Roughly 50 attendees, residents and politicos alike, gathered Thursday afternoon at the corner of 16th Street and Julian Avenue to protest ongoing drug use and dealing outside their homes. They’re fed up with drug users and dealers nearby, they said, despite a constant police presence at the BART plazas since mid-March.
“We’ve got kids on this block. You come home from school, and people are passed out on our porch,” said Andrew Wickens, a father of two who has lived on Julian for five years. “We’re tired of sweeping up needles and skin and fentanyl smoke just to get our kids inside.”
Residents like Estefania Najera Jimenez, who works at Wickens’ hat shop, described being verbally harassed while trying to enter their homes. “They know who we are now — what our cars look like, who our kids are — just because we’re speaking out,” she said. “We don’t feel safe anymore.”
The protest reflects mounting tensions following recent crackdowns at the 16th Street BART Plaza, where San Francisco police have increased enforcement since March. While some say the effort has temporarily cleared those transit corridors, many allege the problem has simply been displaced into surrounding residential streets like Julian.
“The city’s playing a game of Whac-a-Mole,” said Lily Ho, founder of Drug Free Sidewalks and a member of the San Francisco Democratic Party’s central committee. “We don’t have this problem in neighborhoods like Pacific Heights, because there’s no Gubbio Project there.”
Several party officials were present, including Trevor Chandler, who ran against Jackie Fielder for District 9 supervisor, and Cedric Akbar, who runs the city-contracted recovery nonprofit Positive Directions Equals Change.
The rally, organized by local families, city politicos, and recovery groups — including Drug Free Sidewalks and Mothers Against Drug Addiction and Death — called for immediate policy change to curb open-air drug activity in the Mission District’s residential corridors.
The protest began at 4 p.m. sharp and featured speeches from longtime neighbors, nonprofit workers, and recovery advocates from Positive Direction Equals Change, which advocates for abstinence-based treatment programs in San Francisco.
Multiple speakers criticized harm-reduction services like the Gubbio Project and nearby single-room occupancy hotels, particularly the Kailash Hotel, for attracting drug activity without sufficient accountability. Others called for stronger police intervention and even jail time for individuals who refuse treatment.
“Harm reduction defeats the purpose,” said Sandra Sims of Positive Direction Equals Change. “Our goal is total abstinence. As long as people are still using, they’re not going to get better.”
Lydia Bransten, the executive director of the Gubbio Project, pushed back on the rally.
“They got this group of people to come and protest on a street that has been getting better every day,” she said. At the Gubbio Project, she has been clear with those seeking services: “Public drug use and behavioral issues, where people are screaming on the street, is not okay.”
“We take people who would otherwise be on the street, and we bring them in 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., where they can get sleep, they can get services,” she added. “We are connecting between five and 10 people a week directly into treatment services, and people are saying we don’t care about recovery. What?”
Shortly before the rally began at 4 p.m., staff at the Gubbio Project reported an incident involving a woman who tried to enter the church, shouted at staff, and tried to film those getting services.
Then, during the rally, a brief confrontation unfolded near the Mission National Bank building at the corner of Julian Avenue, where Omar Ward, who goes by the moniker “JJ Smith” online and frequently films drug-addicted people on San Francisco streets, was standing.
According to eyewitnesses, a person who goes by the handle “SRO Martha Stewart” on X allegedly struck Smith’s Meta Glasses off his face, prompting a foot chase that spilled into Julian Avenue.
A photo captured moments later shows Smith holding onto the individual’s sweater as bystanders shouted, “Hey, that’s assault!” and, “We got all of that, dude.” Smith let go shortly after and, by 4:47 p.m., three police officers were on the scene speaking with the other individual. Neither party has issued a public statement.
The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The rally concluded with a call for continued community organizing, including a follow-up meeting at Manny’s scheduled for next Tuesday. Organizers say they plan to bring their demands directly to City Hall in the coming weeks.
This piece has been updated with comment from Lydia Bransten of the Gubbio Project.
@Ms. Bransten. It is laudable to be able to connect between five and 10 people a week.
OTOH, you own the problems that the people cause who you invite. If you can’t operate without causing/contributing to the mayhem in the streets, it’s on you to ramp your resolve beyond lukewarm “not okay” comments.
The message from all sides is clear; no one likes to see people in the street.
but DCCC and advocacy groups mentioned here are pushing this through failed strategy and fear mongering.
Contrary to Drug Free Sidewalk arguments and the like, harm reduction sites are actually a step towards recovery, along with other data driven public health initiatives. How are you going to go out and say you want these people to leave (“vayanse” on someone’s poster, how damn cruel and to have a child hold it up), how are you proposing this issue be resolved if you’re against the public health measures that are supposed to solve them in the first place?
Clearly the Lily Ho likes including failed D9 sup. Chandler dont care about long term root of the problem solutions. They clearly want vulnerable people out of sight and out of mind through quick and fast failed carceral solutions. They aren’t truly concerned for the recovery of these people. They only clearly care about their own selves and their ugly smelly privileged children. Lets be real now
The Four Pillars Plan is worth checking out. A model for what we need in San Francisco.
Hundreds of millions have been spent on “long term root of the problem solutions” over the years. Today is the long term, and a look into the streets is enough to tell us we need to stop digging.
The issue is not so much harm reduction versus abstinence to my mind as it is the containment of all undesirable social conduct and attendant city services in a handful of locations.
Gubbio is across the street from Centro Latino where seniors queue for food, 150′ from Friendship House of American Indians substance treatment center, 250′ from Marshall Elementary and adjacent to residential.
In no other neighborhood would such conflicting land uses be tolerated. Were the Mission nonprofits legitimately representing our Latino neighbors, they’d oppose this disrespect on their behalf. Had there been a nonprofit payday involved and they were excluded from the teat, they’d be protesting up an ethnicity storm.
Switzerland has a robust nonprofit health insurance system that includes public health, mental health and substance treatment. The US has none of that. Four pillars for San Francisco fails because those key fundamentals are absent. My understanding is that Zurich repatriates addicts to their home cantons for treatment.
The intensity of opiate treatment that San Francisco will ever be able to afford is rarely successful. Forced abstinence enforced by incarceration is a laughably moral response that only forces addicts to stare down shit lives stone cold sober.
We need safe supply where the city works with retired MDs to prescribe pharmaceutical opiates in known dosages and purities so that, combined with opium den style housing, people can feed their demons behind closed doors.
Connect the dots…Positive Change Equals Change encourages arrests because they have a city contract to serve those formerly incarcerated! Ca-Ching 💰 Plus they don’t support MAT, only abstinence. My son lived in the Mission but I lost him to an overdose 11/23/22. The only way to stop overdose deaths is through Harm Reduction and education.
I encourage you to read this article from Yale.
https://ycsg.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/we_can't_go_cold_turkey.pdf?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR6hvbArodoHe7YLLQMxYD3YVhGf_ZU63EB6wVR5MDGXb82DLdAZhORijGIFFQ_aem_0ZrrbzV8vH6Y0X3CGLKdow
I wish this story did more to contextualize the wild, false claims made by these reactionary orgs swooping in from other parts of the city to exploit struggles on Julian Ave. The only reason the Mission is different from Pacific Heights is… one particular church that provides a safe place for unhoused neighbors to sleep? Really?
They should direct their ire toward Mayor Lurie’s enforcement-only policies that, it’s well-documented by now, have concentrated drug users here. Lurie has done nothing to raise funding for desperately needed affordable housing or to move the city closer to its 2008 goal of addiction treatment available on demand for everyone who asks for it. We need more services, not less. Providers like the Gubbio Project are not the problem, they’re the solution. We would be better off with 10 or 20 Gubbio Projects across the city.
When you crack down on one area at a time while failing to fund actual solutions, the behaviors now seen on Julian are the result. It would be the definition of insanity to double down on this approach.
Just say what you really mean, Scott, that you’re okay with addicts and dealers near family affordable housing, an elementary school where many lower income, migrant, homeless kids predominantly of color try to learn and crowding transit stops, nodding out or vending, because that is a small price to pay for you signaling virtue about compassion when other people’s neighborhoods are involved.
Progressive fentanyl YIMBY.
Lurie does not have “enforcement-only policies.” Please. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on non-enforcement policies.
I think it’s really sad that the harm reduction people have gotten complacent with addicts dying on the street as long as they die slow. It’s also sad, but understandable, that some of the clean street folks are mainly wanting them to die somewhere else.
I really think we need to treat addicts like people and that means both not allowing them to make our streets dirty and dangerous, and offering them the support they need once they’re willing to fix their lives.
I smell astroturf! Can we dig a little deeper into the organizers, reported elsewhere as connected to rightwing figures like Kash Patel and pro-Russian disinformation creeps?
Personally I don’t think there’s a need to astroturf opposition to drug paraphernalia and human waste being left on our doorsteps. I’m also skeptical that getting rid of the Gubbio project would help anything. But branding anyone unhappy with the current state of affairs as right wing shills is insulting and counterproductive.
Fentanyl deaths in SF are up 50%. Gavin Newsome calls on counties to ban homeless encampments. Poor people have nowhere to go but jail or the grave. Seems like these “protestors” are getting everything they want.
Hahaha.
Nothing is going to change for the better.
Get used to the crime, drug dealing, junkies, feces, etc.
Suboxone and subutex is FREE to any Californian who wants it,
via free health care thankfully.
You can get sober without getting sick, so why keep using unless you just want to get high.
Because many want to continue to get high, obviously. Opioids feel like love (literally) and we don’t know the trauma and suffering any particular individual endures.
“The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is anathema to these idiots.”
William S. Burroughs
Aside from the “recovery groups” who are trying to glom onto an organic neighborhood response, resident concerns are not that people are using fentanyl. People are organizing because that addicts are using fentanyl in public and processing the aftermath on the sidewalks of our neighborhood.
If people were smoking fentanyl behind closed doors most of us could not care less. The Puritans would continue to grouse.
I agree that it is more brutal to force people to stare down shit lives stone cold sober than it is to tolerate them addicted on the streets.
I support safe supply and warehousing addicts in opium den like setups. I also support clearing the sidewalks of addicts on residential blocks, near Marshall Elementary and by transit stops and the BART station.