A San Francisco supervisor is urging the city to act quickly to purchase the Oasis Inn, a 58-room hotel that has been used as a family shelter since the pandemic, before its residents are displaced during the holidays.
The purchase could add to SF’s growing hotel-to-homeless-housing portfolio, paid for in part by almost $75 million in state Project Homekey funds in 2022 alone.
An ownership group made up of several different families has held the 1959 hotel at 900 Franklin Street for decades, according to property records. Several owners died and passed their holdings in the 22,000-square-foot, four-story property onto their heirs between 2002 and 2018.
The families have decided to sell the property as soon as possible and let the city know in September that they would not renew the lease when it expires in early January. Attempts by the city thus far to extend the lease with an option to buy have failed, according to District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston, whose district used to include the Cathedral Hill hotel before it was redrawn into District 2 this year.
At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Preston introduced a resolution, co-sponsored by District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, to get the mayor, the Office of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and the Oasis ownership group to come together as soon as possible to negotiate an extension and purchase the inn before its needy families are displaced during the holidays.
“The Oasis is a real success story,” he said at the meeting, adding that moving homeless families into the hotel during the early days of the pandemic was responsible for “saving lives and giving hope and sparking other efforts to use hotels around the city.”
The asking price has not been disclosed but homelessness department spokeswoman Emily Cohen told the San Francisco Chronicle last month that the property didn’t “rise to the top” of a list under consideration for purchase by the city when the ownership group first proposed the sale in September. The department would need months to evaluate the property’s suitability and condition and hoped to be able to extend the lease until June, she added.
Last year the city received $800 million in Measure C funding, after a lawsuit against the 2018 measure to tax the city’s largest companies to fund homelessness services and housing came to a close. But that money can only be used to buy permanent supportive housing, operate shelters and pay rent, not buy shelters, Cohen told the Chronicle. The state’s Project Homekey, however, does allow for hotels being used as interim homeless housing and therefore could be used to fund the purchase if the city wins a state grant.
The nonprofit Providence Foundation of San Francisco has run the shelter and provided supportive services at the Oasis since March 2020, when some of the rooms were initially funded by private donations. Now funded and occupied entirely by the city, it’s the only drop-in emergency family shelter operating in San Francisco, Preston said, an especially important stop-gap for nearby Fillmore families that “disproportionately provides shelter to Black families who have been displaced in their time of need.”
The Oasis has been operated for 20 years by Naresh Dhadhal, who told the Chronicle that the owners began thinking about selling in early 2022. He has been happy with the Providence Foundation’s administration of the shelter, he said, and would be OK with the city taking over, but that decision is up to the owners.