Vol. I, No. 42 · San Francisco — Friday, September 25, 2026 · Price: 1,279 notices, one address

BY GWEN OKAFOR, HOUSING DESK

The city has a file on the building at 74 6th Street, a block south of Market Street, going back to August 23, 1994. It runs to 353 entries: complaints about no heat, a broken elevator, mice, mold, a collapsed ceiling. No other SRO in San Francisco has drawn more.

San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection (DBI) tracks 458 buildings citywide as single-room-occupancy hotels, or SROs. They are small-room, shared-bathroom housing, and they have sheltered the city’s working poor for more than a century. No SRO in the city has drawn more raw complaints than the Baldwin, and part of the reason is size: at 167 units, it is one of the largest SROs San Francisco has.

The city’s own neighborhood map puts it in South of Market, though the block sits on the line many longtime San Franciscans would call the Tenderloin instead. Even adjusted for size, the building still runs hot. Its rate, 2.1 complaints per unit since 1994, is nearly double the citywide median among similarly sized buildings, those with 10 or more units, which is 1.1. It has also drawn more than 1,200 separate written violations on top of the complaints themselves. For most of its recent history it was supportive housing for people who had been homeless. In July 2021 the city converted it into a shelter instead.

San Francisco’s own reporting has drawn a direct line between the Baldwin and the overdose crisis inside the city’s supportive-housing system. A 2022 Chronicle investigation, read tonight from an archived copy after the live page would not render, describes a caseworker who leads memorial services across the city’s SRO system. He presided over one at the Baldwin for twelve deceased tenants, at least five of whom had overdosed on fentanyl. An earlier draft of this story also attached a separate figure from the same investigation, nine deaths since 2019 with more than half from overdoses, to the Baldwin. That count belongs to the Winton Hotel, a different building in the same city program; the error was caught against the archived text before this edition shipped and is not repeated here.

The city ended the Baldwin’s run as supportive housing in July 2021, converting the building into a roughly 180-bed shelter it calls a Navigation Center, meant to move people toward permanent housing rather than house them indefinitely. It appears to still operate that way, though this desk could not confirm who runs it today beyond city documents from January 2025. San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing hosted intake services there as recently as that month. The building’s own DBI complaint history continues past it: the most recent complaint was filed on September 2, 2026. Of the 353 complaints, 325 were filed before the July 2021 conversion and 28 since. Most of the building’s record predates the shelter that runs there now, though the complaints have not stopped.

By raw count, the next closest is 516 O’Farrell Street, a corner building known as the Crosby, with 333 complaints over the same stretch. The Crosby drew its own scrutiny in a separate Chronicle investigation into the city’s SRO portfolio. That investigation counted more than 100 building-code violations there between January 2015 and August 2016, the most of any supportive-housing site the paper checked. It also found that a tenant, Julia Mann, died there in 2015; her body went unnoticed in her room for two months. The city, the nonprofit that ran the building, and its private owner spent $700,000 on repairs afterward.

By the per-unit rate, the Baldwin is not the worst in the city at all. Two blocks away at 226 6th Street, an 11-unit building has drawn 75 complaints since 1994, 6.8 per unit. At 1139 Market Street, a 31-unit building has drawn 197, 6.4 per unit. Both rates are more than triple the Baldwin’s. What sets the Baldwin apart is scale: no other SRO in the city combines its size with anywhere near its complaint history. Only six of the city’s 458 SRO buildings have never drawn a single complaint.

Both buildings are majority nonprofit-operated with city funding, and both are still active today as either supportive housing or shelter space. Confidence is high on every figure here: DBI’s complaint and violation files and the Planning Department’s land-use record were all queried live tonight. The Baldwin’s exact operator as of this week was not independently confirmed beyond city documents from January 2025.