Welcome back to our “Meet the Candidates” series, where District 6 supervisor candidates respond to a question in 100 words or fewer. Answers are published every Tuesday.
District 6 includes SoMa, Mission Bay, Treasure Island and Yerba Buena. Its current supervisor, Matt Dorsey, was appointed by Mayor London Breed on May 9, 2022. He is up for re-election this November against one challenger, Alex Behrend. Because Behrend does not meet our guidelines here, he is not included in this series.
Last week, District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey said revitalizing Sixth Street should start with “geographic equity.” His constituents complain, Dorsey said, that the corridor bears a “wildly disproportionate share of homelessness services” relative to other parts of San Francisco. He called for “right-sizing” support services by supporting small business and closing “duplicative” storefronts run by nonprofits serving low-income or homeless populations.
But Dorsey has also been one of the strongest supporters of the RESET center — a $14 million pilot that opened in May at 444 Sixth Street, as an apparent alternative to jail or hospitalization for people identified by police as being publicly intoxicated. Dorsey has argued that the RESET center gets people using drugs off the street faster while connecting them to treatment. Mayor Daniel Lurie has described the RESET center as part of a plan to “fundamentally transform San Francisco’s response to addiction and homelessness.”
Its location has nevertheless raised questions about the addition of a new facility for drug and alcohol users in SoMa, which already has one of the highest concentrations of such facilities in the city. A City Attorney’s Office memo obtained by Mission Local noted that city law requires a special waiver before adding another sobering center in SoMa if the neighborhood already has a disproportionate share of social-service providers relative to its unhoused population. A SoMa neighborhood association later cited the center in a civil-rights complaint, alleging that the city continues to illegally concentrate homelessness, behavioral-health and drug-treatment services in the neighborhood.
That dispute is complicated by uncertainty over the RESET center’s legal classification. The Sheriff’s Department has described it as a “non-licensed sobering facility,” while the City Attorney’s Office warned that it could open the city to lawsuits if a court ruled that it was being used as a detention center, which it is not licensed for. Just before the center opened, city officials gave conflicting answers about whether people brought there were detained, and if the center would be able to provide prescription drugs to help treat or manage addiction.
While Dorsey agrees that Sixth Street bears an inequitable share of homelessness services, he argues that the RESET center represents a significant, and unique, intervention to the Sixth Street corridor.
This week’s question: Is there a contradiction between your support for the RESET Center on Sixth Street and your concern that the corridor bears a disproportionate share of homelessness services?
Mission Local color codes the answers to yes/no questions. A blue background means the candidate answered yes, an orange background means no and a yellow background means that the candidate answered ambiguously.
Matt Dorsey
- Job: Current District 6 Supervisor
- Age: 61
- Residency: Renter, living in District 6 since 2008, has lived in San Francisco since 1990 (except for four years in Washington, D.C.).
- Transportation: Public transit, walking, biking
- Education: Bachelor’s degree from Emerson College
- Languages: English
- Website: Reelect Matt Dorsey 2026
The RESET Center is an approach I’ve long advocated for San Francisco to make more arrests and better custodial interventions for public drug use. Unlike homeless services that may attract voluntary participants to the neighborhood, the RESET Center is an involuntary intervention — just short of a jail booking — that aims to hold habitual drug-users accountable for addiction-driven lawlessness in SoMa, while better connecting those in custody to gold-standard addiction medications and drug treatment. It’s showing impressive success: reducing police time from hours to minutes to get drug use off the streets, and posting a services referral rate approaching 40 percent.
Endorsed by: Mayor Daniel Lurie, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, Senator Scott Wiener … read more here.
Answers may be lightly edited for formatting, spelling and grammar. If you have questions for the candidates, please let us know at sarah@missionlocal.com // io@missionlocal.com.
You can register to vote via the sf.gov website.
