City Hall Digest: More Mid-Market Economic Troubles and No Safe Consumption Sites for Now

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.

Mid-Market Neighborhood Faces More Economic Trouble

The Mid-Market neighborhood is perhaps the best example of how difficult it has been for San Francisco’s businesses to recover post-pandemic. Vacant and tagged storefronts sit interspersed with scenes of public drug use and dealing.

The area’s woes continued last week as it was announced that the Whole Foods market at 8th and Market is closing due to public safety concerns. The market had long been a target of theft, drug use, and other disturbances—an overdose death occurred in the Whole Foods’ bathroom last September. This is another economic blow to the Mid-Market neighborhood specifically and downtown more generally as these areas deal with less foot traffic, driven by offices shifting to hybrid work models and the negative externalities associated with drug use. 

There have been many attempts at revitalizing the area over the years, from giving Twitter a tax break to taxing vacant storefronts. Sometimes though, it’s about the basics—and in this case, the basics mean ensuring that people feel safe walking on the street. This means getting people with substance use problems off the streets and into recovery-oriented programs, as well as having a law enforcement presence to discourage crime. 

To the latter point, District Six Supervisor Matt Dorsey used the closure of Whole Foods to announce that he and Supervisor Catherine Stefani have started the process for legislation that —after approval by voters—would require a minimum number of sworn police officers in San Francisco, with funds dedicated to growing the force over a five-year window. 

Mid-Market’s dire circumstances aren't representative of the entire city—there’s a renaissance of booming interest and community-building in neighborhoods like North Beach. But every neighborhood should have that same opportunity, and city leaders have a duty to figure out a way to accomplish that.

Safe Consumption Sites Off the Table for Now

Over the last year, the city has been divided over the efficacy, legality, and value of safe consumption sites, centers where drug users can use drugs under supervision to mitigate overdoses. Since safe consumption sites are illegal under federal law, the city faces significant legal liability if it funds the operation of the sites—something Mayor Breed and City Attorney David Chiu have expressed an interest in avoiding. After the closure of the Tenderloin Linkage Center, Breed announced that the city would allow safe consumption sites to continue only if they were funded by a third party, not the city.

However, last week, it became evident that without city funding, safe consumption sites are simply too expensive for private funders to maintain. This finding came from several nonprofit organizations who had expressed interest in running these sites earlier this year, with costs estimated at $2 million annually to operate each location. If the Department of Public Health followed through with their previous plans to open 12 sites across San Francisco, the city would be on the hook for approximately $24 million annually. 

That’s a lot of money - nearly one-third of what the city currently budgets on its treatment offerings for those with substance use disorder -  for something that was implemented haphazardly when we tried it with the Linkage Center. 

Barring a change of heart by Breed and Chiu, it looks like safe consumption sites are shelved for the time being. Now, the question remains of what to do with the $130 million the city will be receiving in opioid settlement money from the pharmaceutical companies and opioid distributors that have been deemed responsible for perpetuating the opioid crisis. 

The city has the chance to use this opioid settlement money to expand drug treatment programs to address the drug and overdose crisis—however, Supervisor Hillary Ronen has been leading the call to push for the settlement money to be used for safe consumption sites. 

We hope to see the city choosing to use the funds for things we think will actually move the needle: namely, expanding intake center hours so more people can access services when they need them, increasing residential recovery treatment program capacity, and funding more step-down beds to help people exiting these programs reintegrate with society.

TogetherSF Action is making advocating for an end to the drug epidemic in San Francisco a top priority this year. Our first step? Flooding inboxes at City Hall. We need thousands of concerned San Franciscans to send letters to their leaders demanding they end open-air drug markets in 2023. Are you in?