Preston criticizes drug center closing
A San Francisco supervisor is pushing for the city to develop an overdose prevention plan in the wake of Mayor London Breed’s decision to close at year’s end the controversial Tenderloin Center — a city-run site meant to link people on the street to drug treatment, among other services. Officials allow visitors to use drugs at the site, and city and nonprofit workers have reversed more than 100 overdoses at the facility at U.N. Plaza.
Supervisor Dean Preston aims to keep the center’s programs running, or find a suitable replacement. The hearing he requested would go before the Government Audit and Oversight Committee, which Preston chairs.
“We should be planning in creative and bold ways to address a public health crisis,” Preston told The Chronicle, as his office released a statement highlighting the Tenderloin Center’s success. Since opening in January it has documented nearly 60,000 visits, and reversed 109 overdoses as of June 19. Roughly 400 people come to the center each day seeking help ranging from hot showers to referrals for housing and drug treatment.
Though city officials conceived the center as a linchpin of Mayor London Breed’s stateof-emergency initiatives in the Tenderloin, staff in the mayor’s office also described it as a temporary intervention for a long-term, intractable problem. Whether the center was costeffective was open for debate: Of the nearly 60,000 visitors, workers at the center have linked 784 people to services, 116 of them for behavioral health treatment, much of it addressing substance abuse. Operating it for six more months will cost $10.6 million.
“I don’t take issue with the decision to wind down the services at that location,” said Preston, a frequent critic of Breed. “I do take issue with doing that without a plan of how you’re going to replace those services.”
He noted that some of the amenities and programs the center offered could be distributed among multiple facilities, rather than concentrated in the bottom floor of a seven-story building at U.N. Plaza. Ultimately, Preston would like to see the vision and services of the center expanded and made permanent.
Fatal overdoses in San Francisco are on pace to come down slightly in 2022, from the shocking highs of the previous two years, when more than 1,300 people died, many from the super powerful opioid fentanyl. Many of those deaths occurred in the Tenderloin.
Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Breed, said the office has been, and continues “to work on long-term plans to support the Tenderloin,” describing goals that closely resemble those of the supervisor. In addition to the center, the mayor has pursued a variety of other measures, such as street outreach teams that have helped connect more than 1,000 people to shelter.
Preston has represented the Tenderloin for about eight weeks, following a redistricting process that culminated in April. He was among two supervisors who dissented from Breed’s initial legislative proposal for a state of emergency in the Tenderloin, because the mayor was pushing a hard-line approach that included more police patrols, and the specter that officers would arrest people who refused services and continued to use drugs, though that doesn’t appear to have happened.
When Breed eliminated the center from the $14 billion budget she is hammering out with the supervisors, community advocates and workers from the center’s suite of nonprofit partners said they felt blindsided, and some worried the situation in downtown San Francisco would become more dire.
But some neighborhood residents and businesses argue the center has already run for too long, becoming a burden in an area that’s also welcoming a new residential and commercial development — including a long-awaited apartment tower and a Whole Foods Market.