When someone overdoses outside St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church, the team inside is prepared.
Staff at the Gubbio Project, a Mission District nonprofit housed in St. John’s on Julian Avenue, carry Narcan, an opioid antagonist, at all times. They say they respond to between three and five overdoses every week on the streets surrounding the church.
It’s all in a day’s work at the Gubbio Project, which receives $2.3 million a year from San Francisco’s Department of Public Health to assist people struggling with homelessness and substance abuse around 16th and Mission streets.
But, with rising tensions around Mission District drug activity erupting into shouting matches and political protests, the Gubbio Project has become a target for a small, but loud, group of critics who blame it for attracting the area’s problems.
“That’s always complicated to defend,” says Lydia Bransten, the Gubbio Project’s executive director. ‘Because we don’t do the pretty work.”
‘I hope you run out of Narcan’
During the Gubbio Project’s general hours — 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday — between 120 and 150 people pass through St. John’s trellised gates and into its sunlit courtyard each day. Some are homeless, some are drug users, and some are elderly locals who come to visit with friends.
More than a dozen counselors are on hand to offer education on overdose prevention and treatment options. But they also accept guests who just want a place to sit, whether they come in genial, depressed, dazed, or clearly on drugs.
Lines form: One for safe-use supplies, such as fentanyl test strips and sterile syringes, and a second line for coffee and donuts. There are clients who welcome conversation; others simply rest on one of the 45 cots set up before the church’s altar.
Between January and April, some 2,500 people a month visited the Gubbio Project, the Department of Public Health said. On average, the nonprofit refers 28 people a month to a city-funded substance-use treatment program.
This, staff say, is a relatively high number. People struggling with addiction often reject treatment when it’s offered. Gubbio is tasked with meeting everyone where they are, including those who say they’re not ready yet.
“It’s much easier to promote a program that has such a clear directive, like an abstinence-based treatment program,” Bransten said. “Someone comes in who was formerly using drugs, and they leave the program graduating as a person who’s clean and sober. Our program is more complicated.”
Some neighbors living across the street see Gubbio’s services as life-saving. A few see them as the source of neighborhood ills. Others aren’t sure what to think: They want the city to guide people into recovery, but are weary of being exposed, along with their children, to the often messy work that’s involved.
Drugs are not permitted inside the church or courtyard, and Gubbio Project guests are told not to disturb neighbors by using drugs once they exit.
When Bransten recognizes one of her clients sitting on a nearby street, even after hours, she speaks with them. Anyone using drugs inside is asked to leave, Bransten added, and cut off from services if they keep using.
Still, nearby residents say there are more and more men and women smoking or hunched over, incoherent, in the alleys around the church. When an overdose happens, it is no surprise.
In recent weeks, a few neighbors have called out the Gubbio Project, saying the nonprofit is a blight that attracts and enables drug use.
The discourse has spilled onto social media and drawn political opponents into the fray.
One vocal neighbor, Andrew Wilkens, posted a selfie with Mayor Daniel Lurie on the block and, in another post, pointed to the Gubbio Project as the cause of deteriorating street conditions.
Other opponents of Gubbio who don’t live in the neighborhood have visited to film and circulate videos showing people bent over piles of their belongings inside the church. They accuse the nonprofit of allowing drug use.
At a rally in early May for safer streets that was attended by both residents and politicians, protesters held signs that read, “Go away, Gubbio” and “Harm reduction kills neighborhoods.”
Bransten worries that social media narratives she describes as “violent, aggressive, and vitriolic” are fueling misconceptions about the Gubbio Project’s work.
She said she’s been threatened by online “agitators” who oppose harm reduction services, and that the address of her home, which she shares with her teen daughter, has been doxxed.
“I hope you run out of Narcan,” Bransten recalls being told while responding to a recent street overdose. “This is the first time that I’ve seen this kind of animosity.”
‘The chicken or the egg?’
Ebbs and flows of drug activity have long been part of the landscape in the Mission, long-time residents and service providers say. For decades, people have sought sanctuary at St. John’s.
“The drugs started before us,” volunteer Steve Ibarra said as he handed out coffee at the Gubbio Project last Monday afternoon. Twenty-five years ago, he said, his brother sought food and shelter at the church before beginning a lengthy recovery journey.
In 2004, the Gubbio Project was founded at St. Boniface Church in the Tenderloin to offer unhoused people a safe daytime place to sleep. In 2015, it established an offshoot at St. John’s. In 2021, when it lost its Tenderloin home, it moved all operations to the Mission.
Complaints about social services in the neighborhood are “nothing new,” said former Mission District supervisor Hilary Ronen. During the pandemic, when St. John’s could not offer safe-sleeping spots indoors, some neighbors blamed the church and the Gubbio Project for the encampments that sprung up around it.
In recent months, however, residents’ frustrations about street conditions have boiled over. And workers at the Gubbio Project say the number of people coming to the church has risen dramatically since police crackdowns began in other parts of the city.
At a community meeting in March, Mission Station captain Liza Johansen said that police activity in the Tenderloin had led drug users to relocate to the Mission. Displacement, the San Francisco Police Department says, is unavoidable when it comes to curbing overt drug use.
Pushing people around is “a little bit part of the strategy,” SFPD Commander Derrick Lew acknowledged at a recent city hearing. “We don’t have the resources to blanket the entire city, so we have to strategically choose problem areas.”
Still, a few neighbors are convinced that the Gubbio Project is “1,000 percent” to blame for the influx of drug use in the area.
“What would happen if Gubbio went away?” asked one man, who declined to give his name. The problem “would go away tomorrow.”
He also accused the organization of “serving drug tourists,” “hiring goons,” and “cooking the books” for personal profit.
The starting salary for Gubbio staff, Bransten said, is around $52,000, less than two-thirds the average San Francisco income. In addition to its $2.3 million from the city, the nonprofit earned donations and other grants that totaled $342,386 in 2022, per its most recent available tax filing. Brasnten’s salary was around $80,000.
“The people who work at Gubbio are angels making poverty wages in order to care for the most downtrodden,” said former Mission supervisor Ronen. “They are part of the solution.”
Several Julian Avenue neighbors agree that public health services like the Gubbio Project are the only way to break the cycle of drug use.
The “very select few” who are outspoken Gubbio critics, asserted resident Michael Johnson, are either being manipulated or encouraged into their stance by “broader powers in the city” who have a political agenda.
Other neighbors fall somewhere in the middle of the debate.
Another man, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said he trusted the evidence in favor of harm-reduction services, and disliked the bitter tone of recent community meetings.
But he worried that by giving out supplies meant to prevent overdoses or disease transmission, places like Gubbio attract drug users, and drug dealers follow.
It’s a “chicken and egg problem,” he said.
Addressing a need
Bransten sympathizes with the neighbors’ distress.
As southeastern parts of San Francisco that were once abandoned have been developed, she said, the homelessness, poverty, addiction, and mental illness that occurred out of sight “is now on people’s doorsteps.”
That, she recognized, can be exhausting. “When you have to work three jobs to keep an apartment in the Mission, you don’t want to come home to someone lying in front of your door in crisis.”
But, Bransten said, “The reason that we are here in the Mission is because there was a need here in the Mission, and we are addressing that need.”
When asked for comment on the Gubbio Project, the mayor’s office directed Mission Local to the Department of Public Health. The agency, which audits the nonprofit, said in a statement that Gubbio “operates in full alignment with the SFDPH Good Neighbor Policy, which requires maintaining clean, safe sidewalks and discouraging any public drug use in the surrounding area.”
“It’s not a free-for-all in here,” said Bransten. It’s “a great team of people who come to this work with compassion and boundaries.”
A few hours into her shift at the Gubbio Project last Wednesday morning, substance-use-disorder specialist Amber Sheldon had already connected two clients to medications used to treat opioid addictions. She’d linked another to a homeless shelter, a fourth to the hospital, and a fifth to a shower, an often-overlooked, basic amenity that can be empowering, she noted.
In one corner of St. John’s courtyard, a volunteer registered people for the city’s supportive-housing lottery. On the sidewalk outside, the city’s Homeless Outreach Team called someone a taxi. A Mission-based contingent of roving nurses from the University of California, San Francisco, made their weekly rounds, cleaning wounds and offering vaccines.
“It’s really awesome here,” said Kayla Johnson, after getting her foot bandaged. “Not a lot of people treat you kindly, because you’re an addict.”
“Can I get you anything?” Bransten asked a man eating alone in an alcove.
“No,” he said. “I just want some time away from everything. But I appreciate what you do. Really.”
“Between January and April, some 2,500 people a month visited the Gubbio Project, the Department of Public Health said. On average, the nonprofit refers 28 people a month to a city-funded substance-use treatment program.”
That’s a little more than 1% of Gubbio clients getting referred to treatment. More importantly how, many of the clients referred were actually successful in their treatment program? I’m not under the illusion that the statistics for abstinence based treatment programs are stellar stellar. And yes, the area around 16th and Mission has been a drug hot spot for decades before Gubbio came along. On the other hand, spending $2.3M in city funding on a program that refers only a little more than 1% of its clients to drug and alcohol abuse treatment is hard to justify. It makes me wonder whether the city could be spending its scarce resources on other programs with more successful outcomes, for clients and neighbors.
This goes to what Fielder was asking: what is the metric for success? There is no universal answer, but Gubbio’s mission statement should be considered:
‘To be in community with and to provide a sacred space and sanctuary for unhoused people in need of safe, compassionate respite during the day.’
The mission statement you quote sounds fine enough for a church that isn’t receiving any public funds. But as a public health program, my original question still stands: are we getting our money’s worth for $2.3M per year if only 1% of clients seeking respite are getting referred for treatment? Note, the key word here is “referred” which doesn’t inherently tell you anything about what kind of follow up there is to ensure successful outcomes after a client receives an initial referral.
Your metric for success is a periphery function of the program. You feel entitled in centering your metric because the program is publicly funded.
You have a strange understanding of the word “entitled”. Asking questions about whether public health programs are using our public funds effectively isn’t entitlement. Harm reduction has been sold to San Franciscans by telling us that we’ll get better outcomes by “meeting people where they’re at” and “leading with compassion”. By DPH’s own reporting , the City is spending $2.3M in taxpayer funds on a program that’s leaving 99%of its clients to struggle with their demons. That’s neither successful nor compassionate.
I think churches should drop the religious gobbledygook. Gubbio Project’s real mission is to monetize fallow real estate held by a tax sheltered holding company.
You are mistaken.
Why are my tax dollars going to fund a sacred space? Don’t we have a first amendment anymore?
The church and Gubbio are different organizations.
Who come over here with their big hairdos
Intent on taking our money instead of giving your cash
Where it belongs, to a decent American artist like myself!
You’ll dance to anything!
Don’t try to tell me
You’re an intellectual
You’re just another
Boring bisexual
I met Andy Warhol at a really chic party
Blow it out your hairdo because you work at Hardees
80 pounds of makeup on your art school skin
80 points of IQ located within
I think it’s already helpful to see how many ODs they avoid. We didn’t just care about treatment, also avoiding unnecessary death on the road to recovery is important.
If you build it, they will come. That’s true for baseball diamonds in the middle of a cornfield, as well as homeless and drug use assistance programs. People go where the resources that support their priorities exist. If you provide beds and a safe use site, you will have homeless drug users showing up. Now, if you have a plan to help them, great, but if it’s just to give them a safe place to hang out, then you are poor fishermen.
Build it and they’ll come? Have you been to the salesforce transit center??? Gubbio meets a human need. If more Gubbios opened, the Julian St. problems would lessen. Clients could be served more indoors. Gubbio serves many non-addicted San Franciscans.
‘The agency, which audits the nonprofit, said in a statement that Gubbio“operates in full alignment with the SFDPH Good Neighbor Policy, which requires maintaining clean, safe sidewalks and discouraging any public drug use in the surrounding area.”’
Let me guess: All the other service providers and SROs in the area get similar approvals. Then there’s SFPD throwing up their arms claiming how they can’t do much because of this reason or that. And so forth, netting a bottom line that has residents getting to live in some kind of death camp reenactment. It’s unfortunate that they lean on Gubbio project to draw attention to the problems in the neighborhood. But the reality is the place is in considerable risk of sliding into Tenderloin/Mid Market squalor long term.
I encourage you to visit one of the several former death camps that have been turned into museums. I take issue with that particular descriptor you’ve used, but I agree with most of the rest of the sentiment.
If she want anyone in the city to take her seriously, she should move here. Otherwise, she shouldn’t get a voice in the conversation about how to deal with our issues.
As if SF would last a single day without all the people who commute for hours to work there because they can’t afford the outrageous housing cost. But I guess they are only “guest workers” who don’t deserve a say in the management of the city that they keep running.
I would suggest that the small but vocal group consists of Gubbio and its supporters. Residents in this vulnerable community have endured years of hardship—not only from the city’s inadequate responses to the fentanyl crisis but also from its unconscionable enablement of drug dealers and users, which has made daily life intolerable for those who live here.It’s rich to hear Supervisor Ronen express concern for Gubbio’s staff and the individuals the site attracts, especially considering her past actions. She allowed Dolores Street Community Services’ Safe Sleeping site at 1515 South Van Ness to routinely expel disruptive individuals directly into our neighborhood—onto our sidewalks and in front of our homes—leaving residents to manage the fallout.
The Supervisor’s consistent deference to individuals brought into our communities, along with her tolerance of the nonprofit mismanagement that continues to degrade our neighborhoods, speaks volumes. These decision-makers do not care about the well-being of our communities.
Articles that express shock when residents finally demand accountability and change seem willfully blind to years of lived experience. Why is anyone still surprised when our communities speak up for safe, clean neighborhoods—and for our children not to have to witness the daily spectacle of people slumped in a fentanyl daze, or worse? It’s astonishing.
Trevor Chandler, who was one of the few actual neighborhood residents at the rally against harm reduction, lost his election by 19 points districtwide, and by 26 points in the precinct where Gubbio Project is located. So that should tell you who’s a smaller group.
I’m proud to live in a neighborhood where a strong majority of us still reject copaganda and support evidence-based policies that work to help, not punish, our neighbors who need help.
Our precincts are progressive, but progressive politics is not limited to the realm of the poverty martyrs as the nonprofiteers would have it.
Progressive means changing the rules of the game to benefit working people over the rich and corporations.
In this case, working people are told to suck it while the nonprofit corporations use our neighborhood as their opportunity site. There are no efforts to make life better for addicts as working people. Brighter prospects would be the best incentive to quit using. The nonprofits are not compensated with public dollars to brighten prospects, just to maintain misery.
Decades of this poverty charity centered progressive politics has attenuated progressive political power in San Francisco to a weak point where our city has succumbed to San Francisco’s own version of Trump.
Our neighbors living in affordable housing who are asking to be moved because they can’t raise a family under these conditions are much more important to me than whatever any commuter nonprofiteer says. They did not vote for Chandler.
And Fielder won because IFPTE Local 21 dropped, what, $470K, the neighborhood is generally progressive and there aint’ no way that an AIPAC HRC YIMBY could win in D9. Remember, Fielder was plan C after the previous contenders had whacked themselves out of the game with improprieties.
Preach!
Nice piece, Abigail. Very informative, thorough and thought provoking.
That poor dog. Pets should not be subjected to their owner’s lifestyle.
This group helps junkies stay addicted. They are not heroes.
The problem is not any one social services site in the North Mission, rather that the North Mission is viewed as a city funded nonprofit opportunity site, an infinite sink for nonprofit business opportunities that don’t make a dent in the problem as well as a containment zone for the rest of the City’s undesirable social problems.
There is a pattern of middle aged upper middle class white ladies, Bransten and Funk of DignityMoves, who are seeking some form of later in life validation and do so through washing the feet of the lepers, who live nowhere near the neighborhoods they operate in, but who bring a stern disciplinarian attitude to residents near their projects. It seems that holding residents in prejudicial contempt is the price of entry to the city funded nonprofit ecosystem. Watching Bransten try to shush me when I was heckling Hillary Ronen in a public community meeting for lying to her constituents about the process for Mission Cabins, it was like she was treating me as one of her clients over whom she is accustomed to exerting unilateral power. The Will To Power can take on all manner of morbid forms.
Gubbio at St. Johns was merely annoying in years past. When they wanted to put a safe consumption site there, across from Centro Latino, near Friendship House of American Indians, and Marshall Elementary and adjacent to residential, the only thing that stopped it was a City Attorney opinion. Residents “deserved” the facility, to their minds. There was also a fire on Caledonia behind Gubbio in March of 2024. I draw the line at fire and feces.
As fentanyl had been contained around 16th and Mission by Breed and Ronen, that amped up the impacts of Gubbio on the adjacent neighborhood as more addicts in the neighborhood means more addicts around Gubbio.
The confirmation here is that many addicts are not homeless and do not want treatment. We need to work our way through reconciling those people with the law instead of thrashing tens of millions of dollars through a nonprofit treatment operation that is bound to fail.
It is closing time for treatment resistent and/or housed addicts on the North Mission’s sidewalks: you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.
“The reason that we are here in the Mission is because there was a need here in the Mission, and we are addressing that need.” The need to fill their own coffers apparently…
They can toot their own horn all they want about the “good” they are doing for the neighborhood, but unless they are able to demonstrate their effectiveness with REAL data they need to have their funding pulled-
They could start without showing barely concealed patronizing contempt for residents.
We were here before Gubbio.
We are here during Gubbio.
And we will be here after Gubbio.
I was a sometime supporter (of Gubbio), and I wonder if people are missing the point. This is a “better” outcome than total neglect, unless you totally arrest everyone and put them in jail, and we know that has had bad results, too. That doesn’t mean that perhaps better “policing” of bad behavior isn’t desirable. I was harassed at a big store downtown, so there is no place safe. As always, it’s complicated. I doubt Gubbio is the real problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s the solution, either.
St John the Evangelist is a nice place for the homeless. Food and coffee served and sleeping on cots from 7am to 7pm on a first come first serve basis. There is a huge problem with sanitation there that Staff seems to shrug off. Maybe they don’t recognize it as needing serious cleaning in which case you are the wrong Staff member for this venue. The pavement areas outdoors are in desperate need of a thorough sweeping and a serious pressure-washer. The cement seating areas need the same. The grass areas where more seating is available also need trash pick up and general maintenance. It would not hurt at all if you place more trash cans throughout the facility. The staff members, whether they are paid hires or they are volunteers, sincerely need to grow a pair and be more pro-active, more vocal and definitely more outspoken with regards to many of the client – caused problems and environmental issues at St. John’s. For example – speak up about all of the thefts going on at this venue. Theft is out of control and continues to be a thorn in the side of the guests because Staff refuse to deal with this disgusting issue. It’s almost as if many of the clients go to this place just to pick up an extra cell phone, battery pack or personal belongings of others in order to immediately sell in order to have money for cigarettes, weed or crystal meth or heroin! There is absolutely nothing wrong or immoral if staff were to speak up about all of these theft issues to visiting clients and there is absolutely nothing wrong or immoral if Staff were to speak up about the rampant drug use in the visiting community. Stop being so accepting of so many young and able-bodied men indulging in the depths of illegal substance abuse and just hanging out all day at St. Johns and doing absolutely nothing productive with their lives. Stop accommodating and coddling their laziness, slothfulness and drug abuse! Stop accommodating the rampant thefts that occur here so often. Jesus spoke righteous judgments so don’t be afraid to tell these people the truth. Jesus also said if a man will not work neither shall he eat. 2 Thessalonians 3:10. Get yourself a 🎤 and get to it or just raise your voice and mean what you say.
1. If it is discovered that you have taken the property of others you will be banned from services here for 90 days!
2. If you are observed selling or purchasing drugs here you will be banned from the facility for 6 months!
3. If you are harassing others or inciting violence against others you will be banned for 6 months!
Try it. You guys need to get it together. The decent members of the homeless community deserve better.
Project Manager Chlorisa needs to pick up the pace or move over and let a competent and skilled person get to it.
If the program is doing such great work I’d like to know why they can’t raise funds from private donors? I’d like my tax dollars to be spend on things like beds for mental health – not coffee and donuts and drug paraphernalia.
They do. I have donated in the past.
Y’all are the best rag in town,
Now, you’re getting more volume which is all you were missing.
Abigail and the rest of your staff continually make me realize how little I know and I know alot.
That make sense ?
I’ve been cleaning both sides of Julian behind the Armory damned near daily for 2 years now down to the cigarette butt and didn’t even realize that the program at St. John’s is the same one from the Tenderloin where I spent 12 years in the deepest muck from my secure SRO run by Don Falk’s tndc.
I must have spent 70 of my 81 years in hoods where the children were mostly born to certain failure and worked my way to Post grad Fellowship work with a perpetual canvassing project of Upstate South Carolina a quarter century ago and taught and designed programs and picked up trash since then and have come to these two conclusions …
First, copy the Stockton program that gave the destitute a grand a month for a couple of years and crunched the numbers and their crime rate fell 50%.
Second, make SFPD booking process include an offer of ten grand tax free and a thousand a month tax free to get sterilized.
You’ll notice it first in DPH prenatal stats.
And, move Gubbio to the Western Nine Holes of Lincoln Golf Course adjoining the Fort Miley Vets Medical Complex as part of the 1,000 site SF RV and Tent Campground.
Also, decriminalize drugs to take the dealers and cops out of the equation.
Hey, radical solutions to radical problems.
go Niners !!
h.
Incredible article and work done by the amazing staff at this project. So glad to have research supported initiatives in this city that are kind to those suffering the most.
Suffering isn’t a contest.
Everything else that government does must be put on hold until we can identify the most oppressed person in San Francisco and direct resources to help them. After that, we move onto the next most oppressed person and so on. This is how we launder money.
An amazing program doing necessary and phenomenal work. An inspiration to us all <3