San Francisco drug-free supportive housing proposal advances to Board of Supervisors
By Andrea Nakano
A San Francisco supervisor is one step closer to getting the votes he needs to fund drug-free supportive housing. Matt Dorsey has been working on the ordinance for the last two years. After numerous revisions, it is now ready for a vote by the Board of Supervisors.
Drug addiction and recovery are struggles that over 37,000 San Franciscans deal with. That’s according to the Department of Public Health. Tom Wolf if a recovering drug addict and now a recovery advocate.
“If you’re in recovery like myself from addiction, you need to be in an environment where people aren’t doing drugs all around you or the odds of you relapsing go way way up,” Wolf said.
Wolf spoke at the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee meeting on Thursday to support an ordinance to fund drug-free supportive housing in San Francisco. He says it’s critical for addicts to be in a drug free environment.
“After I went through 3 months of jail, 6 months of treatment, months living in a recovery/halfway house, I started working in the Tenderloin as a case manager in supportive housing,” he said. “Right on Turk Street, two blocks away from where I was homeless and using heroin on the street every day. Just that alone was really challenging for me.”
Under state policy, the city will continue to have housing that is not drug-free. The main controversy over creating drug-free housing has centered around eviction. What happens if a resident relapses, and what options would be made available? Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who introduced the ordinance, says residents wouldn’t be kicked out on their first strike, but rules have to be put into place.
“We do want to make sure we are supporting people in their journeys,” Supervisor Dorsey said. “If people chose to not be in a drug-free environment, that should be OK, but it just stands to reason if we were to allow perpetual relapses and perpetual drug use, it ceases to be drug free housing.”
At the meeting, several people spoke up against the ordinance. One of them was Curtis Bradford, a recovering addict who benefited from the current housing model.
“I heard people talk about some of the failures of supportive housing, but they failed to mention the tens of thousands of people like me who benefited directly from Housing First,” Bradford said. “Who are still alive today because of Housing First and harm reduction.”
But Wolf says the city’s data shows something has to change to help address the drug problem.
“From 2020-2025, 784 people died of drug overdose in permanent supportive housing in San Francisco,” Wolf said. “Just in San Francisco. Imagine if we got that data from LA, Seattle and Portland, etc., it really brings into question whether or not what we’re doing is working.”
This ordinance will now come in front of the Board of Supervisors on July 14th. Wolf says addicts need another choice to live in a drug free environment to get away from the highly addictive drugs on the streets.
“I think we can no longer deny how Fentanyl has really changed the game,” he said. “How overdoses went from 17,000 in the year 2,000 to 103,000 a year ago in the United States.”
