Sixth Street Community Rejects ‘Revitalization’ Narrative and Pushes to Keep Support Site Open
A crowd of around 80 people, many of them Black, yesterday gathered outside of a drop-in center for people experiencing homelessness, spiritedly refusing to be displaced — again.
Last month, Mayor Daniel Lurie notified the nonprofit Hospitality House that it would need to close the Sixth Street Self-Help Center, which it had been operating at 169 Sixth St. in the South of Market neighborhood for nearly 20 years.
For longtime Black residents, Lurie’s plan to “revitalize” the corridor bears remarkably similar language to that of redevelopment and urban renewal. In the second half of the 20th century, redevelopment displaced more than 20,000 Black residents in the Fillmore neighborhood and pushed working-class people from SoMa’s residential hotels to make way for the Moscone and Yerba Buena centers.
“What urban renewal is, is urban removal,” Joe Wilson, executive director of Hospitality House, said at the rally, his voice booming into the microphone. “It’s replacing one class of people with another. That’s you. We say ‘no’ to that.”
Lurie’s press office provided a written statement in response to a request for comment: “Mayor Lurie’s administration is taking action every day to make San Francisco streets safer and cleaner. At 6th street, we know it’s not enough to manage street conditions — we need a plan to actually revitalize the corridor. We’re currently looking at how to activate the space at 169 6th Street and bring in resources and amenities that serve and energize the whole community.”
Every year, more than 4,000 people access the Sixth Street Self-Help Center, which offers unhoused people a chance to get connected with case workers and harm-reduction services, use the restroom, charge their phones, shower and more.
“When we remove these services, we take away the safety, we take away the dignity, and sometimes we take away someone’s only connection to help,” said Cherie Davis, program manager at the center.
“The city’s strategy should not become the community’s tragedy,” she said over whoops and claps.
The mayor’s office did not offer any official reasons for closing the center, Hospitality House staff said, maintaining that the mayor’s office affirmed their organization was doing good work. However, neighborhood groups had long complained about the area’s conditions, which they said were unsafe and unclean.
If the center closes, workers will move to Hospitality House’s other self-help center in the Tenderloin. While the Hospitality House staff said they would continue to do outreach in the SoMa area, they said closing the center would not solve the struggles that people are facing there.
“Our job isn’t to make poor people disappear; it’s to make poverty disappear,” Wilson said. He pointed out that the Department of Public Health asked Hospitality House to come into the neighborhood nearly 20 years ago to replicate its success with their Tenderloin Self-Help Center. “Apparently, they’ve lost patience.”
“This is only displacing the poverty somewhere else,” said Jose Luis Pavon, emergency rental assistance care manager at HOMEY, a nonprofit in the Mission. “We’ve seen on the 16th Street corridor a significant jump in poor people, addicts, drug dealers, violence, feces on the street. Maybe they’re putting a dent into the problem here on Sixth Street, but it’s just being moved to 16th Street. So how does that make any sense? How is that a win?”
“Promises of revitalization and renewal are empty promises that have been shown to dismantle and upend entire communities, entire cultures, and to make life more difficult for poor people of color,” Wilson said. “That ain’t the business we’re in.”
Community resistance
The potential closure of the center is a “life-or-death situation” for many people, said Aurora Wallace, finance manager at Hospitality House. “It’s people’s moms, it’s dads. I see older people, grandparents; they just need some support. We can’t turn our back on these people.”
But the community did not take the news passively; supporters showed up to the rally in droves with signs, music and food.
“People are not just going to quietly allow this center to be shut down,” said Dean Preston, former District 5 supervisor, and, in Wilson’s affectionate words, “professional rabble-rouser.”
Preston called for public shaming of officials on social media and in traditional media until they change their minds about the site, including protests, office sit-ins and rallies.
“So that when people tune in to Instagram, instead of seeing and caring about where Mayor Lurie is getting a delicious sandwich tomorrow, they’re like, ‘why is this guy shutting down the Self-Help Center on Sixth Street?’” Preston said to laughter from the crowd. “Our job is to make sure this is not just another casualty in a war on the poor in San Francisco.”
— Madison Alvarado