San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Food hall, outreach plan nourish hope on Tenderloin block ravaged by fentanyl
Every morning before sunrise, Damian Morffet arrives at San Francisco’s most distressing street corner. There, at Golden Gate Avenue and Hyde Street, each dawn looks bleaker than the one before.
Dealers hawking fentanyl have already staked their territory. Those addicted to their wares are already high, splayed unconscious at the dealers’ feet. People huddle around makeshift campfires to keep warm or cook their drugs. Trash litters the sidewalk.
Like a Sisyphus of the Tenderloin, Morffet will spend the next 11 hours pushing forward the chaos, keeping the perimeter of 101 Hyde St. clear, even though he knows the misery will be back as soon as his shift ends.
He and his fellow security guards earn a combined $17,500 a month from La Cocina, a nonprofit that’s five years into its quest to open a food hall inside the building and needs the outside passable.
“People every day who live in this neighborhood come
up to me and say, ‘Thank you for being out here and doing what you can.’ And I don’t really think we’re doing anything,” Morffet said, while adding that City Hall does even less. “It’s been a big, giant wound for a while, and they basically put a BandAid on it, and it’s still overflowing with blood.”
Finally, the city may begin to staunch the bleeding. Supervisor Matt Haney, the budget committee chair who lives two blocks from that miserable corner, will propose a package of fixes on March 17 designed to ease the city’s fentanyl crisis.
He wants more effective prosecution for dealers and their suppliers, more outreach to people who use drugs on the streets and better oversight of people addicted to drugs who live alone, and often die alone, in singleroomoccupancy hotels.
The goal is to lessen the overdoses that killed 699 people in San Francisco in 2020 and 61 more in January alone.
“Without a plan like this, we’re just pushing people around, which isn’t working,” Haney said. “We need to try some new things. Otherwise we’re on pace to have a worse year — more awful and deadly and ghastly — for our city than last year.”
The package, still being finalized, would cost in the ballpark of $6 million to $7 million a year, Haney said. About a third would go to District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office for a new unit devoted to fentanyl. Six new prosecutors and two new investigators would focus on fentanyl dealing and try to build larger cases against the drug’s suppliers.
Boudin has repeatedly said he needs “kilos, not crumbs” to fight the fentanyl trade, even though a kilo of fentanyl is enough to kill more than half the city of San Francisco. He mostly releases dealers after their arrests with stayaway orders from particular blocks or corners — orders they often ignore.
If the misery at Golden Gate Avenue and Hyde Street is any indication, other legal efforts — including City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s effort to keep the most prolific dealers out of the neighborhood entirely — aren’t yet making a difference. The city settled a lawsuit over conditions in the Tenderloin with UC Hastings last year, but the dealing persisted.
Haney wants to hire outreach workers on foot and in vans to encourage people addicted to drugs to enter treatment as well as to test their drugs to ensure they’re not unwittingly getting a product laced with fentanyl.
Haney also wants to expand an SRO overdose prevention program that was started by Mayor London Breed in 2019 but never fully implemented as the pandemic struck. He wants all staff in SRO hotels and supportive housing complexes trained in overdose prevention, administering Narcan and connecting people to treatment.
His package of proposals also includes accelerating the expansion of the city’s new Street Crisis Response Team, which sends teams of three — a paramedic, a clinician and a formerly homeless or drugaddicted peer — to respond to mental health crises.
Haney’s proposals seem smart, if long overdue. But won’t it be deeply satisfying if it’s a team of immigrant women with mean culinary skills — and not politicians — who really help turn around that corner in the Tenderloin? After all, economic development is one of the best ways to fight poverty and hopelessness.
Eventually, the city intends to develop 101 Hyde St. into affordable housing, but anybody who follows that process in San Francisco knows progress is somehow always years away. La Cocina has a lease through 2025 in the meantime.
The corner represents what’s broken in San Francisco, but La Cocina represents what’s working. It’s a Mission District nonprofit that helps women — mostly people of color and many of them immigrants — establish food businesses. Some participants live in the Tenderloin and sell food in their SRO hotels.
The inside of 101 Hyde feels like paradise compared with the outside. Woven baskets line shelves, and portraits of neighborhood residents hang on a pink wall. The kitchen is built. The tables and chairs are in place. The seven booths where the women will sell their food — always with one meal option available for $5 or less — are ready. An eighth booth will feature rotating popups.
Caleb Zigas, executive director of La Cocina, said the coronavirus has delayed an official public opening until the summer, but the women are already using the space to cook for nearby SRO residents.
“Our hope is that the city and other folks understand that, longterm, patient investment in a space like that can have deep, positive impacts for the whole neighborhood,” he said.
Zigas said that when La Cocina agreed to open the food hall, the conditions on the corner weren’t as dire as they are now. The nonprofit invested $5 million to improve the building, using its own reserves plus government and private help, and is spending $300,000 a year in operating costs.
And that’s before it’s even open to the public, demonstrating just how hard it is to start a small business in San Francisco — even though outside, an illegal, deadly business is allowed to proliferate and reap rich rewards.
And that’s where Morffet comes in. The 57yearold San Francisco native can’t believe his city has become a place where people die of overdoses at a rapid clip, while nobody seems to do much about it.
“I love my city, but it’s ugly,” he said. “There’s no compassion out here at all.”
Sporting an orange vest, he kindly but firmly tells people to move. Soon, there’s a wall of dealers and people using drugs in front of the building next door.
For now, Morffet’s sidewalks are clear.