You can see all the 16th Street posts here.
Federico and Anthony, both in their late 40s, looked like they had known each other forever.
But really, they had just met today, on the corner of 16th and Capp streets. They formed a San Francisco postcard, leaning back against a sun-soaked brick wall, laughing softly with quiet ease.
That was until a glass pipe slipped out of Anthony’s hands and shattered on the pavement.
Anthony is a San Francisco native with a debilitating fentanyl addiction, he told Mission Local. Over the past few years, he has struggled to get clean six times, but never managed to stay sober for more than a month.
He used to love the Mission but he’s getting tired of it. It feels impossible to stay clean when drugs are so accessible.
“I’ve been writing down baby steps — baby goals — to try to achieve them,” he said. His feet began to tap a frenzied rhythm on the sidewalk, and he swayed as he ran his hands through his hair.
When asked what his goals were, Anthony said he wanted to go to the DMV on Monday to apply for a driver’s license, and that he wanted to open a bank account so that he could start applying for jobs. Fentanyl is expensive.
Federico watched him, only his gray eyes visible: He wore a handkerchief over his mouth, and a bright-red beanie pulled low over his eyebrows. His voice was a painful rasp from the dehydration of smoking crystal meth, a habit he picked up after his mother died a year and a half ago.
“I was depressed. She could live for a 100 years, but I’d still miss her every day,” he said. “I enjoy crystal meth, but I don’t know if I’d call myself addicted.” His habits paint a different picture, however.
Whatever he earns, he spends on drugs, getting high “maybe two, three times a week,” and on rent. He shares a low-income studio at 15th and Mission streets with three cats, and works as an assistant at a nursing home and a chef at a SoMa homeless shelter.
As Federico talked, Anthony suddenly bent over in the stupor characteristic of fentanyl users. He began dancing around the sidewalk awkwardly. His hands trembled. His dose was taking effect.
Federico had his eyes trained on a police car that made its way down Capp Street, but it passed without incident.
As Anthony devoured a prepackaged glazed donut with a fresh banana inserted through the center, Federico described the origins of their friendship: Just earlier this morning. Anthony had seen Federico on the street and called out for help.
“I used to be homeless 10 years ago. I know what life is like on the streets here,” said Federico. “Now I work and I share a little of what I earn with my friends. Life has truly changed.”
Since he usually picks up night shifts, every other day Federico likes to walk around the Mission District, meeting people, making friends and helping out wherever he can.
“I have a lot of affection for the people here,” Federico said as he and Anthony ambled away, leaving that part of Capp Street empty.
Capp Street
Mission Housing and MEDA got walloped today (10 Oct) by the Marshall Community as they laid out their plans for Permanent Supportive Housing, drug/psych treatment at 16th and Capp. Marshall families and neighbors united to push back on nonprofit impunity and lies. It was delightful to watch and be a part of our community coming to see the nonprofits for what they really are.
The Mission nonprofit cartel’s claims of community legitimacy stand exposed as nonexistent. Nobody in the room supported MEDA or Mission Housing or their project. These are the people that the nonprofits claim as their base and they were having none of it.
All the nonprofits can muster in support are other people who are paid to be there like they did to shout down the Marshall community in 2024 at St. Johns after Ronen lied to us about Mission Cabins. The claque was not invited to this community event, so it was more representative and more on point.
These nonprofiteers expect to be able to lie to the community that they speak on behalf of and over, and take it personally when they’re called on the lies they tell for their day jobs paid for with our tax dollars. Their legitimacy has been revoked. They’re digging themselves in deeper by doubling down on insulting people with skin in the game.
MEDA said that the Plaza 16 Coalition called for PSH at their Marvel. Nothing of the sort ever happened. I attended Plaza 16 meetings until it became clear that it was the PR front for a nonprofit extortion operation being run out of the D9 supe’s office.
The call was for family, not addict and psych housing. There is no evidence in the record that P16 ever called for PSH. It is insulting and abusive to the community for the nonprofiteers to gaslight us otherwise.
These nonprofiteers could not care less about the community, which they view as raw material for their business practices. They show this over and again by disrespecting us, lying to us, concealing their intentions, further oppressing low income, immigrant and homeless families of color, and treating the community like the enemy.
Politics in our community is all about the nonprofits and their needs and they hold us in barely concealed contempt. The community is onto their scam, tenants and homeowners, affordable housing residents and market rate tenants, citizens and immigrant, low income and better off working people all ethnicities finding common ground–breaking through the barriers that the nonprofits have erected–and the community is demanding self determination like every other neighborhood.
Stay tuned.
“Politics in our community is all about the nonprofits and their needs and they hold us in barely concealed contempt.”
^^!
A waste of money to build this apartment building. We who live near the school and the school kids experience lots of stress. The patrols of the BART plaza help but we see an uptick of drug users and dealers etc. closer to the school etc. The fentanyl user is not unique. It’s easy to score drugs here 24/7. How stupid to spend $$$$$$?on a building to in part house addicted persons.
Build all the apartments for affordable housing!
Little school kids mostly Latinos are traumatized by all the drugs and all manner of urban decay.
Drug users often don’t want to get clean nor follow the rules of housing, and there are other media stories about that.
There should be areas away from schools, businesses and residential areas. There are other places to create an area just for drug users. Otherwise nice mostly white middle to upper middle class need to bear our burden. Too many services some failed , right in the NE Mission.
Further, not sure when this publication takes photos. It doesn’t adequately document the overall activity. This weekend at several times was a zoo on both sides of Capp /16th, by the Victoria theater, Adair street.
The City is planning to build a behavioral health and detox facility close by. This is going to push more & more addicts to 16/Mission area. So frustrating this part of town is becoming the new Tenderloin. Is it designed as a release valve for the TL? Does anyone have any inside info?
I’d be concerned about a heavy drug user working in a nursing home! Any temptation to steal things or break into the locked meds cabinet to support the habit he says is expensive??!!
Anusha,
Nice feeling to the piece and that takes talent.
Mission Local is best read in town.
Wish you had regular comix and gossip.
Forwarded a pic to you via Lydia that I took from distance but if you zoom in you get the effect of all the different sized wheels and chrome bars and harshly hairy and dirty and ill kept denizens of the Streets of San Francisco.
lol
The pics y’all take of the side streets around 16th and Mission are all empty but the people just moved a couple of blocks to behind the Armory where my dog, Skippy and I clean up daily and on over to the block of Stevenson from 14th North which seems visited by various City workers and cops daily and I clean up lots of blood and needles and waste and broken glass.
There are around 3,200 addicts out there and a thousand a year die.
Decriminalize it and take the cops and dealers out of equation.
go Niners !!
h.
Decriminalize? Isn’t it already? I see no less that 10 fentanyl smokers on my way to work every day… cops drive by do nothing. No criminals here… go niners!
SF needs to build fentanyl dens on a pier somewhere and get retired MDs to write prescriptions for pharmaceutical fentanyl so that addicts can smoke their lives away behind closed doors.
We need some huge potted plants next to the wall where Walgreens used to be. There have been people sitting against that wall all day shooting up for many years.
“Anthony said he wanted to go to the DMV on Monday to apply for a driver’s license, and that he wanted to open a bank account so that he could start applying for jobs. Fentanyl is expensive.”
Tragic beyond words.