San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Small businesses can’t escape streets’ misery
Workers must pay price for city’s failure to supply adequate shelter, services
At ClockWise Escape Room on Market Street, adventure seekers pay to get trapped in a room where they have to follow clues and solve puzzles to break out within an hour. The problem is all the other people breaking in.
The escape room shares a large building between Sixth and Seventh streets with other businesses. The locked front door, which opens to the street, has a buzzer so employees can let customers inside, but others keep slipping in behind them.
Recently there was a knife fight, apparently over a drug deal gone bad, in the hallway. Sometimes every bathroom stall is occupied by transients or injection drug users, who regularly leave dirty needles and soiled clothing behind. There’s a stubborn urine stain on the carpet.
Outside on Stevenson Street, a tuckedaway alley running alongside the building, injection drug users congregate, discarding dirty needles and trash.
Monica Schafer and her girlfriend, Taisiya Paltseva, opened the escape room last year, lured by the city’s promise of a MidMarket revival and easy access to young tech workers with money to burn after leaving their offices for the day.
But like small businesses all over San Francisco, ClockWise faces daily headaches
stemming from the misery on the city’s streets and the inability of City Hall to get a handle on it.
Sure, the police come. Public Works cleanup crews come. Public Health crews pick up the syringes. But where are the measures to prevent the misery in the first place?
In this insanely rich city with an annual budget of $11 billion, where is the money for more shelter beds, more sobering centers, more drug rehabilitation programs and far more treatment beds for the mentally ill?
The closest we’ve gotten to a long-discussed safe injection site for drug users is Mayor London Breed’s planned mock-up of one in the Tenderloin that people will be able to tour in August to see how they work. No actual drug use will be permitted, though it will surely continue to be allowed just outside.
In this innovation capital of the world, why can’t we figure out how to provide such basic amenities as more public restrooms and showers, more garbage cans and more places for homeless people to spend their days besides alleyways and sidewalks?
Maybe then they wouldn’t have to escape their sad life on the streets by breaking into an escape room.
“Instead, we just surrender the streets and say, ‘It’s OK. You can camp here. You can shoot up here. We’ll give you a box for your needles, and we’ll come and clean up after you,’ ” Schafer said. “The streets smell like feces and urine, and man, it’s tough to want to stay here.”
It’s an increasingly common gripe from small business owners all over San Francisco. Stephen Adams, president of the city’s Small Business Commission, hears it all the time. He tells business owners to install the 311 app on their phone but wishes he had better answers.
“I’m hearing every time I go into a neighborhood: ‘My business is down 10 percent. My business is down 20 percent.’ A lot of it has to do with the quality-of-life issues on the street,” he said. “People just don’t want to deal with it.”
And it’s no wonder. At Mike’s Bikes at Eighth and Howard streets South of Market, co-owner Matt Adams said the street misery is worse than it’s ever been in the 13 years since the shop opened. Everyday occurrences include having to roust people sleeping in the doorway to open up in the morning, drug users shooting up right outside, and human feces, needles and trash all over the sidewalk.
He had to switch schedules around because his female manager didn’t feel safe opening up the store alone in the mornings and accepting deliveries. People appearing to have stolen bikes regularly come in asking for repairs but are unable to pay. Some plant themselves on the floor and spread their belongings all around them.
“We try to help and not judge, but a lot of times they’re not right in the head,” he said. “Our staff feels endangered. We’ve had people get upset and throw stuff at us. We’ve had a lot of threats. Shoplifting is a big problem.” Adam Mesnick, owner of the Deli Board sandwich shop on Folsom Street between Sixth and Seventh streets, said he found it ironic that the city fined him $100 for leaving his shop’s trash cans outside too long when heaps of trash sit on the sidewalk all the time.
He regularly posts photos of the sidewalk misery on Twitter. One showed a syringe discarded along with ketchup packets in the garbage can inside his store. Yes, someone apparently had a little something extra with lunch that day.
Another photo showed a pile of cardboard smeared with diarrhea left outside his second sandwich outpost, the Board, on Mission Street near Seventh. He recently shuttered that shop because he couldn’t be at both stores at once and doesn’t want his employees to have to deal with these issues on their own. He’s hoping to obtain a beer and wine license for the Board and reopen it as a dinner spot, saying the evenings there are a little calmer.
“Mission Street during the daytime is absolutely bananas,” he said. “I’ve had employees get needles thrown at them. I’ve had employees get spit on. I’ve had employees get items stolen from them.”
He said it’s ironic the Department of Public Health is so stringent, rightly, on the conditions inside his restaurant and so hands-off regarding the public health disaster outside.
And it’s not just small businesses in Mid-Market and SoMa that face these struggles. Pieter Gunst is the cofounder of Legal.io, which builds software that helps people find lawyers and is based in the Inner Mission. Recent sights outside his business have included people shooting up, a homeless man lying on the sidewalk naked and another man trying to break into a parking meter with an iron bar.
He’s decided to stop hiring people to work in the San Francisco office and instead hire people in other cities to work from home. “When you end up doing the math of the overall cost of putting employees here in light of the increased deterioration of the city and the safety concerns, it just becomes less and less a sound business decision,” he said.
Jenn Meyer runs three outposts of Local Take, which sells goods made by local artists. She said sales at her shop in the Castro are down 20 percent from last year because of all the street misery, including mentally ill or high people coming into her shop and scaring the customers. An employee had to close the shop the other day after a belligerent woman refused to leave.
Back at the escape room on Mid-Market, clients have two choices: attempting to break out of a room called the Asylum, which is made to look like a horrifying mental institution, or Party in Vegas, which looks like a drunken night gone very, very bad. Of course, when they emerge back onto Market Street, elements of both scenes are right there, and there’s nothing pretend about it.
For now, Schafer and Paltseva have decided to buy a security system including cameras and a panic button. Sounds like another prop for the escape room, but in today’s San Francisco, it’s all too real.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf