For more than 100 years, SoMa has been home to the homeless
Waves of new residents want that to change
By Meagan Day
In 2015, the mortgage banker-turned-restaurateur Adam Mesnick — described in the San Francisco Chronicle as “a San Francisco success story” — sent a letter to his neighbors in the South of Market neighborhood. “I have been a SoMa resident and business owner since 2009,” he wrote. “Let’s make SoMa a place where children don’t need to see needles and shit.”
A photo of the letter was uploaded to NextDoor.com, where SoMa residents were already engaged in heated conversation about the area’s homeless population. “I’ve been in SoMa for three years,” wrote one commenter, “and I’ve had it with people who have decided they don’t want REAL help but want to take over our parks, front doors and alleyways as their own private toilets.”
Concerned SoMa residents arranged to meet at a swank coffeeshop called Sightglass, situated in a converted industrial building. In the months that followed, they formed a group called Western SoMa Voice, which held its first meeting earlier this year at a private event space called The Box SF. There, residents brainstormed solutions — around a conference table made of 335-year-old doors from a Chinese village — to the problem of homelessness.
The Box SF’s owner Mark Sackett, who normally rents out the space for $2,000 a day, told Hoodline, “I thought with all these condos and apartments and all this development South of Market, it would actually be getting better. But the City and County of San Francisco… fit all the social services in between Sixth and Eighth streets and Howard and Market.” This includes multiple shelters, case management centers and outreach initiatives. Sackett’s frustration was echoed by NextDoor users, one of whom wrote, “The city needs to move the ‘services’ they provide to these unfortunates.”
Warehouse conversions, airy lofts, repurposed lumber, and rickety freight elevators are huge selling points in SoMa. But with the neighborhood’s gritty charm comes just plain grit.
Significant populations of homeless people have called SoMa home for over a century. The social services were clustered there because the neighborhood was the province of down-and-outs. And it still is. Today, 62 percent of the city’s 6,686 homeless live in supervisor district six, which is made of largely of SoMa. At the same time, the average rent as of spring 2016 was $4,641.
The question seems to be: Whose neighborhood is it really?
Ever since the tracks were laid, SoMa has been on the wrong side of them.
When engineer James O’Farrell proposed cutting a long and unusually broad thoroughfare through nascent San Francisco in 1847, landowners threatened to lynch him for dramatically slicing up their property. He fled by boat to Sausalito, laying low while workers leveled the sand dunes to make way for the “grand promenade.” From its inception, Market Street was a bitterly protested divide.
The avenue not only physically partitioned the city, but quickly became an emblem of social division. In the 1880s, tracks running up the middle spawned a nickname: the Slot. “North of the Slot were the theaters, hotels, and shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business houses,” wrote Jack London in 1909. “South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.”
The steep-sloped neighborhoods north of Market Street were given pleasant names: Hayes Valley, Nob Hill, Pacific Heights. But South of the Slot were large and indistinguishable flatlands, occupied year-round mainly by working-class Irish, English, and German immigrants, and seasonally by migratory casual laborers and destitute hobos. Small factories, canneries, butcher shops, gas works, warehouses, and foundries made up the bulk of new development. The last remaining affluent families, who had built elegant estates in doomed Rincon Hill, fled the area.
In the 1860s, businesses in South of Market began catering to migratory workers who came to San Francisco in between stints on farms, railroads, or in the gold mines. Flophouses and cheap hotels sprang up, and the area became a single men’s playground, with pool halls, saloons and gambling houses interspersed with the factories. In 1872, an observer noted the concentration of vagrants in the area, whom he called “blanket men,” adding that they seemed mostly to be “runaway sailors,” “old soldiers,” and “bankrupt German scene painters.”
The area was largely inhabited by unskilled workers, who slept in flophouses if they had the money, or on the street if they didn’t. In 1880, writes Alvin Averbach in his economic history of the neighborhood, “nearly one-third of the city’s boarding houses, a quarter of its hotels, and half of its 655 lodging houses were found there… troops of the industrial army were called up, as it were, for active duty.” In his book on the homeless in American history, Kenneth L. Kusmer called SoMa “the most important center of transient and casual labor on the West Coast.”
When the 1906 earthquake destroyed much of the neighborhood’s infrastructure, the area’s character became even more defined. By 1907, 58 new hotels and 80 new lodging houses had been built. The city rezoned the area for industrial use — abandoning any remaining dream that it might be become a middle-class residential neighborhood.
“Here grew up the hoboes’ institutions,” writes Alvin Averbach in San Francisco’s South of Market District, 1850–1950, “the hotels and lodging houses whose proprietors acted as bankers so that men spending their regular off-seasons in San Francisco had safekeeping for their money and would not spend it on a single spree; saloons which fed their patrons smorgasbord ‘free lunches’ for ten or fifteen cents and sometimes doubled as informal employment agencies; and pawnshops on Third, lower Market, and The Embarcadero where a hobo might put up a tool or some clothing to pay for food, drink, or shelter when he could not stretch his winter’s ‘stake’ far enough.”
By the 1920s, relief agencies and charities had begun to appear alongside the businesses that catered to the SoMa homeless. The Salvation Army, Volunteers of America Community Kitchen, Canon Kip Community House and St. Patrick’s Church Shelter all began to offer services for SoMa’s homeless and marginally housed. For a brief moment, the arrangement worked: the city provided funds to these charities, which sustained the down-and-out, and employers lined the streets of SoMa to hire all but the least fit men. The population of SoMa during this period was 80% male.
But once the Great Depression set in, cash-strapped employers no longer trawled the area for hired hands, and vagrancy was no longer a temporary condition of seasonal workers. During the 1930s, SoMa became Skid Row, home to thousands of men “continuously out of work and living near subsistence level in pool rooms, cheap restaurants, flophouse-hotels, bars, wine stores, on the sidewalks, and in the missions,” according to Averbach.
World War II improved the prospects of the remaining working-class white families, and they moved elsewhere. Poor Asian and Latino immigrants took their place. SoMa became, more than ever, the province of marginalized people and social outcasts. This increasingly included gay bars, particularly those catered to leather sexuality and BDSM.
Politicians and real estate developers realized SoMa was undervalued. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency started floating the idea of a SoMa renewal as early as the late 1960s, and plans for the Yerba Buena Arts Center — intended to inaugurate a broader revitalization trend — were shored up in the late 1970s. The developers were surprised by the resistance from the locals, however. Disposable and blighted to the outsider’s eye, SoMa was fiercely guarded by its inhabitants.
Then, in the 1980s, AIDS began to ravage both the city’s gay male population and its poor, homeless and marginally housed people. “The South of Market neighborhood became a geographic magnet for AIDS-related apprehension,” writes historian Gayle Rubin. The city began to regard SoMa as a public health hazard, rather than just a stubborn community of undesirable people living cheaply on valuable land. And as residents and regulars began dying off, local resistance fell away.
The 1990s saw the first wave of warehouse-to-loft conversions, fitted for dot-commers with an anti-suburban ethos and money to burn. “Development was viewed by most as a win/win proposition,” explains the SF Modern Condo Project, which looks kindly on the redevelopment of SoMa, “for both home buyers, who gained historic and unique living spaces, and also for the city of San Francisco because abandoned or blighted properties were transformed into highly desirable destinations that generated property taxes for the city coffers.”
Still, the homeless services that had been there since the 1920s remained, largely because no other neighborhood wanted them. Additionally, the streets were still wide and flat, and the relative lack of density was still well-suited to street life. The homeless presence was fairly constant.
By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and gentrification was halted—but only temporarily. A few years later, the city’s economy bounced back with a vengeance, and people like Adam Mesnick and his NextDoor cohorts moved in. The situation, they say, is dire.
Of course, such are the difficulties of turning a neighborhood long replete with “blanket men” into a family-friendly urban village. With the wealth gap growing at breakneck speed in the city — for some the new Gold Rush, for others the new Great Depression — it’s no surprise that SoMa is a battleground.
No one wants their children to look at needles and shit, as Mesnick put it. But the homeless aren’t taking over; the affluent are. In fact, according to the city’s own numbers, the number of homeless people citywide has only gone up roughly seven percent in the last ten years, from 6,248 in 2005 to 6,686 in 2015. At the same time, the average household earnings went up from $88,388 in 2005 to $126,022 in 2014–30 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of $1 million-plus homes in the city has gone up by 38 percent just since 2012. Perhaps it’s the proximity of homeless people to those homes that is creating the current crisis.
For more than a century, shelving the city’s homeless in SoMa was a solution. Now their presence is the problem.
