Late Wednesday morning, a woman with a lanyard called out from the direction of Caledonia Street toward a man hunched over a collapsible wagon. “No, you can’t have that piece of foil out like that, sir. Put it away. Come in for some coffee,” she said, before walking back alone into the Gubbio Project, near 16th and Mission streets.
Just minutes earlier, Santiago Lerma, who leads the Mission Street Team with San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, entered the area on a rented scooter and was midway through an interview with me about the 16th Street Plaza and its surrounding alleys. “This isn’t a heavy-handed approach,” he said. “We’re not trying to arrest our way out of a drug crisis.”
Lerma said his team deploys daily, often rotating in 8 to 10 staffers from the Homeless Outreach Team (HOT), the Department of Public Health (DPH), Public Works (DPW), and occasionally the San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD). Wednesdays are the most concentrated: About 12 HOT staff and 10 DPH workers cycle through the neighborhood, offering services in the mornings and general outreach in the afternoons. On those days, outreach begins at the Gubbio Project, which Lerma described as a key anchor. “Folks naturally come here,” he said. “If we had another Gubbio, you’d see a difference on the street.”
By 1 p.m., outreach teams move to the alleys near the plazas — Wiese, Capp, and Caledonia streets — offering shelter referrals, behavioral health services, and case management. Lerma said the city typically has between 10 and 20 shelter beds available each day, and that the outreach team has placed someone daily since the crackdown began in March. “We’ve been using them every day,” he said. “Since we launched, we’ve probably been at 100 percent, or close — 90 percent of the time.”
As we walked down Julian Avenue, the conversation turned to SROs like the Kailash Hotel. “That one’s private,” Lerma said. “People pay rent, but we don’t have oversight like we do at sites we fund.” He noted that the 16th Street area differs from 24th, calling it more transient and less rooted. “You don’t have a lot of neighborhood people that are taking care, watching out for their neighborhood or their house,” he said. For many in the area, the plazas serve as “their living room.”
By 10:45 a.m., the sun had fully emerged, and we ducked briefly into the Mission Neighborhood Health Center on Capp before crossing back to the southwest 16th Street Plaza. At the northeast corner, two white sheriff’s vans pulled up, and several deputies stepped out. “There’s like 12 sheriffs on 16th and Mission right now,” Lerma noted, glancing across the intersection.
An hour earlier, Capp Street had looked spotless after a DPW sweep. But by 11:02 a.m., as we turned the corner, about a dozen people had taken over roughly 50 feet of sidewalk. A few crouched over torches and pipes in mid-use. “This is not good,” Lerma muttered. Trash had already reappeared. He explained that DPW often needs police clearance to remove items, even when they appear clearly abandoned. “Just yesterday,” he said, “a pile of belongings sat on Capp for over an hour while we waited for officers to arrive. Public Works wouldn’t touch it until the police confirmed it didn’t belong to anyone.”
As we returned to the corner of 15th and Julian, back where the walkthrough began, Lerma laid out what’s keeping the city’s presence in motion. His Mission Street Team operates daily, staffed by eight to 20 people, including members from the Department of Public Health, the Homeless Outreach Team, and Public Works. On Wednesdays, about 12 HOT staff and 10 DPH workers cycle through the neighborhood, offering services in the mornings and general outreach in the afternoons.
He estimated the city has between 10 and 20 shelter beds available each day, a number that hasn’t met demand. Still, Lerma said his team has placed people into shelter “every single day” since the effort began in March.
However, the Department of Emergency Management does not track how many people accept services. “We don’t track that ourselves,” he said, noting that his team relies on updates from DPH and HOT who lead engagement in the field. “Usually we see them leave,” he added, referring to individuals who accept services and are then escorted off-site by outreach workers.
How long will the crackdown continue? There’s no defined budget cap, he said; these efforts draw from existing departmental resources. “This is structural,” he said earlier. “We’re in it for the long haul.”
“We’re not trying to arrest our way out of a drug crisis.”
Why not? Other cities do.
If you listen to reformed addicts, many will tell you that prison is where they kicked the habit. We don’t need to give them long jail sentences, and we can’t afford that anyway. But it’s not humane to leave people to die on the street. It’s actually more humane to arrest them and give them a chance.
It’s better for the rest of us too — and we matter. I’m tired of law-abiding citizens being ignored.
Props to ML for documenting that these people are just doing drugs and partying all day. Many of them have housing and shelter but they prefer to chill outside with their friends. It shows how far gone they are and how far gone the neighborhood is that you can take pictures of them smoking pipes in broad daylight and they don’t care. Clearly the police don’t care since they aren’t doing anything either.
I absolutely love to read articles about the 16th/Mission plaza and surrounding areas. More exciting articles please!
From one city job to another, and nothing has improved, par for the course.
If there was another Gubbio we’d see a difference on the street. Yes. Having a safe place to sleep, eat, get wounds taken care of and have community time makes it much easier to talk about treatment than does being handed some pamphlets or a jail cell.
I was surprised Lerma didn’t run for D9 Supervisor. I had some email exchanges with him on neighborhood issues when he was working for Ronin, and he was always helpful and knew how the various moving parts worked. He cares, but he also knows that things have to get done. I think he has a bright future in SF, either politically or administratively.
they are trying to arrest their way out of the situation. they can deny all they want. they are a heavy handed force. look at the number of people they got out there. instead of paying all of them workers, just pay for the rent of all the people on streets. it would be cheaperthen their war on the poor.
99% of addicts don’t want a place to live or the strings attached. They answer to a higher power. The grind from hit to hit is all that matters. Providing free housing to hardcore addicts won’t work and would be unfair to people who are contributing to our neighborhood, working, and just scraping by while not half-dead in the streets. We can thank the Sacklers for this mess. Our mild weather and laissez-faire attitude towards outdoor addicts doesn’t help, either. I would choose to be a homeless street addict here in SF, too, given the choice.
We do pay rent for a large number of people on the streets. And drug treatment, and trash cleanup, and ambulance pickups, and police patrols, and narcan for OD prevention, and homeless outreach teams, and funding for an alphabet soup of social service programs, and higher prices as a result of shoplifting and fencing. Talk about heavy handed. There are certainly cheaper ways to address this problem.