San Francisco is on track to lose more than 450 shelter beds as the city began closing multiple homeless shelters in the Tenderloin area in recent weeks.
Among them: The Adante and the Monarch, two of the city’s last remaining COVID-era converted hotels on Geary Street, ended service in recent weeks, and the Ansonia Hotel at 711 Post St., a 280-bed shelter at the edge of the Tenderloin, is slated to close within a year.
The closures are the latest blow to Mayor Daniel Lurie’s scrapped 2025 pledge to open 1,500 shelter beds within his first six months in office. They also align with the city’s shift away from longer-term shelter stays in favor of short-term shelter services, often in conjunction with law enforcement and sobriety rules.
Reasons for the recent closures vary. The city has been slowly shutting down converted shelter-in-place hotels since the pandemic as its leases have ended. More than 180 residents at the Adante and Monarch were moved to different locations, according to District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood.
Mahmood has long pushed to redistribute shelters in the city away from neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, where they have historically been concentrated.
“The principle of geographic equity is important, and one the Tenderloin community has been advocating for years,” Mahmood said. “We are now exploring siting more effective services, like sober centers, outside of the Tenderloin or through expansions of existing sites.”
Mahmood said that all residents staying at the Adante and Monarch hotels were moved to new shelter or housing, but it is unclear where the residents were placed.
For 711 Post, which opened in 2022, District 3 Supervisor Danny Sauter said the decision to close was to lessen the “negative impact” on the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood.
Residents in the area have sought to close the shelter at 711 Post for years, claiming that street conditions have deteriorated as a result of its presence there.
“Since taking office, I have spent a significant amount of time considering the future of 711 Post,” Sauter said in a statement. “By all measures,” the shelter “was not meeting the standards that we should set for services in our city.”
Urban Alchemy ran the site under a $27 million contract since its opening, but announced earlier this year that the nonprofit no longer wished to operate it.
Urban Alchemy spokesperson Jess Montejano said that running 711 Post was creating “reputational impact,” and caused the nonprofit more problems than it was worth, but that Urban Alchemy was proud of the work it achieved there and the more than 200 people who moved from the shelter into permanent housing.
Claims from the neighborhood that the shelter contributed to worsening street conditions were overblown, Montejano added.
“We worked really hard to keep that shelter clean and safe, both inside for our guests and outside for the neighborhood,” Montejano said.
Urban Alchemy came under intense scrutiny from the city last year, in part due to spending at 711 Post.
Lena Miller, Urban Alchemy’s founder and CEO, said the nonprofit adjusted to meet the city’s requests, including absorbing 30 additional beds, and went over budget.
The homelessness department issued a corrective action notice regarding the overspending, but spokesperson Emily Cohen said at a September budget hearing that the shelter was seeing “high service outcomes.”
It remains unclear why the city continued to move towards closing 711 Post. Montejano was unaware that it was shuttering, and declined to comment. The closure was in the works even as Five Keys Charter Schools & Programs, another nonprofit, took over operations on April 1.
Sauter did not respond to questions about who decided to close the site.
Five Keys operated 85 rooms at the Adante as part of the RESTORE partnership with the Department of Public Health, which offered opioid addiction treatment to shelter residents. At both the Adante and the Monarch, a 96-room transitional shelter operated by WeHOPE, residents had their own rooms and received two meals per day.
As existing shelters have closed, the city has begun opening new ones with what the mayor refers to as “the right kind of beds.”
In August, the mayor’s office announced three new sober shelters: Some 70 beds in the Mission, about 65 beds at the former Marina Inn, and about 60 beds at the new Hope House in SoMa.
Some, like the Eleanora Fagan Center in the Mission District, allow short stays of 30 to 60 days. Others, like Wells Place in the Marina, allow residents to stay for up to two years, but require those residents to work or study and save money during that time to become financially independent.
In coming weeks, the city is also expected to open a RESET center at 444 Sixth St. in SoMa, a sheriff-run “tough-love” facility for people detained for public intoxication. Last year, a “police-friendly” stabilization center for officers to take people in crisis, also opened at 822 Geary St.
“The city remains focused on standing up treatment beds at the right level of clinical intensity to help people succeed on their pathways out of homelessness,” wrote a spokesperson for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
Seems messed up that Sauter can’t say who actually made the decision to close the shelter. Whether it’s a good decision or a bad one, there should be an official who made the call and takes responsibility for it.
This makes me not want to vote for Danny Sauter. He needs to be part of the global solution, and bring the district along with him. NIMBY ism has resulted in an over concentration of housing centers in my neighborhood, the Tenderloin. I like the idea of spreading them out and focusing on a menu of short, medium and long-term stay facilities, while prioritizing sheriff-operated facilities for temporary detention and services distribution for publicly intoxicated folks. There are way too many unhoused folks still using and trading in broad daylight in my neighborhood. It’s not fair to my young kids who share the streets. The addicts still have the run of the place. They can be scary to encounter, and we feel helpless.
Lena Miller took in $339K managing the Urban Alchemy nonprofit grift in 2023.
Can’t wait for PSH to open up at 16th and Mission between the fentanyl mercado and Marshall Elementary because it worked so well at 711 Post.
Also, with our D9 supervisor in a sanatorium apparently indefinitely, it appears that the Lurie administration is having a field day containing fentanyl drug tourists around 16th and Mission at levels much higher than the baseline.
We were already living in a colony, with no political representation from Fielder. Now without the artifice, anything goes.
Amazing some of the heartless and cruel responses to this closure. Seriously, these people are what fed into the hype for Lurie as mayor who is improving the city. These cretins just want a city in their image but have no place in their soul to accept the poor, broken and disadvantaged.
I’m not sure if I missed something in the article but is the mayor planning to replace those lost accommodations SOMEPLACE ELSE? Is there a plan for that and if so, where?
Know that when London Breed’s office tried to do homeless housing in certain neighbourhoods away from the TL and Inner Mission, protestors showed up and complained about the typical stuff that subclass of humanity always complain about: drugs, filth, crime, prostitution would infect their precious neighbourhood. It is a terrible, unfounded myth that only succeeds in marginalizing poor people, which is the goal all along.
I’ve also heard that the protestors were/are shills for the big Real Estate Developers who send them out there to cause a ruckus and deny homeless an opportunity to improve their lives. Some of those real estate folks end up buying the property in question for centers on the dollar….
THIS is the political machine at work and Lurie as deeply involved with it now.
I live at 861 Post Street and have for over 50 years. The problems in the 800 block
are far worse than the problems in the 700 block which despite my age I traverse
on a regular basis to get to the #27 Southbound bus stop.
In response to the 800 housing unit in the Marina. This is why we have a housing shortage problem in SF. Everyone blames the high cost of housing but whenever an apartment building is considered NIMBY’s are out in force to proclaim “Not here”. Now with the 6K a month for homeless, Did you see how the hotels were left after COVID? Many of the rooms had 70K in damage done to them. What should be done is accountability when money is spent on housing, weekly inspections and if any damage has taken place the person should be evicted immediately which will send message to the other residents. If there are no consequences for bad behaviors they will not stop.
We need to keep these beds open we have to many homeless out here with shelter I live at the Asante And the Cova and I could not wait to leave both places all the staff did was steal rape and rob the people that stayed there so glad that they are closing those shelters I just feel so sad for the people that have to stay there so so sad
I hope Mission Local digs deep on where these people were relocated. I can’t help but assume it is the Mission District that will be absorbing all the homeless and precariously homed people from the Tenderloin and SOMA, and not our more well-heeled and moderate neighbors in other districts
Thanks for reporting.
Paying 6k/month to house persons is not sustainable or wise. .
Allowing addicts to continue using drugs at the Monarch and deal drugs out of the back windows is not acceptable .
What taxpayer is ok with using their hard earned money to pay 72k a year for to house a person in a place like the Monarch?
That was way wrong to misuse taxpayers money that way.
There are better less expensive options and they should come with requirements and restrictions .
It is not ok to support illegal drug usage on the taxpayer dime .
Is the city going to pay 72k a year to all of us when we need services help ?
Good point. Spending that kind of money was considered justifiable until covid decimated SF’s tax base. That base had grown quickly after big tech was enticed by tax breaks. New tech workers squeezed into apartments the way returning GIs did after 1945. SF’s overall population increased and so did homelessness. The poorest were squeezed out. It’s just as bad in other prosperous US cities (Portland is worse than SF). The federal government should help. ML readers have cited Singapore’s example of government built housing (80% of the population–Hong Kong’s is 45%). I hope that can start in the US after 2028. And while I’m wishing BIG I hope all our new housing will be under 10 stories tall and feature bay windows and balconies.
And when those folks land back on the streets you’ll complain about increased homelessness, too.
citations on these costs please.
I agree. I have kids who deserve safe streets and a childhood free from assault by junkies on their walk to school. We have a similar but not exactly same issue at the McCalister Hotel. Drug dealing right in front and out of the windows. Day and night.
San Francisco doesn’t deserve to have one bed for homeless. Every single one should be deported out of this city. Into a town that is much cheaper to run and operate. San Francisco is extremely expensive. There’s absolutely zero benefit for any human being except, negative wallet for homeless living in San Francisco. Housing can be offered in cheaper towns. The money saved can be put towards more important things. I would imagine about 50% of the budget and more can be saved by relocating all the homeless outside of San Francisco. Think of how much more business would thrive and tourists would visit.
Deported to where? That’s some solution you got there!
“The city has been slowly shutting down converted shelter-in-place hotels since the pandemic as its leases have ended.”
IIRC a lot of this funding came from the Federal govt. GOP Congress isn’t going to extend those funds. Every election has downstream consequences.