Competing events addressing how best to respond to overt drug use in the Mission District led to a shouting match inside Manny’s Cafe on Tuesday evening.
“How many drug addicts, realistically, can we afford to take care of?” asked Andrew Wickens, a resident near 16th and Mission streets, who has begun engaging in pugnacious online criticism of perceived inaction towards drug activity near the corner.
He was speaking to an audience of about 40 people inside the Valencia Street cafe at an open mic for residents to air their concerns about drug use in the neighborhood. He was soon joined by others calling for tough love.
“We can’t even get out of our houses because they’re right there,” said another attendee.
“Get angry, and don’t apologize,” said Bill Maher, a former San Francisco supervisor in attendance. “They wouldn’t put up with this crap in their district, so don’t let them shit in yours,” he added, referring to members of the Board of Supervisors.
When an audience member called out that he didn’t want drug users jailed but just moved out of the neighborhood, Maher grabbed a microphone and pushed back.
“That’s crazy, you’re fucking crazy,” he said, to the suggestion that arrests are not the answer.
“The only way to get them off [the streets] is to get them when they’re breaking the law,” added Cedric Akbar, a zealous advocate for abstinence-only drug based treatment and an elected member of the San Francisco Democratic Party.
But midway through, Kevin Ortiz of the San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club entered and asked for the mic. He was fresh from an event held earlier where half a dozen members of the club handed out free coffee, mostly for homeless residents of the Mission, from 6:30 until 7:30 p.m.
“This is a propaganda rally,” Ortiz said, claiming that few Latinx people were in the room. But there were indeed Latinx people in the room.
Wickens and other attendees shouted at Ortiz. “You’re not part of the solution. You’re part of the problem!” one attendee said. “I live in this fucking neighborhood,” Ortiz repeatedly responded. A Manny’s employee intervened, and Ortiz left.
Wickens then handed the mic to a few Mission residents who said they are Latinx, interpreting from Spanish to English for them as they said people need to be moved off of the street.
They spoke little, however, and their voices were soon drowned out by shouting from outside: Ortiz and Akbar were in a heated argument about who had the right to attend the meeting.
One attendee who lives near Julian Avenue tried to bring a voice of reason back into the room. There was almost a fistfight tonight, he said, gesturing outside. “We want the drug addicts gone, and the drug dealers gone. The question is, how?”
Wickens tried to answer: Take photos of users and dealers and send it to the police. Contact local representatives.
The dispute is part of a larger clash among San Francisco Democrats about how to respond to drug use. The conflict often pits the city’s “harm reduction” community, which focuses on approaches like clean needles, against its “recovery first” community, which emphasizes abstinence as the main goal of drug treatment and is more comfortable with using police.
Members of those pro-abstinence groups seemed to take over the event at times, drowning out the residents who were there.
The conflict was previewed last Thursday, at a rally at 16th Street and Julian Avenue, where about 50 people protested drug use on the sidewalks outside of their homes. Many of those attendees were well-connected politicos and elected members of the San Francisco Democratic Party, like Akbar.
It was in response to that rally that Ortiz and the San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club handed out coffee near Manny’s on Tuesday.
Posters for the coffee event read: “Stand with our unhoused neighbors. Reject hate. Pour love.” A dozen or so people stopped by and asked for a cup of coffee. Those who stopped by were a mix of people who appeared to be homeless residents, and others who appeared to simply want a free cup of coffee.
“We all want safe, clean streets,” said Ortiz, who lives a few blocks from some of the hotspots residents have been complaining about, including Julian Avenue. But, he said, the city’s go-to solution “for decades” has been “more police” instead of solutions like housing, street cleaners and, yes, harm reduction.
Residents of the streets and alleyways around 16th and Mission streets have said for weeks that overt drug use and dealing has gotten significantly worse in the neighborhoods in recent months.
They attribute it to crackdowns in other parts of the city, such as the Tenderloin, and the police chief, Mission police captain, and Mayor Daniel Lurie have all acknowledged that there is “displacement” of drug activity from other neighborhoods after police operations.
Some say that Lurie’s decision to have a near-constant police presence at the 16th Street BART Plaza has also caused more spillover onto the smaller side streets, where these neighbors live.
About half the attendees at the Julian neighbors event had links to the current San Francisco Democratic Party (known as the Democratic County Central Committee) or to abstinence-based drug-treatment programs.
Maher, for instance, is on the board of a group called Drug-Free Sidewalks that advocates for abstinence-based drug treatment; the group’s posters hung on the windows. Akbar leads Positive Directions Equals Change, which has a city contract for drug treatment and also emphasizes abstinence.
Some residents in the audience were skeptical that either approach could work on its own.
“I want safe-use sites, I want more treatment,” said one 59-year-old resident, who asked to stay anonymous. She has lived in a rent-controlled apartment on 16th and Julian for almost 20 years. But, she added, she wants City Hall to “stop using this neighborhood as a containment zone.”
The drug use on her streets, she said, has left her with few options.
“I was super resistant to calling the cops for a long time,” she said. “But you get to the point where that’s all I’ve got. There’s no one else to call. There’s no one else to help.”
Everyone seems to want the same thing: safe streets. Ortiz calls for more housing a safe use sites. That’s what San Francisco has been doing since the 1980s. Look at the point-in-time count from the past 40 years, and you will find that between 7000 – 9000 people are sleeping on the streets. Year after year, we create more housing, and yet more people end up on the streets. Maybe we need to rethink our approach.
Year after year, the rest of the state and country keep sending their homeless to the city.
> yet more people end up on the streets
Is this true? According to the city, the number of unhoused people has remained steady in the last ten years. In that same span of time, the number of sheltered has steadily increased (albeit, not as quickly as some of us would like).
https://www.sf.gov/data–homeless-population
I agree that we need to rethink the approach though. What did you have in mind?
Create the assisted housing outside of the city, where the land is less expensive. Anyone found camping on the street, shitting on the street, dozed out on the street, can be moved to that space where they can get help, take showers, eat… or just take drugs. They can also meet family or even leave whenever they wish. But if they show up on the SF street again to live, crap, or nod off, they will be taken back to the off-site space. No anger or hate, just a practical solution.
Who’s going to agree to that?
Okay. I dig it. It’s got to be a state program though, considering the jurisdictional questions. And we’d have to subsidize that effort, which would cost us. I imagine most would think it was worth it though.
Since not enough housing has been created, and the existing housing keeps getting more expensive, it’s no shock that people keep ending up homeless.
You’re right that the high cost of housing is the root of the problem, but plenty of housing has been created over the last several decades. With a few exceptions of explicitly affordable family housing, such as the ones along the 16th St corridor, most new housing has been “market rate” and targeted to high-earning young singles and couples. There’s a glut of this market segment right now, with thousands of vacant “market-rate” 1BR and studio condos and apartments in the eastern neighborhoods, with no viable path to filling them in sight for years, maybe decades, to come, if ever.
Gentrifying historically lower- or middle-income neighborhoods by building new market-rate housing makes those neighborhoods more expensive to live in. Despite what most people believe (to the everlasting benefit and glee of the real estate industry), supply and demand theory isn’t “simple,” and there are numerous factors that affect pricing, with supply and demand being only one and not necessarily always the most significant of them.
Simply building moar housing, without carefully targeting that housing to those market segments that most need it, only exacerbates the problem of unaffordable housing.
The topic of discussion at these events were fentanyl dealers vending and addicts using in public around 16th/Mission, not encampments or homeless people.
Homelessness has not been a persistent problem for our corner of the Mission. DEM’s Santiago Lerma said last month that most addicts they reach out to are neither homeless nor San Franciscans.
Let’s please try to avoid conflating matters that are not related to one another other than being “public squalor.”
what are you talking about, thousands of vacant 1BRs? SF’s vacancy rate is the lowest it’s been since before COVID – data here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/san-francisco-rent-rates-20252806.php
Bulldozing existing rent-controlled properties to put up market-rate units without space or amenities for families is gentrification, period, not a focus on getting low-income people indoors. YIMBY is a developer PR effort to pretend to grassroots their profit ambition. Long-term tenants, elderly, families, working class service industry jobs will be impacted and never recover – not in 10 years when new market rate units go up, not in 50. It’s a lie – qui bono? Developers, and the politicians in their pocket.
‘But, he [Ortiz] said, the city’s go-to solution “for decades” has been “more police”’.
That is absolutely not the case. Police presence, everything and anything a beat officer would be expected to address, has been increasingly hands-off over the years. Be it writing traffic tickets, enforcing ordinances against sidewalk camping or laws against dealing and using drugs. The latter used to be hush-hush b/c of fear of reprisals from law enforcement. Nowadays, shooting up or smoking fent/meth/crack on the sidewalk has become commonplace.
At some point newspapers will stop covering Ortiz and the Latinx Dems like they are serious organizations that argue in good faith. Would this blog ever give serious airtime to the arguments of the Westboro Baptist Church?
You both are correct. The police budget has steadily increased over the years, closing in on $800 million. At the same time, community policing appears to be in decline. The explanation I’ve seen is the department’s understaffing.
Wow! I’m surprised and pleased to see Mission Local run the opinions of some normal people.
Nobody wants drug users on their doorstep. Thank you for FINALLY noticing.
Residents of Julian avenue, start recording individuals and make a citizens arrest. If you catch a misdemeanor or felony, you have the right to make a citizens arrest. Then call the police to take custody of the individual. If police won’t do it, citizens have the right to make an arrest!
What a shitshow.
We learned last night that treatment is the new nonprofit grift. That’s why Mission Housing/MEDA is building permanent supportive housing for substance and psych cases at 1979 Mission as Phase I and why washed up losers like Maher are sidling up to nonprofits to elbow their way to the teat.
Treatment is expensive, labor intensive, and under best circumstances is 50% effective, that’s with a support network and prospects for being able to face a non-shit life stone cold sober.
I did not recognize Maher, had not seen him for two decades. I really thought that Maher was one of the denizens of a Tenderloin Manor who was working through his issues on recovery when in truth he is a car thief who served on the Board of Supervisors during the knock down drag out fight period (which he resuscitated last night with Ortiz) who appears to have weathered his own struggles with substances in the intervening years.
More nonprofits trying to posit themselves as spokespeople for a neighborhood is the last thing that the North Mission needs.
We all agree that we want for our sidewalks, transit stops and stations and areas around Marshall elementary school to remain clear of fentanyl addicts. An hour ago, the entire sidewalk on Julian in front of the Kailash Hotel was packed with fentanyl addicts, people facing fentanyl psychosis abounded. We don’t want that.
Residents don’t care where these people go to do fentanyl. I don’t think that most of them are that concerned whether they get into treatment or OD. Residents want whatever it takes to restore to the status quo ante of last summer.
I’d garner than folks who have people in front of their house have a different viewpoint than those who walk by them. The latter I think will be more touch feely.
“Take photos of users and dealers and send it to the police. ”
Will the SFPD make an arrest and is that valid evidence against drug dealers? I honestly have no idea if this is a viable suggestion.
Based on my experience, emphatically no. It’s very clear the SFPD isn’t interested in, and/or capable, of helping. I encourage more folks to interact with the police in this city to form an opinion of their own.
Talk to him Cedric you ain’t where you at being timid
For 100 years: How much have housing costs gone up per year? How much have incomes? First the most vulnerable get displaced. That’s what we’re seeing. Policing is just lipstick on the pig of capitalism. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it covers it up a bit.
I will say this again.
The topic of discussion at these events were fentanyl dealers vending and addicts using in public around 16th/Mission, not encampments or homeless people.
Homelessness has not been a persistent problem for our corner of the Mission. DEM’s Santiago Lerma said last month that most addicts they reach out to are neither homeless nor San Franciscans.
Let’s please try to avoid conflating matters that are not related to one another other than being “public squalor.”
In addition to covering up the deficiencies of capitalism and keeping the poors down, the prison-industrial complex is a profit center for the ruling class. It’s class war all the way down.
Ortiz isn’t wrong that there is a propaganda element at play here.
It wasn’t hard to foresee things might go sideways when ML commenced a daily series and wrote: “If you would like to participate in holding the city accountable, send us photos…” That reads like ‘all hands on deck’ in my book.
It is bogus that these DCCC connected nonprofits are swarming like flies on shit. And if I was Ortiz, Id be going harder because DCCC 100% did him dirty. But there is no way the current fever pitch is completely organic.
For the first time, residents of our corner of the Mission are organizing. There are reasons why residents have not been able to organize. That is because there are compensated staffers at the nonprofits who are paid to ensure that residents remain perennially unorganized so that they can continue to use our neighborhood as their opportunity site.
This is not the first time that residents have had to contend with compensated political interference designed to keep us deprived of political self determination. I’m hoping that we can also involve our new neighbors at the 4 affordable housing buildings so that professional politicos can no longer speak over residents to articulate their agenda on our behalf.
That we are getting familiar pushback and cooption attempts from the political apparatus is the best indication that we’re on the right track.
Your effort is being supported by Cedric Akbar, Lily Ho, and some random gentrifier influencer using his kids as props. I suppose Ortiz is opposite side of same neoliberal coin, but the game plays on either way.
I do recognize you live there and I don’t. If you can get rid of the drug scene, all the power to you. I just don’t think you can. So with that in mind, the reality is people are there that need help. At least Ortiz seemed to recognize that.
When a movement draws cooption then that movement is on the right track. Efforts to disqualify movements categorically based on your prejudices of associative cooties fail, especially given some of the faces we’ve seen the progressives.
Also: accused double rapist Jon Jacobo.
Like the NIMBYs who get snippy when YIMBYs come to meetings they used to dominate by virtue of no one else showing up, Ortiz is just annoyed that someone else is playing the astroturf propaganda game more effectively than he is.
I hope that Akbar and Maher continue to conduct themselves this “effectively.”
“Year after year, we create more housing, and yet more people end up on the streets. Maybe we need to rethink our approach.”
We create a dozen affordable units are, a hundred affordable units there. I agree, this doesn’t help at all. What we need is a few million additional housing units. If SF hadn’t spent the last 40 years blocking housing construction I’m sure homelessness and gentrification would still be issues but it wouldn’t be as bad as it is.
Campers,
Y’all missing the big picture.
Akbar’s outfit (goes all way back to Johnson & Silbert at founding of Delancey Street) is just another way the Rich send a few million here and there to keep Poor from Storming Hills.
Led by ?
People like Akbar.
And, Crag Johnson.
And Mohammed Nuhru.
And Keith Jackson.
And, Bill Maher I’d guess.
Sad but not at all surprised to see Mayor Lurie doubling down on the age old practice of sending violent goons as a group to Public Meetings to intimidate the side he don’t like.
I say he ‘doubled down’ cause his crew gave Akbar a 20k raise.
Hey, I’d pay Akbar and Johnson but not for this.
In fact, I was teaching just down the hill at Potrero Hill Middle School (SED) as Johnson was creating his agency in Enola Maxwell’s (Sophie’s mom) Potrero Hill Community Center atop the Hill in 1993) .
Daniel Lurie is young and intelligent and listens.
So, far in my opinion his moves say that he hasn’t learned here.
Sending in black muscle living off City Contracts is just so Willie Brown and not Lurie the man, at all.
That’s what happened last evening at Manny’s.
You should focus closely on where the six foot or over guy with Akbar physically leans into Ortiz with a pelvic move better left in bed as a signal about what was to come if he didn’t shut the blank up.
Akbar then says outside that his group can do this in the entire City (show up as a group paid by Lurie) to influence the deliberations involving issues related to the Mayor’s Agenda.
In this case, the Mayor wants a hardline approach of arresting addicts along with dealers and his subcontractors including Urban Alchemy will turn to force much faster than SFPD.
Hey, I’d pay Akbar and Johnson twice as much to advocate Taxing billionaires into the Middle Class.
Bottom line is that people do drugs because they take one to a faux reality that’s better than the one you occupy such as being Homeless and Jobless or simply want to get high cause you’re bored.
Since only AI offers the chance to improve Reality fast I think the best path (50 plus years experience talking here) is to Decriminalize drugs as have several European countries and Oregon, somewhat for a time …
That takes the Dealer and the cops (and Akbar) out of the equation which with addicts is basically a medical issue.
I can definitely see Mayor Lurie going in that direction.
In about 5 years.
go Warriors !!
h.