Best of the Net
Expanding Drug Tourism
Tourist Hotel to Shelter Conversions Have Exploded Drug Use
• • • • • • • • January 2025 • • • • • • • •
Incoming Mayor Lurie plans to combat open-air drug markets and stop drug tourism. Unfortunately, outgoing Mayor Breed is trying to make this task more difficult.
Prior to leaving office Breed got her four appointees on the Planning Commission to approve legislation that would facilitate tourist hotels across the entire city to quickly become homeless shelters. Did Homeless and Supportive Housing (HSH) inform neighborhood groups about this legislation? Of course not. Were the supervisors in the districts where such conversions have already occurred notified? No.
People unable to afford rent come to San Francisco and wait for their opportunity. They sit on sidewalks until a city-funded outreach worker offers them an unlimited stay in a tourist hotel with a private bathroom.
Plus two meals a day.”
Westside residents may think they are not impacted by the potential conversion of tourist hotels in their neighborhoods to homeless shelters. Think again. HSH told the Commission it intended on doing these conversions citywide.
I recently wrote how offering tourist hotel rooms, rent-free to the unhoused promotes drug tourism :
People unable to afford rent come to San Francisco and wait for their opportunity. They sit on sidewalks until a city-funded outreach worker offers them an unlimited stay in a tourist hotel with a private bathroom.
Plus two meals a day.
Once they get a room they have no incentive to move to permanent supportive housing. That requires they pay rent. And they probably would not get a private bathroom. Nor would they get free meals.
Converting tourist hotels to “non-congregant shelters” has been a colossal failure in San Francisco. Residents are not required to transition to permanent housing. There is no time limit on stays! People have been getting free rent at the Cova Hotel for two to three years!
San Francisco offers people refusing to pay rent better housing—at no charge!—than it does to those willing to pay rent. And those enjoying free housing are less likely than those in traditional shelters to transition to permanent, rent-paying housing.
Even those receiving SSI or city welfare checks live rent-free in the city’s converted tourist hotels. San Francisco has gone from Care Not Cash—-where recipients had to use their welfare check for rent or get a reduced grant—to a “shelter” program that never requires hotel residents to pay for housing.
This program dispels the notion that shelters are a temporary stop on route to permanent housing. The vast majority of those enjoying rent-free housing in tourist hotels in San Francisco return to the streets rather than move on to permanent homes.
A Bad Plan That Also Wrecks Neighborhoods
In addition to being a costly failure in reducing homelessness, giving the unhoused rent-free housing in tourist hotels has caused an explosion in nearby drug activities. Many who save money by never paying rent use their funds to buy drugs.
HSH’s spokesperson told the commission that the city’s use of tourist hotels as “non-congregant shelters” has been a big success. That’s not how people living and working around Seventh Street remember it. Or how anyone who saw the videos of hundreds selling and using drugs outside those Seventh Street hotels view it. They recall those programs causing skyrocketing drug activity and violence.
HSH also said that the COVA and other hotels in the Tenderloin and Lower Polk had not increased drug activities around Little Saigon. HSH apparently believes that nearby businesses, immigrant families and other residents who believe otherwise are confused about what’s happening right in front of them.
HSH has refused to do an economic analysis of the impact of these shelter conversions on surrounding businesses. Residents and businesses in the Tenderloin and Lower Polk asked for such an analysis but Breed’s Planning Commission majority did not care; it moved the legislation forward without any economic study being done.
Why is SF Ignoring Actual Shelters?
What happened to unhoused people being given space in large shelters? Or in the Navigation Centers developed under Mayor Lee?
And what happened to shelters’ being seen as temporary stops on route to permanent housing? These “non-congregant shelters” transition to nowhere. Instead, they offer the unhoused what is often better-quality housing at no charge than what they can obtain by paying rent (many supportive housing units have private bathrooms but most do not).
San Francisco is spending millions to keep people homeless!
What the Public Can Do
The legislation to facilitate the conversion of tourist hotels to shelters will be heard at the Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee in January. It has not been scheduled as committees have not yet been created.
This is now a citywide issue. In fact, HSH claims it needs this legislation to expand tourist hotels to shelter conversions across the city. If it passes the Board, other neighborhoods should get prepared for what SOMA, Tenderloin, and Lower Polk residents and businesses have experienced for years.
It’s not pleasant.
There is powerful and broad support in San Francisco for permanent drug-free housing. Instead, this shelter conversion plan again invests millions of dollars to allows unhoused people to use illegal drugs.
Why can’t San Francisco get off this wrong track? Why can’t the city start investing in people who want to change their lives long-term? Investing in people who economically support the neighborhood where they live rather than cause problems, as we have seen outside virtually all of the tourist-to-shelter hotels.
Tell Mayor Lurie and your Westside supervisors that you have had enough. This legislation to incentivize drug tourism must be defeated.
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco
January 2025
