The parking lot at 469 Stevenson St., near Sixth Street in SoMa, has had many lives: valet parking for the now-shuttered Nordstrom, the site of a proposed development that would have provided 494 units of housing if the city hadn’t rejected it in 2021 and, in the early months of the Lurie administration, a “triage center” that police hoped would serve as a one-stop shop for getting people into drug treatment, getting people bus tickets out of town or just getting them arrested more efficiently.
Most recently, it served as an urban “oasis,” staffed by workers from the nonprofit Urban Alchemy, where local residents could socialize around a cup of coffee.
But, as of early January, the parking lot is, once again, a parking lot.
“A lot of people are angry,” said Michèle Jones, a nearby resident. Jones, who was unhoused until recently, said she went to the “oasis” park “more than 100 times” before its closure.
The coffee was good, she said, and the restrooms were clean. “People were getting things, they could sit down and actually relax,” she said. “ And now, not being able to, that’s a hard thing for people to deal with.”
The oasis was part of a larger city effort to improve conditions on Sixth Street, which was one of the early promises of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration. It was modeled after a similar park at Turk and Hyde streets in the Tenderloin, which opened in 2022. That “oasis” continues to operate.
Last summer, Lurie visited Sixth Street, along with his Instagram followers, and pointed out the parking lot “oasis” as one of the city’s successes in the neighborhood.
“We’ve got a long way to go, that’s no question … But it’s looking better, at least at this moment, so we’ll take it,” he said in an Aug. 21 video.
Some neighborhood residents and business owners told Mission Local they saw the facilities being used sporadically throughout the fall. Others said they didn’t even know the area had shifted from a police “triage center” to an “oasis” park. But for some of the regular guests, the closure came as a shock.
The decision to shut down the park reflects the Department of Emergency Management’s pivot toward deploying community ambassadors — an unarmed, contractor-run fleet tasked with deterring drug-related activities and fights, as well as connecting residents to local resources — instead of setting up stationary posts, department spokesperson Micaela Leonarte told Mission Local in a written statement.
“Constantly changing street conditions have demonstrated a need for more deployable and dynamic ambassador teams rather than fixed posts at stationary locations,” she wrote. “Therefore, DEM is transitioning to a more flexible deployment of ambassadors citywide that relies on roving teams covering a wider area and providing coverage during both daytime and evening hours.”
This change in approach coincides with the city’s recent allocation of $32 million in contracts to five service providers to expand its community ambassador program across the city over the next 18 months. The neighborhoods covered include the Mission, Civic Center, the Tenderloin, Mid-Market and SoMa, with additional teams deployed citywide as needed.
That includes $24 million in contracts to Urban Alchemy. The nonprofit was allocated close to $11 million to cover the South Market, Mid Market, and Tenderloin areas, according to city records.
With the “oasis” closing, former park workers have been reassigned to Urban Alchemy’s neighborhood patrols. Ambassadors, who were already patrolling Sixth Street between Market and Mission streets, will now be allocated elsewhere in the neighborhood.
Some local business owners said they saw positive changes in the neighborhood in recent months, starting when the “triage” center opened in February 2025. Azmi Murait, owner of Shawarma Azmi on Sixth Street, said he felt the block was safer since Urban Alchemy workers started walking down the street and moving along people gathering in front of his store.
But, he noted, most of the people who were asked to move only moved down a few blocks. “They can come back anytime,” he said.
Ivy Jeanne McClelland, co-director of Vanguard Lab, a harm-reduction organization that holds workshops on Sixth Street, criticized the interventions Lurie has rolled out in the neighborhood, especially the SFPD “triage center”. She said she thought the efforts were focused more on managing optics than on addressing the needs of people struggling with homelessness and addiction.
As for the “oasis”, McClelland said, “it was a Band-Aid.”