Drug treatment facilities, needle exchange centers, homeless shelters — all usually face opposition from irate neighbors.
But those neighbors don’t often include members of the Board of Supervisors.
The city has ended its efforts to spend a $10 million grant to move drug treatment services from Howard Street to a Mission Street location kitty-corner from Supervisor Matt Dorsey’s home.
The promised money now sits unused, and the state may revoke it.
Dorsey and a cadre of his constituents, including roughly 50 businesses and more than 300 individuals in the South of Market area, pushed the mayor’s office to stop the Department of Public Health from creating the service center on 1125 Mission St. The neighborhood is already home to many drug service centers, including the Maria X Martinez Health Resource Center a block away.
Dorsey said such facilities, while they do help those in need, can lead to open-air drug use that harms businesses and affects neighbors.
“When I come home and leave for work, the entrance to my apartment building looks down Julius Street, which has drug use all the time,” he said. “I think some [city] departments aren’t taking responsibility for the challenges of public safety they’re creating.”
The grant was awarded from California’s $430 million behavioral infrastructure bond to enact “projects that will address significant crisis service gaps,” according to the bond’s website. The money has not been disbursed.
Oz Erickson, chairman of the developer Emerald Fund, on Monday wrote an email to Mayor Daniel Lurie and Dorsey with the signatures of 50 business owners, arguing that SoMa has more drug treatment centers than other city neighborhoods.
“Not a single resident or merchant wants the return of those dreadful days when the sidewalks were so jammed with dealers and users that pedestrians such as Governor Newsom in July of 2023 had to walk on the street instead of using the sidewalks,” Erickson wrote. “We do not want any more drug treatment service locations in our neighborhood.”
Lurie’s office declined to comment.
In a statement, the Department of Public Health said, “With every decision we make at SFDPH, our goal is to most effectively connect San Franciscans to the resources they need to have stable and healthy lives, while working with communities to support their neighborhoods. After extensive community feedback the best way to achieve those goals is to keep the Behavioral Health Access Center at 1380 Howard Street for the time being. As always, we will continue exploring opportunities to expand our services and ensure continuity and stability for everyone we serve.”
The drop-in center at 1380 Howard St. offers drug screening, medical referrals, and access to mental health services, as well as Medi-Cal enrollment. Dorsey said if that center had moved, the Department of Public Health would have used the state funding to also build new offices on the site.
“At the end of the day though, the thing that made this indefensible is, I don’t think it’s a good or wise use of [state] dollars,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey, who is open about his struggles with addiction, said the Department of Public Health proposed client-facing drug treatment services at the Mission Street site. He thinks the city already has too many of those types of services.
Instead, Dorsey wanted to see state funds spent on facilities San Francisco lacks, like a locked treatment center for the mentally ill or abstinence-based services with medically assisted treatment.
Since joining the Board of Supervisors in 2022, Dorsey has emerged as a leading voice for abstinence-based drug treatment.
City officials are increasingly lambasting harm reduction drug treatment strategies. Those methods include the distribution of safe paraphernalia to prevent the spread of disease and consumption sites where users can be monitored for overdoses.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the proposed new location of the treatment facility.