Urban Anarchy

by Sanjana Friedman | Mar 1, 2025

Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco–based homeless-services nonprofit, is an organization of many slogans. Those include, among others: No fuckery (“Fuckery is lying. Fuckery is injustice. Fuckery is letting ego override empathy”); Don’t look, see it through your third eye (“The third eye represents the part of us that cannot be cheated, manipulated, or deceived”); and Once you see us, you can’t unsee us (“We are game changers, impact makers and community healers”).

The last slogan is especially apt. Once you notice Urban Alchemy employees on street corners, clad in their signature camouflage pants and HiVis vests, you will start seeing them everywhere. They patrol subway stations downtown, staff public toilets in libraries, sweep streets, and mill around homeless shelters. In the morning, around City Hall, they watch silently as the local “night market”—an informal gathering of junkies, drug dealers, and stolen-goods vendors—disperses for the day. They’re not security guards or police officers, though their mission includes de-escalating dangerous situations in the absence of law enforcement. Nor are they solely street sweepers, though their job description includes clearing litter from sidewalks. They’re “practitioners,” they say, and their aim is “transforming the energy of traumatized urban spaces.”

By design, these practitioners are almost all ex-convicts. As stated on its website, Urban Alchemy believes that “[t]he trauma of long-term incarceration compels individuals to undergo inner work that transforms the self,” equipping them with “extraordinary emotional intelligence and leadership skills” and “uniquely qualifying them to connect with the most marginalized in our society.” This counterintuitive, and perhaps counterfactual, claim has served the nonprofit well during its meteoric rise.

At its founding in 2018, Urban Alchemy’s annual revenue was a mere $35,000, gleaned mainly from contracts to operate public toilets. Today, that figure exceeds $70 million, stemming largely from government contracts to perform a range of additional public services—running homeless shelters, cleaning streets, and de-escalating “non-urgent” street conflicts—across seven cities nationwide.What explains this remarkable growth? The most immediate explanation is progressive America’s faddish interest in “alternatives to policing,” which exploded in the summer after George Floyd’s death. Though Urban Alchemy’s employees are neither licensed as security guards nor properly accredited in crisis management, they have been contracted to respond to nonemergency 911 and 311 homeless-related calls in certain neighborhoods of San Francisco and Los Angeles and to run sanctioned homeless encampments in Portland and the broader Bay Area. Unsurprisingly, things often go awry: UA employees have shot and been shot, dealt drugs, and sexually assaulted clients on the job. There is scant hard evidence that their “street-psychology-based” interventions improve public safety.

Urban Alchemy is a case study in the expansion of the multibillion-dollar “homeless-services” industry. Most of us are now familiar with the phrase “homeless industrial complex” and with the fact that increased investment in our “unhoused neighbors” seems only to beget worse outcomes. The group’s rise concretely shows how this happens. Urban Alchemy began with a small contract to solve a specific challenge (public toilet operations) and was then rewarded for this work with ongoing no-bid contracts to manage other problems that cities have effectively created.

On paper, Urban Alchemy does not “police” the homeless. Its practitioners do not enforce laws, protect property, or evict those encamped in public spaces. Instead, they pursue what the nonprofit calls “complementary strategies to conventional policing and security” by, for example, trying to engage unruly and potentially violent people in conversation to de-escalate situations. It’s not entirely clear what training practitioners receive to carry out this delicate work; on its website, Urban Alchemy says that it coaches employees in “emotional intelligence, trauma-informed care, [and] motivational interviewing,” among other soft skills. (A former Urban Alchemy employee told The Nation that he received only three days of online training before starting as a practitioner.)This model often leads to subpar results—to put it generously—on the ground, both for UA employees and their clients. In Sausalito, a wealthy Marin County town that had brought in the organization to work in “several city-sanctioned homeless camps,” per the San Francisco Standard, homeless residents alleged that UA practitioners ran a “criminal syndicate” that involved trafficking crystal meth in the camps and sleeping with and physically assaulting residents. (Urban Alchemy reportedly contends that these allegations, which form the basis of an ongoing federal RICO lawsuit against it, are “frivolous and predicated on racial bias aimed at many of its Black employees.”) One practitioner was accused of attempted murder for a shooting near one of the nonprofit’s contracted San Francisco homeless shelters; another was filmed allegedly brandishing a knife while on duty; and others have been accused of repeatedly sexually harassing subordinates.

Urban Alchemy often responds to these allegations by transferring the problem employee to a different location or position. One practitioner accused of sexual harassment at a shelter in California, for example, was moved to a site in Oregon. Another who engaged in a shootout on a busy street in downtown San Francisco was subsequently put in line for a promotion to become UA’s director of community and engagement. Urban Alchemy’s attorneys reportedly argued at trial that the employee, with three prior felony firearms convictions, “acted out of character in the incident.” The organization has faced at least eight employee misconduct lawsuits in San Francisco alone.

Beyond the legal woes, there’s little evidence that Urban Alchemy’s approach to public safety improves cities’ homelessness and violence problems. A study conducted by researchers at the Stanford Ethnography Lab—which, as of December 2024, was neither published nor peer-reviewed—purportedly found that Urban Alchemy’s presence in downtown San Francisco reduced crime in certain neighborhoods; this result may have merely reflected the broader post-2020 drop in crime. While Urban Alchemy elsewhere touts that its employees have “[e]ngaged in more than 1.5 million discussions promoting pro-social behavior” and “[r]esponded to more than 40,000 non-emergency calls,” among other engagement statistics, none of these figures demonstrates that the group has reduced homelessness or crime in the areas in which it operates.

A lack of clear evidence of success has not slowed Urban Alchemy’s rapid expansion. The organization traces its roots to 2014, when San Francisco’s then–Department of Public Works director Mohammed Nuru contracted Hunters Point Family, another nonprofit, to operate public toilets in the Tenderloin at night and to clean human feces from sidewalks. After San Francisco again hired Hunters Point Family to pick up used needles and to monitor public restrooms, the group spun out an independent nonprofit—Urban Alchemy—to implement the program. The fledgling organization quickly got a boost after Nuru—since jailed for seven years on federal corruption charges—directed $1.5 million in public funds to UA for toilet operations. Later, it received another $1.2 million in public funds from the city to run a “Vehicle Triage Center,” offering services to people living in their cars.Why would Nuru, who was then one of the preeminent power brokers in city politics, direct millions to an unknown nonprofit? Perhaps as a favor to a longtime friend. In the San Francisco Standard, Matt Smith reports that Urban Alchemy CEO Lena Miller—who has spent her career working in city government and the nonprofit sector—maintained a “mutually beneficial relationship” with Nuru from the 1990s onward. Per Smith, Miller helped Nuru secure his first position in city government in the early 2000s, when she introduced him to her then-boss, Mayor Willie Brown. Nuru eventually encouraged Miller to quit her job in the mayor’s office and return full-time to nonprofits. Miller later teamed up with Bayron Wilson, who reportedly had been paroled after serving ten years in prison of a life sentence, to found Urban Alchemy. The timing paid off; under Nuru’s Department of Public Works, UA would receive $34 million in contracts.

The group’s big break, however, came in 2020, when San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing began awarding no-bid contracts, ostensibly to expedite services in a public-health emergency. The organization scored a $10 million contract to run an encampment (euphemistically termed a “safe sleeping village”) outside City Hall. Soon after, it received a no-bid contract to run “shelter-in-place” hotels—local hotels that the city rented out during the pandemic to house homeless people—and a nearly $20 million no-bid contract to run a youth hostel that the city was converting into homeless housing.

In other words, from the pandemic onward, Urban Alchemy expanded primarily through public contracts to operate programs that the city had created for it to run. The nonprofit ran state-created hotel shelters; provided services to homeless people living in state-sanctioned RV parks; and supervised state-run tent cities that the state had directed it to set up.

Neither homelessness nor homeless-services spending has declined in San Francisco while Urban Alchemy has been active. In 2019, the city’s homelessness budget was $368 million, and an estimated 8,035 people were living in shelters and on the streets; in 2024, the homelessness budget was $846 million and an estimated 8,323 were in shelters and on the streets. Overdose deaths peaked in the city last year. Retail stores continue to flee the downtown area. Yet money flows to the nonprofits unabated.

Is the finish line in sight? Urban Alchemy has warned that it may have to lay off hundreds of practitioners in 2026 if it doesn’t secure a contract extension from City Hall. But San Francisco just elected a political outsider, Daniel Lurie, as mayor, largely on his promise to bring accountability to runaway public spending. Moderate politicians who ran on similar rhetoric won crucial seats on the city’s board of supervisors. Time will tell whether anything comes of campaign-trail promises. San Francisco spends billions of dollars on contracts with more than 600 nonprofits, including Urban Alchemy. That’s a powerful interest group, unlikely to go down without a fight.