S.F. wants to ‘revitalize’ SoMa’s 6th St. corridor. It’s starting by closing a drop-in center.

Depending on who you talk to, the Sixth Street Self-Help Center is a lifeline to the residents of the SRO hotels around it, or an anchor dragging the local quality of life down. 

What is clear: Daniel Lurie’s administration quietly terminated its contract with the center at 169 Sixth St., demanding the hub close by Dec. 31 and relocate its staff back to the Tenderloin. 

The city has given little insight into why the center has to close. Its budget, services and staff, the city says, will move eight blocks across Market Street to the Hospitality House at 146 Leavenworth St. in the Tenderloin.

The center at the corner of Sixth and Natoma streets sees about 4,200 people a year, and has connected hundreds to permanent housing in the neighborhood, said Joe Wilson, the executive director of Hospitality House.  

“We are doing the things the city claims it wants done,” he said. “Now the mayor’s office has said that they want to reimagine Sixth Street so, well, what does that mean? It’s anybody’s guess.”

Hospitality House leaders say its closure underscores the city’s punitive approach to homelessness while city leaders say they are trying to “revitalize” the Sixth Street corridor and have plans for the soon-to-be-vacant space. Hospitality House staffers are holding a rally on Wednesday, Aug. 19, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., to fight for the center to stay open.

Complaints from community groups grew against the center

While city leaders will not give a clear reasoning for the site’s closure, it also appears to follow months of pushback from community and business groups who say the presence of the center is, in part, responsible for what they say are unsafe and unclean street conditions. 

“We’re trying to get Sixth Street cleaned up,” said Henry Karnilowicz, president of the SoMa Business Association, which works to advocate for businesses in the area.

The fewer than a dozen small restaurants on Sixth Street, including pizza shops and bodegas, face more dire circumstances than other businesses in SoMa, Karnilowicz said, and the presence of the center draws in a crowd that keeps paying customers away. 

“People say it’s gentrification. It’s a revitalization, that’s how I look at it. We have to make it so that locals and non-locals feel comfortable, not that they’re going to be threatened or see people defecating right in front of them. And I think that’s a good thing.”

Karnilowicz said his organization has met with the mayor’s office over the last year to express their concerns, especially “what’s going on right outside of Hospitality House,” the Sixth Street Center.

The Self-Help Center is located at the corner of Natoma and Sixth streets. Natoma, which is more of an alley than a street, dead-ends at Fifth Street, and the low level of pedestrian and car traffic makes it an easy place for people to congregate.

Hospitality House staff say they frequently step into the alley to encourage the groups of people who are often hanging out on the sidewalks and doorsteps of Natoma into the center and off the street.

On a recent morning in mid-August, a man walking down Sixth Street used a metal pole to drag a plastic container, likely filled with his belongings, toward Market Street.  

Around him, on Sixth Street alone, there were at least four other service organizations besides the Self-Help Center that were open to serve low-income residents and the nearby homeless population. Those services are varied; one exclusively serves families, another offers food and hygiene services and a third has services catered to drug users.

To some, that is too many services with too little city presence helping to address the problem.  

The South of Market West Neighborhood Association filed a formal complaint to the state of California on April 3, alleging that San Francisco has violated state-housing law by concentrating poverty and disadvantage in SoMa, and by failing to provide basic city services on the same level as other neighborhoods.

“We’re seeing it everyday,” said Shaun Aukland, a board member of the neighborhood association. “Who was the responsible [party] to report those people, help those people, get them into shelters and treatment? When we asked the Department of Public Health, we were seeing a lot of finger-pointing.”

That said, added Aukland, they did not push for the center to be closed.

“It’s not a win for us that Hospitality House is closing.”

What Aukland and other association members did do, he added, was file complaints about  unclean and unsafe conditions along the Sixth Street corridor, including the area where the Self-Help center operated; reports of things like people loitering, using substances, throwing trash and sleeping on sidewalks. 

‘We need a plan’

The mayor’s response in the wake of those complaints has been to call for a “revitalization” of the corridor, though it is unclear what that will entail. 

The city says it is in active conversations about what will fill the space vacated by Hospitality House’s center, but had no specific plans to share at the time of publication. The property directly above the drop-in center, The Alder Hotel, is up for sale, according to a listing online. The hotel is currently used for single room occupancy housing.

“Hospitality House remains a valued [partner] providing critical behavioral health services to San Franciscans, and we will continue to work with them to ensure continuity of care for clients as our top priority during this change,” wrote the Department of Public Health in an emailed statement. 

A separate statement from Lurie’s office highlighted the absence of a plan for the future of Sixth Street.

“We need a plan to actually revitalize the corridor. We’re currently looking at how to activate the space at 169 Sixth St. and bring in resources and amenities that serve and energize the whole community.” 

Who is responsible for street conditions? 

Wilson, from Hospitality House, said his organization is not responsible for what happens outside of its facility.

“We feel we’re being punished because of the external conditions — the visibility of homelessness and poverty,” said Wilson. Both, he said, have “not been eliminated to the degree that anyone is satisfied with.”

Legally, though, the city does assign some responsibility to local businesses and nonprofits that operate in any neighborhood for what happens outside their doors. San Francisco’s Good Neighbor policy, created in 2024 by former Mayor London Breed, makes the city “primarily responsible” for street conditions, but stresses that service organizations funded by city departments or agencies should “actively” work with the city to address concerns surrounding their sites. 

The Good Neighbor policy is in the process of being updated to make the role of those service organizations clearer, by requiring organizations to “make reasonable efforts to resolve routine concerns,” conduct and document at least three perimeter checks per day, keep entrances and sidewalks “reasonably” clear and “appropriately” discourage “disruptive behavior” near sites. That policy will likely go into effect in September or October of this year. 

Kimbel Welch runs the City Team center directly across from the Sixth Street Self-Help Center and said their center too has felt pressure and blame from neighbors. 

City Team provides food assistance and hygiene services to the homeless population, including on-site showers. Welch said his team is often the first contact with people who want help, and that they often refer people to Hospitality House’s case-management team as well. 

“We do get blamed a lot for the homeless community here,” Welch said. “I don’t know how we could be responsible for public property. I get it, but in the end, I can’t make people move off of the sidewalk.” 

Welch said his team will encourage people to disperse, refuse to open their doors if there is an encampment on the sidewalk outside, and deny services to those who repeatedly use drugs outside of the center after being warned to stop. 

For some in the neighborhood, the problem isn’t any one social service agency in one area, but just that there are so many of them in one area.  Recently, homelessness advocates and some city leaders have pushed against the piling of social service agencies, shelters and affordable housing in the Tenderloin and SoMa, saying a “containment zone” is created in the neighborhoods that have more services than others. 

“There’s some truth to it,” Welch said of the idea that a large number of agencies in a certain neighborhood may attract vulnerable populations to the area. “But we’re here because they’re here, not the other way around.”

Cherie Davis, the lead program manager at the Sixth Street Center, also has her doubts that closing the center would create the outcome that the center’s opponents hope for. 

“They think they’ll follow us to the Tenderloin. To me, this area is going to get worse than they think,” she said. 

Hospitality House staff meet community members where they’re at, said Davis. In nearly every case, she added, she took on a new case because someone walked in the doors at the Sixth Street center and introduced themselves. 

“People come here, they get stabilized,” Davis said. It may be the 75-year-old woman who would have ended up homeless without their interventio,n or the man with Huntington’s Disease unable to take stairs, who Davis’ team helped to get new housing. 

Sometimes, she said, it is just a place for unhoused residents in the area to catch their breath.