New Shelter for Homeless and Mentally Ill Opens on Valencia Street Today
They prefer to call it a “Behavioral Health Beds” facility, but a new shelter and drop-in site opened today at the former Salvation Army Community Center after a year of community pushback and pandemic delays.
Every new proposed new homeless shelter in this town is going to face some degree of opposition, though few drew as NIMBY’ed up a backlash as the 2019 Embarcadero Navigation Center affair. So when a homeless shelter was proposed at the Salvation Army Community Center at Valencia and 22nd Streets in late February 2020, the idea was not universally popular among the neighborhood’s residents. COVID and shelter-in-place would turn our worlds upside down a couple weeks later, and the issue promptly faded from the headlines.