Next Door Shelter

Civic building

Next Door Shelter (civic building, run by the Police Department): $4.0M paid to contractors for work here, $815.3M budgeted for its department in FY2025, 3,007 employees on the payroll, 3 city documents at the Internet Archive, every figure linked to its source. Next Door, at 1001 Polk Street, is run for the city by Episcopal Community Services, and its record here is overwhelmingly one of oversight. The Shelter Monitoring Committee's papers show the committee pressing the Human Services Agency for an investigation, and for the release of information, about a death at the shelter on 24 December 2005, and separately meeting the agency that operates it. Public comment at those meetings is unsparing: a homeless activist told the committee that staff had no respect for clients and that, after a stabbing, the street was safer than the shelter. The dispute reached the Board of Supervisors, whose agendas record letters about the shelter at 1001 Polk Street, including one urging the director of Episcopal Community Services to stop the shelter's own director from attempting to silence a critic. The Rules Committee heard the shelter's director and site manager alongside committee members and the head of the city's housing and homeless division. The building itself has had steady, unglamorous work: shoring and underpinning in 2015, a replacement 80-ton chiller, a reroofing, and a $3.1 million partial replacement of the heating and ventilation system completed in 2023. Vendors have been paid $4.04 million on contracts recorded against the site. Source: SF Controller open data and the Internet Archive.