If there’s one neighborhood where Mayor Daniel Lurie’s insistence that San Francisco is back doesn’t resonate, it’s District 6.
In a conference room at Moscone Center Monday night, the mayor’s office and the office of Supervisor Matt Dorsey sponsored an “open house,” as the mayor has done in other districts, to hear directly from residents from Union Square, Mid-Market, and South of Market, ahead of the Nov. 3 election in which Dorsey faces Alex Behrend. Cookies and coffee were served, as neighbors spoke with representatives from more than a dozen city agencies, law enforcement officials, and members of Lurie’s and Dorsey’s staff.
The event went smoothly enough — until Dorsey introduced the mayor.
“Mayor Lurie, your ballot initiatives are funded by billionaires Chris Larsen and Michael Moritz!” a heckler shouted. As the young man continued badgering Lurie about his support for Manny Yuketiel, the mayor did his best to speak over him.
“We’re not here for you,” Lurie told the heckler. “We’re here for the district, so I’m happy to talk to you afterwards.”
The sheriff’s deputies removed the heckler to applause from the crowd, allowing the mayor to continue his familiar cheerleading of San Francisco, a “city on the rise” reflecting “hope and optimism.”
“When this city is at its best, there is no one that can beat us. We are the greatest city in the world,” Lurie told the crowd. The pronouncement was met with silence.
Pivoting to public safety, and what Lurie described as the “behavioral health crisis” in D6, he acknowledged that street conditions in SoMa remain unacceptable. “We have to do better by you all,” Lurie said. “And we’re going to do better.”
After Lurie’s brief remarks, and another heckler interrupting Dorsey was removed, the mayor waded into the crowd to talk with residents. (He was accompanied by a staff member taking notes.)
The mayor was greeted by one man who said he lives with his daughter in a building at the corner of 10th and Mission streets. After the city’s Human Services Agency opened a drug treatment center nearby, he told Lurie, his family has faced “a parade of drug addicts that get services, and smoke fentanyl, in front of our building.” The mayor asked for the exact address and took note.
Another man, Mark Sackett, told Lurie about The Box SF, his unusual shop in the former printing plant of The San Francisco Examiner at 1069 Howard St. in SoMA. When law enforcement moves drug users from one area of the neighborhood, “They all scatter to the next alley, or wherever, and that goes to our business,” Sackett told the mayor. Property taxes, insurance, and broken windows are adding up, he said. “I don’t know how we’re going to solve it, but we can’t sustain it,” Sackett said.
“I understand your frustration,” Lurie told him.
“I’ve been a big supporter of yours since you got elected,” Sackett said. “I need to say that the shine is wearing thin.”
“I hear you,” Lurie said.
If Lurie wasn’t aware of the troubling conditions in D6 coming into the open house, he should’ve been, Sackett later told Gazetteer SF.
“I was just telling him we need help down here. SoMa is dying. And he goes, ‘I’m working on it. I’m working on it,’” Sackett said. “I mean, he at least listened to me.” Sackett gave Lurie a copy of a letter that he wrote to the mayor in April 2025, explaining the challenging conditions he faces. “I said, ‘I sent this to you with no response, and he put it in his pocket and told me he would read it.’”
The city’s RESET Center was supposed to solve many of the problems Lurie heard about from D6 residents on Monday night. Opened in May, the mayor claimed the new sobering center had immediately moved “dozens and dozens” of drug users at “speed and volume” off D6’s streets. More than five months later, the criticism from residents at Monday’s event, and statistics they point to, confirm previous reporting by Gazetteer that RESET hasn’t proved to be the remedy the mayor promised.
Shaun Aukland, a member of neighborhood association SoMa West, said D6 is home to the highest number of violent crimes in the city last year. The district ranks highest in property crime, assaults, and homicides, he said. (SoMa West relies in part on data from SFResponse.org). Figures in many of those categories have increased in the last six months, according to a fact sheet that Aukland presented to Lurie at his office at a meeting a couple weeks ago.
“He said he was surprised by the numbers,” Aukland said.
According to Aukland, RESET is admitting 22 percent of the number of drug users it can handle. A recent hearing at City Hall revealed why: Police are only bringing patients to the center during daytime, not overnight, Aukland said.
Sheriff Paul Miyamoto confirmed as much at the open house. “There’s just not enough of us out there trying to get more people off the street,” Miyamoto said.
The sheriff, whose office oversees RESET, said he is short 150 deputies. Those on duty are stretched thin handling drug use on Mission Street between 16th and 24th streets, he said. With additional recruits, Miyamoto said, he plans to deploy more deputies at night and into the early morning hours.
More people are also needed in SFPD. Dorsey told Gazetteer that the department is short more than 700 officers. The department should be staffed at 2,257 officers but currently has 1,537 on the street, he said.
“We don’t seem to have the bandwidth to keep [RESET] at anything close to capacity,” Dorsey said in the interview. The shortage of officers “bedevils everything we’re trying to accomplish on public safety.”
RESET, Dorsey added, is “a model that has a lot of potential, but we’ve got a bottleneck in terms of enforcement that’s really disappointing.”
Aukland said that at his meeting with Lurie, SoMa West made specific requests for the city to spread D6’s concentration of homeless shelters more evenly throughout the city, create more parks and open space, expand hospitality zones, and to increase, and improve, policing. According to Aukland, the organization never heard back.
The open house at Moscone, Aukland said, amounted to a “photo op” for the mayor.
“I think they’re more interested in telling people how things are versus understanding how things are, and making them better,” he said.
