Supervisor Dean Preston’s campaign to transform the former Red Victorian Hotel in the Haight-Ashbury District into transitional housing for young people might be a lost cause. But he hasn’t given up.
The Red Victorian in the Haight in October 2020. Sup. Dean Preston had been pressing to turn the building into a home for transitional youth.
In Preston’s opinion, The City has made a habit of cowing to a small-but-vocal contingent of residents opposed to homeless services, which they fear might make the neighborhood a magnet for the homeless. Preston’s bill essentially sends a message to Mayor London Breed’s administration: if you won’t take up my offer on the 21-room Red Vic, find a better location yourself. The legislation would require the city to find 20 transitional housing units in The Haight by the end of March of 2023.
Under Preston’s bill The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing would have to update the Board of Supervisors on The City’s progress within four months of the bill’s passage.The money for a new transitional housing facility is essentially already in hand, Preston argued. It’s the same pot of $10 million earmarked for youth transitional housing that Preston had hoped to use on the purchase of the Red Vic.
The Huckleberry Youth Health Center, also at the corner of Cole and Haight Streets, serves young people up to age 26, and about two-thirds of its clients are over 18. It’s one of the city’s coordinated entry hubs that works to connect people to housing, but the supply is short. . It wrote in a letter to the Board of Supervisors, “The last thing this neighborhood needs is another attraction for street dwellers, many of whom are drug addicts and behaviorally challenged.”