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, to replace outgoing District 6 supervisor Matt Haney, who was elected to the state assembly.
Dorsey is up for re-election this November against one challenger, Alex Behrend. We have decided not to cover Behrend, given our guidelines here.
Sixth Street’s residential hotels have housed working-class and low-income residents since the early 20th century, making the street a center for some of the city’s most affordable housing. City officials have also historically described its buildings and street conditions as “blighted” and made repeated attempts to “revitalize” it.
The question of who this revitalization is for is a tense one in SoMa. Beginning in the 1960s, the city’s Yerba Buena redevelopment project cleared residential hotels from the area north of Sixth Street to make way for what would eventually become the Moscone Center and Yerba Buena Gardens. About 4,000 residents and 700 businesses were displaced.
That era set up a debate that still haunts SoMa: Can the city “improve” a neighborhood without replacing the people who already live there?
Later civic efforts on Sixth Street tried to balance those goals. A redevelopment area established after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake funded more than 1,000 affordable housing units, improvements to SROs and neighborhood nonprofits, alongside wider sidewalks, streetlights, business assistance and cleaning. More recently, the city completed another major streetscape overhaul. Yet Sixth Street continues to reflect challenging social conditions that city leaders have struggled to address: poverty, vacant storefronts, drug use, street disorder.
Now the debate is resurfacing in a different political moment. Mayor Daniel Lurie has made visible drug use, homelessness and street disorder major targets of his administration. Drug arrests rose more than 50 percent in 2025, and a new RESET sobering center for people arrested for public intoxication — championed by Dorsey — opened this year on Sixth Street.
In August, the Lurie administration ordered Hospitality House’s Sixth Street Self-Help Center to close and move its services to the Tenderloin, saying the city wants to “revitalize” the corridor.
The closure has revived debate about what “revitalization” would mean. Some business leaders and residents say the concentration of homeless services and visible poverty has made Sixth Street unsafe and businesses difficult to revive. Service providers say they are being blamed for street conditions they did not create.
This week’s question: What should “revitalizing” the Sixth Street corridor look like?
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
Revitalizing Sixth Street starts with honoring the City’s commitment to geographic equity and taking seriously neighborhood residents’ legitimate complaints about bearing a wildly disproportionate share of homelessness services. Four years ago, San Francisco opened a $13.5 million Maria X. Martinez Health Resource Center at Stevenson and Sixth for comprehensive health and dental care — yet left open every duplicative nonprofit storefront, including Hospitality House. Our city’s persistent budget crisis is enforcing efficiencies upon us, and right-sizing support services is part of that. The rest is empowering small businesses to activate neighborhood-serving storefronts through targeted grants, fee waivers, and workforce support.
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 candidate, please let us know at sarah@missionlocal.com // io@missionlocal.com.
You can register to vote via the sf.gov website. Illustrations by Neil Ballard.
