Navigation Center No. 9 proposed for Lower Nob Hill
San Francisco officials have picked out a spot for a new 75bed Navigation Center for homeless youth: a shuttered appliance store on the edge of the Tenderloin in Lower Nob Hill.
The site at 888 Post St. is a vacant, threestory building that was once home to the House of Fans.
City officials are still negotiating an agreement with the building’s owner. If it opens next year, it would be the ninth shelter with intensive services in San Francisco, at a time when the city is struggling with more than 8,000 people on its streets. It would also be the first Navigation Center specifically for those under the age of 25.
This news also comes shortly after District Six Supervisor Matt Haney reintroduced legislation on Tuesday to encourage the city to
build Navigation Centers in every district that doesn’t have one.
The bulky, beige building that sits at Post and Hyde streets is near dense rows of apartment buildings, a coffee shop, a corner market and a coin laundry. It’s unclear if this site will inspire as much community opposition as the Navigation Center on the Embarcadero — a proposal that rankled nearby residents and led to a pricey lawsuit against the city.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose district includes the site, discussed the proposal at a community meeting Wednesday evening with about 15 community leaders, who were supportive of the idea.
“For a very long time we have been talking about what we are going to do about the situation that is in this neighborhood and throughout the city with regard to homelessness,” Peskin said at the meeting. “We now have an opportunity ... to do this in this corner of the city.”
While 888 Post St. is technically in Peskin’s district, it sits on the dividing line of Haney’s District Six, which shoulders the majority of the city’s homeless services.
Officials hope to open about 75 beds for homeless people under the age of 25 on the building’s top floor. The second floor will have a kitchen and a laundry room, and nonprofit Goodwill plans to lease the bottom floor for services such as workforce training.
Peskin, Mayor London Breed and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing are currently working out the price and length of the lease with the building’s owner. But they hope to propose the lease to the Board of Supervisors early next year, and open the site by the end of 2020.
If approved, it would inch Breed closer to her goal of adding 1,000 shelter beds by the end of 2020. Since 2018, the city has opened 366 new shelter beds and 424 more are in the pipeline, including the 200 set to open on the Embarcadero.
“We’ve been looking for an appropriate site for size and location for transitionalage youth for a very long time — well over two years — and this was the first site we found,” said Jeff Kositsky, director of the homelessness department. He said young homeless people often frequent the Lower Nob Hill area, in addition to hanging out in the HaightAshbury.
Even though the new site will benefit from the city’s shelter crisis ordinance — legislation passed this year meant to shave months off the process of creating a Navigation Center — it will still take several months to make capital improvements to 888 Post St.
This site in Lower Nob Hill is Peskin’s fourth attempt at getting a Navigation Center in his district. At Wednesday evening’s community meeting, held around the corner from the proposed site, community leaders supported the proposal.
Chris Schulman, chair of the Lower Polk Neighborhood Association, said he was “all in” on the idea, but also wanted to ensure that the city had more options for those who were homeless and older than 25.
Duncan Ley, owner of Tonic bar located across from the proposed site, said he hopes the Navigation Center could activate the area.
“We’re thrilled about it, not everyone is, but we are,” Ley said. “We’re excited to activate that corner. It is just dark. We need more lighting around that area, and hopefully a Navigation Center will get that moving.”
The city plans to have a bigger community meeting with the neighborhood early next year.
While Peskin supports the idea of spreading services around San Francisco, he said at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting that the city should put services where homeless people are concentrated. According to the city’s latest point in time count, District Three has 278 homeless people while District Six has 1,990.
City data also show that District Six has 30% more bed capacity — which includes emergency shelters, transitional housing and permanent supportive housing — than its ratio of homeless people. On the other hand, District 10 — which includes the Bayview — has 24% fewer services than what’s needed to match its homeless population.
Despite the new shelter beds that have been — and will be — added under Breed, the city is still woefully short of temporary beds and permanent housing.
The homelessness department, mayor and some supervisors say it’s extremely difficult to find a site in the right location to open a Navigation Center. The department says it has considered and rejected more than 100 sites over the past few years for reasons that include price, location and size.
But their detractors blame a lack of political will.
All of the city’s current Navigation Centers are in Districts Six, Nine and 10 — which include South of Market, Civic Center, the Mission and the Bayview.
Haney said he hopes his legislation to require every district to have a Navigation Center will lead to more services throughout the city and force officials to move with urgency.
“The city needs to be pushed,” he previously told The Chronicle. “City Hall is not stepping up adequately to address this as a crisis where every neighborhood is part of a solution.”
Breed dismissed the idea of requiring Navigation Center sites in every district.
“I have a responsibility to the entire city. So whenever I can identify a location to build a Navigation Center or housing, that will be the priority,” she said at a Tuesday news conference celebrating the opening of the Embarcadero Navigation Center. “We can’t divide San Francisco up this way (by district), because this is a problem that impacts us all.”