Glide, a San Francisco charity that provides food and social services for the homeless community in the Tenderloin, is planning a $200 million redevelopment of its headquarters.
The Glide Memorial Methodist Church, where the organization is based, has stood at the corner of Ellis and Taylor streets since 1931, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The church became more widely known in the 1960s when Rev. Cecil Williams opened the congregation’s doors to the poor and disenfranchised in the neighborhood, including prostitutes, drug addicts and gay runaways.
Glide legally separated from the United Methodist Church in 2020 and negotiated a settlement that gave it legal title to the property .
“The city’s needs and the needs of Glide itself outgrew this building years ago,” CEO Karen Hanrahan said. “We have had to be creative about how to serve more and more people in a building that was built for a set of problems at a much smaller scale.”
The plan would update the building and add a kitchen large enough to accommodate e 80,000 meals a year. An HVAC system will also be installed to bring fresh air circulation to hot and stuffy rooms. The project will also yield a lobby large enough for those waiting to sit inside instead lining up around the block.
“It’s a sad spectacle. It lacks privacy. It lacks dignity,” she said. “What we want to do is get more people off the street for longer periods of time. But we can’t do it in this building because we don’t have the space.”
During the pandemic, Glide set up tents on Ellis Street and provided pop-up services in other neighborhoods.
“Glide has always evolved to meet the needs of the people around it,” Hanrahan said. “Today the needs and the scale of the challenges — with the homeless and all the issues around equity — are at a much larger scale.”
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