by Randy Shaw on May 5, 2025 (BeyondChorn.org)
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood
D5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood’s legislation mandating greater equity in the placement of homeless services is long overdue. Five supervisors are co-sponsoring. The measure challenges the longstanding myth that San Francisco can solve a citywide problem by limiting services to a handful of neighborhoods.
Protecting Neighborhoods
Mahmood’s measure does two specific things. First, it requires all supervisor districts to open at least one shelter or behavioral health center in the next twelve months. Second, it prevents the city from opening new facilities within 1000 feet of another one.
Had this latter provision been in effect in 2022 Little Saigon would likely not have been wrecked. It would have stopped HSH from placing two shelters virtually next to each other on the 600 block of Ellis. It also would have prevented the city from opening a shelter at the Monarch tourist hotel at 1015 Geary across the street from the 1000 Polk Navigation Center.
The Monarch was one of two tourist hotels converted to shelters within 1000 feet of another homeless services facility. The Adante at 1015 Geary is the other, and is also almost next door to another facility.
The once thriving lower Polk and Geary commercial districts were badly hit by that patently destructive move. Both areas saw vacant retail and drug activity soar after new homeless services were placed in proximity to existing uses.
In case anyone wonders why a law is needed rather than trusting common sense in siting homeless services, Little Saigon and lower Polk are a case study for passing Mahmood’s measure. How could City Hall think placing a new shelter next door to one of the city’s largest would not jeopardize nearby small businesses? But they did so anyway.
Kudos to Supervisors Dorsey, Fielder, Sauter, Walton and Melgar for co-sponsoring this legislation. Extra kudos for Melgar, who represents a district that once had a “progressive” supervisor who blocked homeless services on the grounds that there were children in D7 (he had no problem backing homeless services in the far more child populated Tenderloin and Bayview-Hunter’s Point).
Where Do SF’s Unhoused Come From?
San Francisco’s homeless policy has long been driven by a false assumption. That assumption is that the Tenderloin is the best place for homeless and behavioral health services because “that’s where the population needing such services is located.”
But I know from working in the Tenderloin for 45 years that those in tents or otherwise hanging out on sidewalks are not there because they were evicted from a Tenderloin SRO or apartment. They have come to the Tenderloin because their presence has been accepted there by city policies defining the neighborhood as a containment zone.
That people needing services are located in the Tenderloin has nothing to do with the neighborhood serving as an incubator or breeding ground for people becoming homeless. Rather, it’s because the prior administration’s policies encouraging drug tourism sent a welcome map to people across the nation to come to the Tenderloin for free drug use.
That’s why the city converted four Tenderloin tourist hotels to shelters but did not extend the SIP hotel model in any other neighborhood. It’s also why Tenderloin families and businesses sued the city in March 2024 to enjoin the continued use of the neighborhood as a containment zone (the suit is ongoing in federal court. One of the lawsuit’s goals, to stop the Tenderloin distribution of drug paraphernalia by city funded nonprofits, is being implemented by the Lurie Administration.
An Excuse for Inaction
The myth that homeless services are located in the areas that produce the problem enabled many neighborhoods to feel justified in opposing services. This put a terribly unfair burden on the Tenderloin, Bayview-Hunters Point, and SOMA.
Mahmood’s legislation marks a dramatic shift in this thinking. It is the first time San Francisco has formally acknowledged that it has unfairly targeted specific neighborhoods—also among the most ethnically diverse—in addressing a citywide crisis. Once the entire city feels negatively impacted by drug tourism, that unfair neighborhood targeting will stop.
Come to think of it, that’s what happened last November in the mayoral election. Voters elected a mayor who has consistently pledged to end drug tourism. That’s the best strategy to make new shelters in many neighborhoods unnecessary..
Kudos to Mahmood for promoting an equity measure with clear and real mandates. Please encourage all supervisors to support this legislation and thank those already in support.
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 new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. 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.
