When Jeff Kositsky stepped down after five years working for the city, mostly as San Francisco’s top homelessness official, he seemed ready to move on.
“I’m more of a nonprofit sector guy,” he told the SF Chronicle last September. “I want to work on a platform that feels more comfortable to me.”
Kositsky has quietly landed on that platform: the nonprofit Urban Alchemy, which got its big break four years ago managing public toilets and now has its sights set much higher. The firm provides an array of services in SF and elsewhere, such as street security in the Tenderloin — which has proved to be a dangerous job — and the management of sleeping sites for homeless people.
As Urban Alchemy’s new director of advancement, Kositsky will work on its “national expansion, organizational development, and fundraising,” according to his LinkedIn page. He started in November.
It’s a significant hire for the four-year-old organization. Kositsky was the first person to lead SF’s revamped homelessness efforts, appointed in 2016 with fanfare and ambitious goals by then-Mayor Ed Lee. He ran the Homelessness and Supportive Housing Department (HSH) for four years, then led an interagency team that cleared sidewalk encampments and offered people shelter.
Kositsky is one of the biggest names in SF’s homelessness and nonprofit circles, but the move to Urban Alchemy came with no notice or announcement. In a January 2022 interview on KALW, many weeks after he took the job, the hosts referred to him as the “ex-SF homelessness czar.” They did not mention his position with Urban Alchemy, nor did he.
From SF to LA … and beyond?
In 2018, SF-based Urban Alchemy was spun out of a local nonprofit, Hunter’s Point Family Foundation, with city contracts to run hygiene stations called Pit Stops and to keep sidewalks clean. The work began in SF’s Tenderloin and spread to other neighborhoods, as well as to Los Angeles, where city officials took note of the nonprofit’s SF work.
That work, praised by SF officials, led Urban Alchemy to contracts to run “safe sleeping” sites for homeless folks living in vehicles, and once the pandemic struck, in tents and in so-called shelter-in-place hotels.
In a 2021 interview with a Half Moon Bay radio station, Urban Alchemy CEO Lena Miller said that in early 2020, when city officials were desperate to find staff to run the newly leased hotels, Kositsky put in a good word for Urban Alchemy. Officials were skeptical about UA handling the hotel work, which they had never done before. Kositsky replied, “They might; see what they say,” according to Miller.
Last December, a month after Kositsky started at UA, the organization signed a contract to operate and provide security for a safe sleep camp in Sausalito, and it continues to garner significant projects in its hometown. At the heart of Mayor London Breed’s recent emergency plan for the beleaguered Tenderloin is a linkage center where people can seek housing, healthcare, and other services. Urban Alchemy has a $1.8 million contract to manage the site. In February, it won an $18.7 million contract to run a long-term shelter for up to 250 people on Post Street.
While Kositsky’s LinkedIn job description nods to national ambitions, Urban Alchemy has not publicly said where it plans to expand next.
Kositsky and Urban Alchemy did not respond to requests for comment.
A czar’s history
After running the nonprofit Hamilton Families for two and a half years, Kositsky became SF’s homelessness chief in 2016 amid high expectations. Mayor Ed Lee wanted 8,000 people housed by the end of his term, for instance.
One of Kositsky’s Hamilton initiatives aimed to tap tech industry giants for funding and build a system that helped the nonprofit cut wait times for housing in half to about six months. He wanted to parlay that work into better citywide services, but a new data-driven approach hit roadblocks.
Kositsky’s success — as much as any homelessness director — was judged by what people could see on the streets. And by February 2019, many had seen enough as encampments were cropping up in neighborhoods that had previously had none.
‘We’re trying to change the way business has been done for the last 20 years. We used to be a nonprofit-centered city. We need a client-centered system.’ — Jeff Kositsky in 2019
At a public hearing that month, several supervisors criticized the department, including Sup. Aaron Peskin, who called for Kositsky’s ouster. “I don’t believe that this individual is suited to run that department if we want real change,” Peskin said at the time.
A few months later, the biennial point-in-time count of SF’s homeless population revealed a 15 percent increase to 8,000. All the while, Kositsky was trying to shift power away from the city’s web of nonprofits, like the one he had run at Hamilton, and toward city agencies — a move he said would help SF’s homeless get help faster. “We’re trying to change the way business has been done for the last 20 years,” Kositsky told The Frisc in 2019. “We used to be a nonprofit-centered city. We need a client-centered system.”
Whatever progress he might have made was rudely interrupted. In March 2020, COVID-19 shut down the city and scrambled its homelessness strategy. Outbreaks hit crowded shelters, which had to be shut down, sidewalks became even more crowded with tents, and officials scrambled to rent hotels and find other ways to ease the pressure.
That month, Kositsky left the top seat at HSH to run the Healthy Streets Operations Center (HSOC), which combines services of several agencies to clear tent encampments and move people into shelters.
Kositsky pledged that HSOC would be less reactive — that is, respond less to complaints and work more proactively with people on the streets. But advocates for the homeless charged that HSOC was intent on “sweeping” people off the street, whether or not they had shelter available.
Part of the public debate over HSOC centered on the use and location of public toilets and their relationship to homeless encampments. At one point, Mayor Breed wanted to cut public toilet funding from the city budget, and Sup. Matt Haney, a champion of public toilets, hit back on Twitter: “If people don’t have a place to go, that doesn’t mean they don’t go somewhere.”
Haney, whose District 6 includes the Tenderloin and South of Market, managed to restore some funding.
Meanwhile, Kositsky is returning to the nonprofit sector after presiding over rapid growth in the city’s homelessness budget, which now exceeds $1 billion over two years. The crisis shows no signs of slowing. The city, which relies heavily on nonprofit contractors to run a network of housing and other services, will be spending plenty of money in the near future — and that means plenty of opportunity for fast-growing groups like Urban Alchemy.
Staff writer Kristi Coale (@unazurda) writes about homelessness and more for The Frisc. She reported this story as a USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism 2021 Data Journalism fellow.