names on already.
…….if ever there was a tipping point…….here is one.
It’s aways been a drug den. I I used to do orgies there with totally spun out, but very cute gay boys. They gave me quite a workout. Good times.
#unrelatedattentionseekingbehavior
I spent a night there and it was creepy to say the least. Years ago. It was filthy and the druggies were running up and down the halls all night. I don’t think that neighborhood is ever going to change.
Attention Governor Hairdo, billionaire philanthropists and all carriage coin throwing Tech broligarchs: City of Hope Cafe is a local, national and global model of successful compassion. The current deed holder of the Civic Center Motel has proven that he is incapable of maintaining this property. It’s time for a billionaire philanthropist to step in and kick down and purchase the property to create a sober living opportunity. Many of the new supes campaigned on cutting “red tape”, “streamlining abundance” and “results.” Here is a golden opportunity for venture capitalism to invest in humanity by actually contributing to San Francisco. Tell your philanthropist pals! Let’s do this.
Also: billionaires, venture capitalists, broligarchs and self proclaimed philanthropists: think of the photo ops!!!
Zombies on the loose. And getting worse.
Thank you for your report on this site .
Please continue to report and expose the Lower Polk Street area , alleyways and even Larkin.
This site is one of many here.
Thiis was once a thriving neighborhood .
Now it is a big drug den and wasteland .
For over seven years this area has only gotten worse and been neglected .
20 percent of all drug related deaths happen in this zipcode .
With your help , we can hopefully start to clean it up
And get some business and safety restored .
We need people and places that contribute to the area .
It is a no go area and only dealers and addicts congregate on every block everyday without consideration for those who live here .
Very tragic .
You speculate with such authority. Some are simply poverty-stricken with fewer options than even last year.
The hotel is for sale. So is Mitchell Bros. across the alley and half the block across Polk. All commercial buildings. It’s a great opportunity site to build market rate housing. We have become over saturated with social programs. Every community has a carrying capacity for society’s ills. After you pass that tipping point, the neighborhood unravels quickly. The TL has been a dumping ground for too long and have exceeded what we are willing to welcome. It’s everyone else’s turn for a while.
Bring back “No Sit, No Lie.” No rest for the wicked. Anywhere.
Bilal, Bilal… do you hear yourself when you talk? Think carefully, What do we need more of in the city, housing for people recovering from addiction… or yet another hotel?
SF already punches above its weight, and then some, when it comes to providing housing and services for drug addicts. Let one of the other thousands of cities in this country pick up some of the slack.