A proposal for a 120-unit supportive housing facility for formerly homeless people in the Mission Bay neighborhood brought a flurry of public comment on the "no" side Thursday evening. KRON 4 attending the community meeting, where city officials tried to reassure residents that the plan was not for a homeless shelter or navigation center, but for more traditional housing on a lot behind the police headquarters on China Basin Street albeit with mental health counseling and other services on site.
“Nothing against the homeless, but putting them here in a neighborhood where we all paid a high premium doesn’t sit well with me,” resident Joe Lovullo tells KRON 4.
The meeting, organized by another homeowner who objects to the proposal on the same grounds, came in response to the proposed development which the Examiner first reported on last month slated for Mission Bay South Block 9, adjacent to Seawall 337, the AT&T Park event parking site, and a block from Terry Francois Boulevard. It is the first 100-percent supportive housing development in the works in San Francisco since 2009, and it's the type of housing homeless advocates say the city needs most studio units for individuals with on-site services for the most vulnerable and chronically homeless population. It's expected that about half of the residents at the facility will have mental health challenges or a disability. If approved, construction would begin on the project in 2019, with completion expected in 2021.
KRON 4 only found one person with a progressive attitude toward the project, acknowledging the city's enormous problem with homelessness and saying, "We need to stop kicking the ball around in San Francisco, and every neighborhood needs to do their part."
The contentious meeting in Mission Bay follows a few weeks after a much more contentious community meeting over a proposed navigation center on South Van Ness in the Mission.
The prevailing attitude seems to be that sheltering the homeless is good, just not in my backyard, so to speak even though with skyrocketing rents and property values, it's hard to point to any neighborhoods in the city that are "poor" enough to be considered compatible with supportive housing by those who think such housing is incompatible with their expensive neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the city's Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, which is the successor agency of the former San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, is required to build 868 more affordable housing units in the Mission Bay neighborhood, a total toward which these 120 supportive units would count. So far, just over 1,000 affordable units have been built in the area, out of a total of almost 2,000 required 29 percent out of a total 6,514 residential units planned and already constructed in Mission Bay.
Related: Federally Owned Parking Lot Behind Ninth Circuit Could Become Housing For Homeless