City Hall Digest: City Takes a Step Forward on Safe Consumption Sites, Preston Pressures Mayor On Affordable Housing, and More Contracting Drama

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.

Mayor Breed and Supervisor Ronen Introduce Legislation to Allow Safe Consumption Sites to Operate via Nonprofits

Mayor London Breed has introduced legislation with Supervisor Hillary Ronen to allow a safe consumption site to open—if it is solely funded and operated by a nonprofit. 

After the Tenderloin Linkage Center closed at the end of last year, the city has been cagey about whether it would open additional safe consumption sites, centers where drug users can use with medical supervision and get access to services. Because the Tenderloin Linkage Center failed to connect clients to services in meaningful numbers, made street conditions less safe in the Tenderloin, and was technically illegal under federal law (as all safe consumption sites are), the community has been waiting with bated breath to hear how the city planned to move forward.

By allowing a nonprofit organization to run the site without city funding, the city can technically avoid being legally liable for it. But, questions remain as to whether the city would play a more active role in abating open drug dealing and public drug use—which plagued the Tenderloin Center—by using law enforcement to secure the site and surrounding blocks. 

This decision also doesn’t address the fact that the city’s approach to combating the opioid epidemic has been, so far, incomplete. While safe consumption sites are an important tool to keep drug users alive and free of diseases like HIV, they do little to get users into recovery or remove drugs from the community in the first place.

Until we see a coordinated effort across city departments to increase law enforcement around drug dealing, reduce harm to users, and match users with recovery programs, we are unlikely to see an improvement in the dire conditions for those suffering from addiction—and all residents—across the city.

The City Is Spending Your Tax Dollars On Hiring Nonprofits without Doing Due Diligence 

How the city spends our tax dollars on contracting is a hot topic right now—and for good reason, when there are innumerable things wrong with the process. According to a recent investigation, 18 city departments paid over $25 million last year to nonprofits that should have been ineligible for city funding because they were flagged by the Attorney General’s office for either failing to pay annual taxes or to renew their charity status with the state. 

While the onus falls squarely on the nonprofits to ensure their paperwork is regularly filed, the city also has a responsibility to ensure the entities they’re giving money to are actually allowed to operate in the state. 

Simply put: it’s bad, lackadaisical governing that results in questionable spending. This lapse should serve as a clarion call for renewed and intensified scrutiny on how the city does business with outside contractors.

Supervisor Preston’s Pressure Straddles Line Between Advocacy and Interference

Last week, Supervisor Dean Preston accused Mayor Breed of dragging her feet on funding an affordable housing project at the site of an old car wash site in his district, saying that affordable housing is not a priority for the Mayor. Preston publicly pressured the Mayor's Office of Housing to award funding to a nonprofit affordable housing developer to help them buy the site before the public bidding process has begun. 

The property in question at 400 Divisadero was originally slated to become a 186-unit development in 2019, but the developer walked away in 2021 after it became too expensive to complete. Since then, Preston has been pressuring the city to buy it and turn it into a fully affordable housing development. 

Last year, the city set aside funding to buy land to be turned into affordable housing. This prospective funding was not designated for any specific projects. The Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development is in the process of issuing a notice of available funding, so that different developers can apply for this money. Once all the applications are in, the city will determine what the best use of the funds is based on a set of criteria.

Supervisor Preston is suggesting that the Mayor circumvent that criteria, which is in place to ensure good use of public funds. Decisions about how to spend public funding should be based on what makes the most economic sense, what makes us competitive for state funding, and what generates the most homes. We’re all for streamlining the construction of affordable housing, but bypassing a competitive process where the allocation of taxpayer money is concerned isn’t the way to do it.