The final public meeting to discuss a Navigation Center for homeless youth in the lower Nob Hill neighborhood had just begun Thursday night at the First Congregational Church on Polk Street. The wooden pews of the nave were packed. District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin and other officials had mics in hand, ready to field questions.
Suddenly, to no one’s surprise, an angry resident spoke out with concerns about crime, which come up whenever homeless sites are proposed. He began shouting at the officials: “My car’s been broken into several times.”
Peskin tried to calm the speaker: “I’m with you.”
“You’re not with me,” the man shot back.
People in the crowd were restless, perhaps with memories of a meeting last spring, during which an unruly crowd shouted down Mayor London Breed in opposition to the Embarcadero Navigation Center. Unlike that meeting, however, the tide turned last week, and it was in part due to Lake Taylor, a woman with dyed blonde hair, cropped short, who owns a small store across from the proposed site.
Taylor hadn’t intended to speak. But to bolster his point, the angry man described a recent shoplifting incident at what turned out to be Taylor’s leather-goods store, Billie Marie. She couldn’t let the moment pass, she later told The Frisc.
As people, many of them her neighbors, queued up to speak, she thought to herself, “I don’t want this thing that happened to me, which is scary to people around my business, to be the reason not to have a Navigation Center in the neighborhood.”
“He used what happened at my store as ammo for his argument,” Taylor told The Frisc.
So Taylor addressed the crowd, expressing cautious support — particularly if it were true that, as officials said during their presentation, crime goes down in a neighborhood when a Navigation Center opens.
‘I’ve been to many meetings,’ Brian Edwards of the Coalition on Homelessness told the crowd. ‘This might be the first neighborhood that actually wants the youth Navigation Center.’
The “ammo” in question — the argument that crime will increase — is often deployed against opening services for the homeless, most recently to deflect a youth Navigation Center in the Haight-Ashbury, which is in District 5. But last Thursday, the argument could not hold court against the wave of support in the room.
“I’ve been to many of these meetings, including efforts to get this [youth] center in District 5, and I’m disappointed we’re not getting one there,” Brian Edwards from the Coalition on Homelessness told the District 3 crowd last week. “This might be the first neighborhood that actually wants it.”
“I thought I’d be able to handle it”
In a city where 83 percent of the more than 1,000 homeless youth are unsheltered, the proposed youth center has been a long time coming. San Francisco received a federal grant to provide one in 2018, and expectations fell on District 5 and the Haight-Ashbury with its high street-youth population. But neighborhood opposition and finding a suitable site proved to be sizable obstacles.
First floated last summer, the District 3 site at 888 Post Street — once The House of Fans — has advanced quickly. It’s not a done deal, but the site on the cusp of Nob Hill and the Tenderloin is available, affordable and, as Thursday’s meeting showed, has some measure of community support.
Affordability and space also brought Taylor to the neighborhood three years ago from Seattle, seeking better, warmer winters. She worked a corporate job and made leather goods by hand on the side. After an intensive workshop, she decided it was time to ditch her day job.
Her first space, at Golden Gate and Hyde Streets, was rough. The open drug use, addiction, and defecation on the streets were more than she bargained for: “I thought I’d be able to handle it, because I was used to dealing with people on the streets of Seattle.” (She said she had worked with homeless youth there but declined to go into detail.)
After a year and a half in a basement apartment with no windows and a nearby storefront where she witnessed several shocking incidents, Taylor moved both her business and living spaces, but only a short distance. The community is what keeps her there. “It’s unlike any other area of San Francisco,” Taylor says. “I know my neighbors and have friendships with them, I know all the dogs that walk down the street, and there’s a sense of helping each other out and making sure everyone is okay.”
Breaking and entering
On a personal level Taylor is “100% in support of [the center] from a compassion standpoint.” As a business owner she’s more cautious, but still lends approval. As the angry speaker at the meeting pointed out, she’s been a target of crime already. But she’s not willing to use that as a cudgel against the Navigation Center.
Since last summer, her shop has been hit four times. One was an overnight break-in, with the thieves using a bolt cutter on the gate she uses to lock her store. She’s also had three shoplifting incidents, all by the same thief. Coming to the community meeting was a chance for her to feel a sense of control. “I decided I want to be a part of the process, to get ahead of this thing and turn it into something positive,” she said.
She admits a Navigation Center across the street would be like stepping into the great unknown. But plenty of crime is happening without the center. Whether the thieves are homeless or not, the center would be taking people off the street and providing services such as mental health counseling and job training. Instead of assuming things would get worse, Taylor is ready to bet that the center can make her neighborhood better.
Kristi Coale is an award-winning journalist in radio and print. Her work has appeared in various outlets including KALW, the National Radio Project, and Wired. She’s on Twitter @unazurda.