by Randy Shaw on February 3, 2025 (BeyondChron.org)
Where Did $100 Million Go?
“On San Francisco’s Sixth Street, vacant storefronts and shuttered businesses dominate the landscape. The area’s chief commerce is sales, but the money is made by sidewalk hustlers who pay no rent and charge no taxes. Sixth Street seems the classic blighted area, suffering from years of government neglect.”—- Randy Shaw, “$100 Million and Counting: 15 years of Redevelopment Failure on Sixth Street.” Beyond Chron, June 20, 2005
The out of control drug scene on San Francisco’s Sixth Street is a tragedy. The city spent enough public money to transform Sixth Street into a successful mixed-income neighborhood. But city officials instead turned Sixth Street into a drug-filled ghetto for the poor.
I commend Mayor Lurie for prioritizing Sixth Street’s improvement. The drug crackdown starting this week is long overdue.
But let’s not forget that the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency spent a whopping $100 million on “improving” Sixth Street from 1991-2005. Yet it left the area a mess.
Sixth Street’s Decline
Sixth Street’s downturn began in the 1960’s. Many alcoholics displaced by SOMA Redevelopment ended up there. By 1980 it was so filled with street alcoholics that the late Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Church purchased an 1800 square foot strip of land that became known as “Wino Park.”
Reverend Williams felt that poor alcoholics deserved an area where they could safely sleep off their drunkenness. But his vision clashed with reality. The park attracted drug dealers and crime. Glide put the property up for sale in 1982.
That’s around when I began visiting tenants in Sixth Street hotels.
From 1982-89, San Francisco filled hundreds of Sixth Street SRO rooms through its hotline hotel program. This populated the area with homeless people getting one to three night stays. Few had income available to support the street’s retail. Drug activity in the SRO’s and along Sixth Street soared.
The 1989 earthquake ended the hotline program. It was replaced by a program the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (which I head) conceived and operated via a city contract. Known as the Modified Payment Program, it provided below-market rent permanent housing for over 1000 people previously limited to the hotline.
The shift to permanent tenants dramatically improved the prospects for improving Sixth Street. THC hired tenants in several hotels to monitor conditions in and outside the building. Tenants who saw Sixth Street as their home cared as much if not more than property owners about improving the neighborhood.
The earthquake also led groups led by TODCO and the United Way to create a Sixth Street Earthquake Redevelopment Area. The Anglo Hotel on the 200 block of Sixth was the only SRO destroyed by the quake but it paved the way for the Agency’s expansion.
I was excited about the Agency bringing new resources to Sixth Street. But it did not work out as I hoped.
A Missed Opportunity
“Since the Agency began its economic development efforts on Sixth Street, the number of street level businesses has declined. Bookstores and restaurants that had the courage to open on Sixth Street were left by the Agency to whither and die. The Agency’s promise to economically revitalize Sixth Street lacked a business strategy and vision necessary to succeed; the Agency knows how to attract Starbucks, Panda Express and other chains, but it has no clue in how to boost independent businesses.”—my 2005 story
I disagreed with TODCO’s John Elberling about everything on Sixth Street. TODCO pushed the Agency to fund nonprofit affordable housing on Sixth; they were the area’s only nonprofit houser.
In contrast, THC, hotel owners, merchants and property owners favored mixed-income projects so as to avoid Sixth Street remaining a ghetto for the poor. Our coalition wanted nonprofit projects to be spread throughout the Project Area and market rate housing built on Sixth.
Tenants saw public safety as the top priority. The democratically elected Sixth Street Project Area Committee (PAC) voted 18-0 in November 2002 to support $120,000 in funding for an innovative anti-crime program known as Adopt-A-Block. But Agency staff did not care that community stakeholders saw the anti-crime program as critical to the area’s economic revitalization. They opposed a plan from the group that the Agency claimed to be accountable to; staff even refused to allow the PAC-endorsed anti-crime program to appear on the Redevelopment Commission’s agenda!
A similar rejection of community desires concerned a wiring upgrade plan for Sixth Street hotels. Most hotels had power outages as permanent residents used more appliances. City code did not require landlords to make this upgrade so we thought the Agency could cover the cost.
Tenants won support from the Agency’s Project Area Committee but TODCO and Agency staff claimed the plan wrongly provided a “gift of public funds” to for-profit owners. They didn’t care that most Sixth Street tenants lived in for-profit owned buildings and would benefit from the wiring upgrade without facing rent increases (wiring upgrades were limited to hotels charging affordable rates, which nearly all were doing).
When the wiring plan went before the Redevelopment Commission, the commissioner casting the deciding vote for the plan said effectively, ” I always vote with staff. But the entire neighborhood seems to support the wiring plan.”
We won the battle to pass the wiring plan. But it never got implemented. Agency staff imposed so many costly conditions that it wasn’t feasible for private hotel owners to participate. This left tenants and owners frustrated at the Agency’s refusal to help them.
Why did Agency staff promote their views over those living, working and owning property in the neighborhood? And against the democratically-elected body set up to speak for the community? Because Redevelopment Agencies gave them that power. That’s why I led the successful efforts to stop Redevelopment from coming to the Tenderloin and Mid-Market. And why I backed Governor Jerry Brown’s successful elimination of California Redevelopment in 2011.
Much of the money targeted for Sixth Street improvement went to Agency staff. And to projects like installing palm trees at $10,000 per tree and widening sidewalks by 18 inches.
I produced a study in 2002, “$80 Million and Counting: A Decade of Redevelopment Agency Failure on Sixth Street.” In the press release for the study, Sam Patel, speaking for a 135 member independent hotel organization, said “The Agency staff has refused to work with us to improve Sixth Street. Our ideas for improving the area have been ignored.”
Redevelopment succeeded in enshrining Sixth Street into a ghetto for the poor. That’s a major reason it is beset by problems today.
Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco
