You can see all the 16th Street posts here.
One of the regulars who monitors activity at 16th and Mission streets wanted to know on Sunday afternoon if “anyone had brought up the question” of the furniture unloaded in front of 1950 Mission St., the affordable complex known as La Fénix.
More specifically, he wondered why there was no secure dumpster in front for tenants to use.
We watched as a couple of people picked through the offerings of metal furniture, a microwave, and a refrigerator. While some finds go into someone else’s apartment, he said, the cleanup crews often find the same items on Capp Street or Julian Avenue.
“People put it on a cart and push it away, and then just get tired,” he guessed. A secure dumpster, he said, “would help alleviate us and DPW having to pick it up.”
He shook his head, watching the pile diminish. “One man’s trash is another person’s treasure.”
Sure enough. Adam felt good as he stacked the microwave and some metal cabinets. “You can’t go wrong,” he said, referring to the metal furniture. “No bed bugs, and they clean up easy.” Adam lives three blocks away and said that half his place has been furnished with items left by tenants moving furniture out of 1950 Mission St.
For the fifth weekend in a row, Mission Street remained clear during the day, but in the evening, vendors, drug users, and others filled the east side of Mission Street.
A neighbor sent photos of a fairly packed Caledonia Street between 14th and 15th streets, so I walked around there today. About six people sat in the alleyway that dead-ends before 14th. Residents trying to get into their driveways are calling 311 “nearly every day,” wrote one resident.
Julian Avenue also had a fair number of people near 14th Street. And by 5 p.m. Sunday, the east side of Mission Street again had a crowd near the Muni stop. Otherwise, west Mission Street and the other side streets were clear, with lots of ambassadors, DPW workers, and some officers working the area.
Southwest Plaza and west side of Mission Street
4:40 p.m. 8/3 southwest plaza, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:36 p.m. 8/3 West side of Mission Street, looking south from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:36 p.m. 8/3 West side of Mission Street, looking south from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:35 p.m. 8/3 West side of Mission Street, looking south from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:44 p.m. 8/3, west side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:44 p.m. 8/3, west side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:46 p.m. 8/3, west side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:46 p.m. 8/3, west side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez
Northeast Plaza and east side of Mission Street
3:54p.m. 8/2 east side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:03 p.m. 8/2 east side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:02 p.m. 8/2 east side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:02 p.m. 8/2 east side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:47 p.m. 8/3, east side of Mission Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:38 p.m. 8/3 east side of Mission Street, looking south from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:37 p.m. 8/3 east side of Mission Street, looking south from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:37 p.m. 8/3 east side of Mission Street, looking south from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:39 p.m. 8/3 east side of Mission Street Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:40 p.m. 8/3, northeast plaza, Photo by Lydia Chávez
Caledonia
Caledonia is clear near 16th Street, becomes populated near 15th, and is very populated north of 15th Street. It deadends there. Four Barrel Coffee backs up onto the alley on the west side. The Friendship House Association of American Indians operates a treatment facility that backs up to the alleyway on the east side. None of the people in the alleyway are associated with either establishment. Tenants in apartments off the alleyway enter their garages from the alleyway.
Julian Avenue
Julian Avenue has more people gathering north of 15th Street and around the armory at 14th Street.
4:58 p.m. 8/3 Julian Avenue, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:58 p.m. 8/3 Julian Avenue, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:33 p.m. 8/3 Julian Avenue looking south from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:33 p.m. 8/3 Julian Avenue looking south from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:33 p.m. 8/3 Julian Avenue looking north from 15th Street, Photo by Lydia Chávez 
4:33 p.m. 8/3 Julian Avenue, looking north from 15th Street.Photo by Lydia Chávez
Wiese Street
Once overrun, Wiese Street continues to be clear and clean.
Furniture dumped on the sidewalk is not a problem at Avanza, 490 South Van Ness.
Perhaps La Fenix families are so desperate to flee street conditions that they’ll jettison their furniture to make escape easier. This is probably because they are “rich and privileged” and probably homeless hating racists also.
So you’re inventing imaginary scenarios about the people dumping appliances on city streets to craft your narrative from whole cloth once again, eh?
Doesn’t it get old after a while? For you I mean.
“One father, who walked out of La Fenix on Sunday with his daughter, said he wants out of the complex managed by Bridge Housing. Bridge, he said, is helping him find a new unit elsewhere. He was not happy with their management at La Fenix.
“They have community meetings, but I don’t feel like they do anything,” he said. “The security guards don’t watch the door and I’m tired of hearing people fornicate in the alley.”
He’s ready to move on.
It is surprising how many children, just walking by after a shopping trip or needing to get home, have to navigate the block.”
missionlocal.
org/2025/06/day-96-at-the-16th-st-plaza-im-tired-of-hearing-people-fornicate-in-the-alley/
missionlocal.
org/2025/04/sf-parents-16th-street-mission-street-conditions/
The sanitation station was removed from the corner of 15th & Julian, do you know why or if it is coming back? There were feces all along the sidewalk there this morning. We need more bathrooms, not fewer.
You mean the addicts had grown accustomed to the presence of the Gubbio addict magnet and are still drawn to shit there to mark their territory? We need to get Lydia Bransten out there with a spatula and bleach to get the work done.
Shut Gubbio project down. It’s appears this ‘attraction’ has dragged down the neighborhood.
Enough of the non-profits addicted to the homeless industrial complex in SF. Vote NO on City ballots looking for more bonds every yr, it makes the problem worse and raises costs for all residents. Non-profits have ZERO incentive to improve either the conditions of the neighborhood, the City or addicts. They survive by making problems worse.
What a skewed system.
Whether Gubbio stays or goes people still need bathrooms. I’m so tired of this thinking that if we take enough things away, make it awful enough, make them hurt enough and they’ll go away and become someone else’s problem, as if that’s a solution.
This is an issue everywhere, in every city. I talk to friends in Texas, in the Midwest, in L.A., in the northwest, on the east coast – everyone everywhere tells the same tales of campers and drugs and sorrow. Try understanding that this is a feature of our cruel capitalist system that criminalizes using drugs as one tool to create a permanent underclass.
And in this immediate situation it’s not so much Gubbio drawing them in as it is the city deciding to clear out some areas at the expense of others. We are the new containment zone for the foreseeable future.
Homelessness is an issue everywhere. Concentrating the worst cases in a working class urban neighborhood and giving up on quality of life for all the non-junkies nearby is not. Talk about creating a permanent underclass.
Shit’s my specialty,
That and broken glass.
My dog and I deal with at least a half dozen piles of poop daily both human and critter (damn, this one person has a big stool who goes in front of the Armory!) and it took two and a half hours today and 4 yesterday for two blocks of 14th Street from Guerrero to Mission.
The DPW guys with the little trash cans hate to pick up the dung but as an old Special Ed. teacher who worked in some pretty funky settings it doesn’t bother me and I carry two jars of kitty litter (City won’t provide it) which I sprinkle on the loose stools which protects the Public til we get there the next day and scrape it with cardboard pieces and sweep up the litter.
Having the same territory to go back over month after month and year after year helps enormously and I’ll put me and Skippy’s work up against anyone.
Frankly, the City has done a fantastic job (thanks DPW) in making Mission Street and the adjoining Sinners Side Streets (hmm, I like that phrase and it’s alliterative) …
They’re sparkling but there’s no activity at all when we need dozens of vendors and maybe some chess boards and an exercise area like they have in the TL down by the library.
Go Niners !!
h.
Mercy Housing Management, employees are operating a senior apartment building named All Hallows Community in the Bayview neighborhood. I’m a tenant. It gets extremely hot inside the hallways and twice as hot inside the elevator. Thermostat reads between 75-85 degrees Fahrenheit. Us senior/tenants here all suffocating. The manager of the apartment building does the recycle the old fashioned way. She drags the recycle items down the hallway and onto the elevator and the stench is getting into our lungs. Mercy Housing Management and employees are the lowest form of humans there is. Four years, I’ve been complaining about these unhealthy living conditions here at All Hallows Community Cemetery/Prison, A Place Where Seniors Come to Die
You want to fix your homeless problem, stop fighting ice, no one wants to say it but I do all the time, let ice take the drug dealers selling fentynal and meth, homeless will decrease by 60% i know the homeless situation very well and I can confidently say that if fentynal and meth weren’t there, neither would the homeless be, san francisco has barely any beds for treatment so arrest these Hondurans on dirt bikes selling the crap to our kids!
Perhaps there wouldn’t be so much concern if ICE mainly took the people you describe, but that’s not the case. It’s so obvious, and worse yet is the slow-moving literal torture that seems meant to intimidate people either to self-deport or not immigrate at all, which bothers us greatly. These are people, after all, and hard-working, law-abiding to boot.
Me and my dog’s 2 block trash route takes double the time,
We do 14th from West side of Guerrero to West side of Mission plus rear of Armory on Julian both sides and Valencia to Brosnan plus side forays when duty calls.
Nothing like being retired and owning your own time.
Last week someone dumped an 8′ long and 6′ high exercise machine topped with a computer read out.
Biggest thing I’ve seen dumped behind Armory in 3 years of Volunteering.
Xavier and Scotty from DPW emptied bed of 8′ long pickup and with sheer muscle and know-how, got the rig into the rear of the truck and closed the tailgate.
I did video of some and Tony is starting to get these things on YouTube.
We need an elected Police Chief and 4 RV/Tent Campgrounds too.
Where was I when I interrupted myself ?
Yeah, our trash route takes twice as long now since the Mayor’s people began pushing them down to the rear of the Armory.
Then, DPW and the cops sweep them again and on and on.
Answer is to copy the Europeans but do it even better.
Decriminalize drugs I mean.
Takes cops and dealers out of equation and allows focus on addiction.
The numbers and studies don’t lie.
Then again, Joe O’Donoghue used to say:
“Figures don’t lie but liars can figure.”
go Niners !!
h.
Santiago Lerma from Dept of Emergency Mgmt said that most of the addicts they encounter are neither homeless nor from San Francisco. There’s no evidence that most of them want to clean up.
We’re dealing with other cities’ problems, human beings who don’t want solutions themselves and which the city contains in our corner of the Mission with the assent of the district supervisor because her nonprofit base wants to use our neighborhood to monetize even more human misery.