San Francisco has directed another $32 million into a growing ecosystem of private street-monitoring organizations tasked with responding to the drug and homelessness crises.
U.S. cities grappling with poverty and untreated mental illness increasingly have turned to this workaround: deploying “ambassadors” whose job is to make street disorder less visible, if not less severe. However, few cities have embraced the model as fully as San Francisco, which has in turn cultivated a cottage industry.
The latest batch of contracts, signed in late December, expands the industry across the city, with new funding for roving teams that can be deployed as needed. The contract winners — Urban Alchemy, Ahsing Solutions, Heluna Health, Glide Foundation, and the Tenderloin Community Benefit District — fill roles that span homeless outreach to quasi-security work.
Under the contracts, the city directs the organizations to maintain public safety and cleanliness, but the share of funding devoted to workers and training differs from program to program. Here’s where the money goes.
The biggest winner: Urban Alchemy
The vast bulk of the fresh funding is going to Urban Alchemy to continue patrolling the Tenderloin, Mid-Market, and South of Market areas. The organization’s success will be measured by how many blocks it covers, how much trash and debris it clears, and how many incidents it de-escalates or responds to.
Urban Alchemy launched in San Francisco in 2018 as frustrations over open drug use, garbage, and visible homelessness on streets were reaching a fever pitch. In its first year, revenue was $35,983. That has grown exponentially (opens in new tab) since; the nonprofit reported fiscal 2024 revenue of nearly $84.9 million. Urban Alchemy now operates in Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Birmingham, Alabama.
With eight new contracts, Urban Alchemy is tasked with stopping street violence, deterring drug use, and maintaining safe passage for pedestrians in the South of Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods.
Different orgs, different priorities
A review of the agreements shows wide variation in how providers plan to allocate their funding.
The five contract winners vary in their roles and backgrounds. Ahsing Solutions is an upstart for-profit ambassador group focused on the Mission. The Tenderloin Community Benefit District is a small neighborhood beautification-focused organization. Glide, a housing and healthcare nonprofit in the Tenderloin, will focus on the Lower Polk and Lower Nob Hill neighborhoods. Heluna Health, a decades-old nonprofit that provides program support for public health work and reports annual revenue five times greater than all the others combined, is stationed around Civic Center.
Despite the highly sensitive and dangerous work carried out by ambassadors, only two organizations, Heluna Health and Ahsing Solutions, include budget lines for staff training. Ahsing has budgeted $62,000 for training staff; Heluna has budgeted $30,000 over the 18-month period.
The others, the city said, are expected to use existing funding baked into other categories to train employees.
Salaries make up the bulk of the money spent on ambassador services, though entry-level annual pay is roughly consistent between organizations.
The small disparities reflect the different responsibilities between ambassadors. By the numbers, the Tenderloin Community Benefit District appears to offer the best value for taxpayers, though its mandate is far narrower, focusing largely on stewardship of Tenderloin parks rather than maintaining order on city streets.
Other organizations, such as Urban Alchemy and Heluna Health, budget for larger teams patrolling multiple corridors.
There’s a much wider difference between executive pay at the five companies, with behemoth Heluna Health topping the charts.
An industry under fire
City leaders say contractors offer more flexibility and speed than city employees, and many residents and business owners credit the organizations with delivering at least short-term improvements to unsafe streets. Contract staffers are paid somewhat less than their public counterparts. Transparent California lists the base salary for a city-employed street inspector between $57,000 and $122,000, plus overtime, benefits, and other compensation.
But those providing unlicensed security services have drawn scrutiny for being stopgap measures that place relatively low-paid workers on the front lines of the city’s shortcomings, while doing little to address the root causes of the humanitarian crisis. Urban Alchemy and Ahsing Solutions have both denied that their organizations provide security services for the city, despite holding contracts to provide security outside their city work. The legal gray area, which is rarely enforced, has garnered criticism from security experts and advocates for homeless people.
In a December letter to Public Works Director Carla Shortt, the Laborers Union Local 261 alleged that Ahsing had undermined the city’s street-cleaning efforts by performing duplicative work, while praising Urban Alchemy for working “side by side” with city employees.
“The continued reliance on these contracting arrangements has produced waste, duplicative work, and the circumvention of worker protections,” said Theresa Foglio-Ramirez, a representative of the union. “The millions of dollars spent on these schemes could instead have expanded the full-time street cleaning workforce.”