The new center, operated by the Department of Public Health, will be an alternative to jail and the hospital.
by ELENI BALAKRISHNAN April 24, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
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The San Francisco Department of Public Health opened a 16-bed facility at 822 Geary St. to to provide medical care for homeless people in crisis on city streets, as an alternative to taking them to jail or filling hospital emergency rooms.
Visitors will be primarily people who don’t need to be urgently hospitalized, but need lower-level medical care, officials said today. Street teams, police and EMS vehicles will be able to drop people off at the center 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“Treatment for people in crisis. More capacity in our emergency rooms. More officers back on the street more quickly, and it will be open around the clock,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said this morning, emphasizing that the city must “move with urgency” to get people off the streets and address consistent overdose deaths.
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The brand-new center, located at what was once a Goodwill store, and which was originally slated to become a supervised-consumption site, appeared fully set up this morning. The center, which was originally funded and created by Mayor London Breed’s administration, had multiple living-room areas with armchairs, a consultation and an exam room, and two bedrooms set up with a bed and a chair. The city purchased the site in 2021 using funding from Prop. C.
Department of Public Health Director Daniel Tsai said it was important to get homeless people off the streets and into “effective treatment and sustained recovery.”
For now, though, the center may provide just temporary relief; the stabilization center will only be able to host patients at the center for 23 hours at a time.
Tsai said people will be assigned case managers, and be taken to the next step of care after their stay, but where that will be is still unclear.
The city has a major shortage of shelter beds overall, and Lurie campaigned for mayor on a promise to expand the number of shelter beds in the city by 1,500 within six months of his taking office in January.
Today, 525 people are on a waiting list for shelter.
“My administration will build adequate shelter beds,” Lurie’s campaign website reads. “By building the beds necessary to house the homeless, we will no longer push the problem from one streetcorner to another.”
Kunal Modi, Lurie’s Chief of Health, Homelessness, and Family Services, told Mission Local today that the 16 beds at the stabilization center would contribute to that count, despite only hosting patients for one day.
Asked how the beds would be sustainable in such a short-term model, Modi said there would be other efforts to supplement the crisis center.
“This is one part of our strategy. There’s no single opening that is, itself, a silver bullet,” he said, and said there would be “a range of steps or other beds that we’re going to continue to open because we need to have an entire continuum of care for folks.”
The costs of operating the center, which is required to have a physician on call at all times, and at least one licensed clinical professional for every four clients, are still unclear.
Patty Blum, vice president of Crestwood Behavioral Health, which will operate the center, said this morning, as she gave a tour of the facility, that staffing levels at the center are “extraordinarily high,” and that patients will be constantly observed while there.
Blum said the facility will also be staffed with registered nurses, case managers, recovery coaches, and dual-recovery certified coaches. The site will also host overnight security, and police and GLIDE ambassadors will oversee the surrounding blocks.
“The most expensive thing is letting people who are in distress continue to be outside,” Modi said in an interview, “and cycling unnecessarily through our hospitals or other places that are not the right care settings for them.”
Police Chief Bill Scott told Mission Local that the center was a needed option for officers interacting with homeless people in crisis on the streets, and jailing people is not always the best option.
“A lot of folks end up in the emergency room or, depending on what the dynamics are, they end up being taken to jail,” Scott said. “The law allows us as police officers to be able to detain, even arrest, bring people to a facility like this under state law, and then we can release them here.”
At that point, people will “voluntarily” receive treatment.
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ELENI BALAKRISHNAN
Eleni reports on policing and criminal justice in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter @miss_elenius.More by Eleni Balakrishnan
