Board of Supervisors to Weigh Controversial S.F. Navigation Center, Mayor Breed Says

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will hear an appeal next week brought by opponents of a planned multiservice homeless shelter on an Embarcadero lot near the Bay Bridge, Mayor London Breed said Monday.

In late April, the San Francisco Port Commission approved building the navigation center, a move sharply contested by many neighborhood residents. The 200-bed facility, on 2.3 acres, will be the city's largest navigation center, providing a range of round-the-clock supportive housing and rehabilitative services to the homeless. The port said it still plans to later develop the prime piece of real estate — Seawall Lot 330 — for longer-term, more profitable use.

The city plans to break ground on the center this summer, with hopes of opening it in early fall.

Opponents of the center — neighborhood residents represented by Portside Homeowners Association and Safe Embarcadero for All — appealed to the board under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), objecting to an exemption from environmental review issued by the city's planning department on April 19, the board said.

Wallace Lee, a member of Safe Embarcadero for All and a stay-at-home dad who lives two blocks from the proposed site for the navigation center, said the exemption to CEQA wasn't appropriate for the scale of the project. He said the city approved the project under pressure from the mayor.

"We think that it was done as a political expediency," he said, noting how fast the project has moved since it was first proposed, "so that the mayor could meet her goal of ... having it open for business by the end of the summer."

During an interview on KQED Forum on Monday, Breed said she wanted the community "to give us a chance."

" ... hold us accountable if we're not doing everything we said we would do," she said. "If they strike down the appeal, that means we can move forward and get going. If they support the appeal, we won't be able to move forward."

If the supervisors give the city the OK next Tuesday, they'll "move full speed ahead," though there could be other challenges, Breed said.

Wallace said he didn't have a lot of confidence that the Board of Supervisors would side with opponents, and that the group would appeal the decision in court if necessary. On Monday, the city planning department also filed its response to the appeal, saying it found the proposed project was "consistent with the cited exemption."

The navigation center elicited a succession of heated, sometimes vitriolic community meetings about the project, attended by staunch advocates for and against the plan. The strongest pushback comes from residents of the South Beach, Rincon Hill and Mission Bay neighborhoods, amid concerns that the facility would transform the tourist-heavy neighborhood into a dirty, crime-ridden area and reduce property values.

San Francisco opened its first homeless navigation center in 2015 and currently operates six throughout the city. Unlike traditional shelters, the centers allow occupants to bring pets and don't make them leave in the morning.

The proposed Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center is a critical part of Breed's campaign pledge to open 1,000 new shelter beds by the end of 2020. The city is leasing the port-owned land for two years for nearly $37,000 a month, and will have the option of renewing for an additional two years if it can demonstrate the center has helped reduce homelessness.

First proposed in early March by Breed, controversy over the center erupted weeks later after a group of neighborhood residents started an online fundraiser to challenge the plan in court. That campaign, in turn, provoked a dueling fundraiser among supporters of the proposal, one that quickly eclipsed its rival and got major contributions from several high-profile tech CEOs.

The two fundraisers underscore just how divided San Franciscans are on the issue of homelessness and how to address it. Breed said Monday that the city was working on additional locations for navigation centers but wasn't ready to announce them yet.

KQED News' Matthew Green and Kate Wolffe contributed to this report.