Nuns who help homeless face eviction in costly San Francisco
Sister Mary Valerie places cake on a tray to serve at the Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth Soup Kitchen in San Francisco Tuesday.
Signs hang on the front of the Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth Soup Kitchen behind a line of people waiting for food to be served in San Francisco Tuesday.
Sister Mary Benedicte serves food at the Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth Soup Kitchen in San Francisco, Tuesday. Nuns who serve the homeless are in danger of getting kicked out of their home after a rent increase of more than 50 percent.
Sister Mary Valerie hands out bags of popcorn at Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth Soup Kitchen in San Francisco Tuesday.
SAN FRANCISCO – Sister Mary Benedicte wants to focus on feeding the hungry lined up outside a soup kitchen in a gritty part of San Francisco.
But the city’s booming economy means even seedy neighborhoods are demanding higher rents, threatening to force out an order of nuns who serve the homeless.
The sisters of Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth said Tuesday they can’t afford a monthly rent increase of more than 50 percent, from $3,465 to $5,500, and asked their landlord for more time to find a cheaper place to serve the poor.
“Everywhere, the rent is very high, and many places don’t want a soup kitchen in their place,” said Sister Mary Benedicte Tuesday, her English accented in French.
“It’s very, very hard to find a place for a soup kitchen where people can feel welcome and where we can set up a kitchen for a reasonable price.”
Since 2008, the modest kitchen sat on a derelict street in the Tenderloin neighborhood, long associated with homelessness and drug use. But it’s also within walking distance of a revitalizing middle Market Street area, led by the relocation of Twitter in 2012.
The still-seedy neighborhood, in other words, is trending up.
Retail rents in the district are considerably higher since the time before Twitter, when space went empty during the recession, said Brad Lagomarsino, an executive vice president with commercial real estate company Colliers International.
Sister Mary Benedicte and Sister Mary of the Angels sleep in the back of the storefront and in the evenings, they bake pastries – French tarts and cookies – to sell at a local farmer’s market to supplement their income.
The two sisters feed lunch to about 300 people three times a week. They offer dinner twice a week, using donated food and cash to dish up warm meals.
With help from a small number of volunteers, they served a lunch of vegetables and sausage, creole rice and cake Tuesday.
“We not only feed them, we try to love them,” Sister Mary Benedicte said. “Poor people, what’s very hard for them is to be alone on the street. Some of them say the hardest part of living on the street is that nobody wants to speak with them.”
A lawyer for the landlord said by email Tuesday that “no eviction is going forward” and the owner will meet with the nuns when he returns from India this week. The nuns also have a lawyer, who is working their case for free.
Faith-based organizations throughout the city are struggling to pay rent while providing social services to the needy, said Michael Pappas, executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council.
Some are renegotiating leases while others have had to cut back on office space or raise money to rehabilitate new property.
This isn’t the San Francisco he knows.
“We were always looked upon as the pioneers in philanthropy,” he said, “and I just think the forces of the economy are challenging us right now.”