Louie Hammonds, 54, says he wakes up every day and asks himself: “What good can I do today?”
Then, he shaves his face into a neat goatee, dons his Ray-Bans and zips up the bright yellow Urban Alchemy vest he wears while walking the streets of the Tenderloin.
His days are long. He starts at 5 a.m., opening the doors of the Urban Alchemy office at 1035 Market St. so people can wander in for a cup of coffee or a place to sit. Then he heads out across the busy street corridor and into the Tenderloin, where he patrols for 12 hours.
Long days of putting in thousands of steps in one of San Francisco’s most challenging neighborhoods isn’t a chore for Hammonds.
“It’s a blessing,” he said, to be able to help the Tenderloin community and for the opportunity to work with the nonprofit organization.
Just 10 years ago, Hammonds was completing a prison sentence of 20-plus years for a gang-related shooting he committed in Stockton at the age of 24. When he was released in 2017, he made his way to San Francisco, and to the Tenderloin specifically, where he found housing.
“When I was released at 45 years old, I was worried, I was afraid,” he said. “I’d never had a job and people around me were talking about retirement.”
But the following year, Urban Alchemy representatives visited his housing complex and told him about the job: a street ambassador, who’s tasked with connecting with the unhoused community and helping to improve street conditions. Best of all, Urban Alchemy specifically hires formerly incarcerated people.
For Hammonds, who had completed a substance-abuse program while in prison and eventually became a mentor to other incarcerated men, the job seemed like a no-brainer. Since he started in 2018, he’s moved up the ranks and currently serves as the program’s vice president of operations.
In this role he helps recruit and train other street ambassadors — there are some 32 in the Tenderloin — while overseeing day-to-day operations, including budget and staffing levels.
Despite the extra responsibilities, he still makes time to walk the neighborhood and get back to the roots of the job: Making connections and guiding people to the right resources.
When you see him on the streets, the job seems like a perfect fit.
It’s an Urban Alchemy ambassador’s job to approach people in the neighborhood, unhoused or not, Hammonds said. But often people beat him to it.
On the street, a man more than a foot taller than Hammonds stops him to say hello. They wrap their arms around each other before going their separate ways.
“This guy,” Hammonds says, while patting the man’s shoulder. “What a story.”
Later, down the same street, a woman and her son stop Hammonds for a fist bump; the woman says her son views the ambassadors as the neighborhood’s superheroes.
As she walks down Turk Street, Hammonds radios another ambassador at the end of the next block to keep an eye on the woman and make sure she gets to her next destination safely.
There’s an intricate web of Urban Alchemy ambassadors throughout the Tenderloin. At nearly every block, Hammonds sees someone he knows or helped train. He calls them out by name, or as “brother” or “family.”
“How you doing, family?” one man calls out to Hammonds.
“All is well,” Hammonds says.
The same courtesy is extended to the unhoused people in the neighborhood. He offers cigarettes to a group of men gathered on the sidewalk.
That helps build a relationship and fill up an “emotional bank account,” he says, making it easier when he has to ask folks to disperse or put away drug paraphernalia. He doles out comments to dogs, too.
Among his longtime acquaintances is a man known on the street as Cornbread.
Formerly homeless and formerly incarcerated, too, Cornbread is considered an honorary member of the Urban Alchemy street team. He carries a broom with him while he sits outside of the Market Street office, cleaning up alongside the ambassadors.
“Everybody is supportive of everybody out here,” Cornbread said.
When they met, Cornbread was unhoused, but now, Hammonds says with a smile, he’s got housing. Ask Hammond about someone else’s story in the Tenderloin? He won’t shy away from the hard parts — the struggles so many people in the Tenderloin faced and continue to face — but he will always include the successes.
For him, that goes with the job.
