The Hearth

This is written as a response to a call for proposals for the ground floor at 995 Market. If you are reading it because I sent it to you, that is deliberate. The sections about money and terms are addressed to a landlord and will tell you more about what this actually is than a pitch deck would. Everything else is addressed to whoever wants to build it.

01 — Vision

The hearth in the heart of it

Start with something obvious that nobody does much about. A city runs on people who almost never meet each other as people.

Some fund it. Some govern it. Some build it. Some maintain it. Some protect it. Some care for people in crisis. Some are living through those crises. Most of them encounter each other only through their roles, at the worst possible moments, in the shortest possible exchanges.

So the city is carrying an enormous amount of knowledge it has almost no way of receiving. The Urban Alchemy worker who has stood on the same corner for three years knows things about that corner that nobody upstairs knows. So does the nurse. So does the building engineer, the restaurateur, the person who has survived being outside, the officer, and the person who raised the capital that put the building up. Each one holds a piece and none of them can hear the others. A city gets stupid in exactly the places where its intelligences stop talking.

A hearth is the oldest fix for this. It is the place with the fire, where anyone can come get warm, where food happens, and where people who don't know each other end up sitting near each other until something starts.

In the heart of the Tenderloin, a hearth for the Tenderloin.

Nobody has to stop being who they are to come in. The executive stays an executive. The outreach worker stays an outreach worker. Nobody has to become somebody else's idea of recovered before they belong. The roles stay. They just soften enough that people can hear through them.

The call for proposals asks for a ground floor that becomes the public gateway into the building, where the city meets the community inside. At 6th and Market a gateway has to work in both directions or it is just a lobby with better lighting.

Concretely, one floor holding several things that don't usually share a room. A juice bar and a kitchen. An apothecary. Rooms where you can get bodywork. Immersive art you walk into rather than look at. A parlor where a philosopher runs a conversation for eight-year-olds on a Saturday and for adults on a Thursday. And a facade that responds to the people walking past it, all night, whether or not they ever come in.

Here's the story we keep coming back to. A software engineer upstairs finally starts sleeping properly. Gets some bodywork. Lays off the energy drinks. Comes down for a juice and ends up in a conversation with someone from the block who needs something built. Maybe he builds it. But the thing that mattered wasn't the app — it was that they made it together, which required him to listen first. That's a friendship instead of a passing hello. That's what a hearth does. It's warmth that lights other people's fires.

And on a Tuesday morning an Urban Alchemy worker coming off shift can sit down, get a free massage and a good juice, and take a load off in a room that isn't asking anything of them. Nothing is being forced on anyone. The idea is to drip-feed this kind of care into a block that has been told for years that it belongs to other people, and to charge a fair premium to those who have more than enough and to the visitors who wander in off Market Street.

None of which would be new for this address. The David Hewes building has gone up in 1908 and since housed Compass Family Services, an Urban Alchemy office, the Burning Man headquarters, and a WeWork. Social services, civic ritual and startup culture have all lived at 995 Market already. They have just never shared a floor.

01a — What it does

Five things, in plain words

Everything in this proposal is one of five very old human functions. If you remember nothing else, remember these.

• WelcomeThere is room for you here. Food, warmth, rest, somewhere to sit that isn't a waiting room, and someone at the door who is glad you came.
• NoticeSeeing what's actually here rather than what we assume. Storytelling, immersive work, listening, and keeping a record so that what people say doesn't evaporate.
• CareTending what we've been given. Bodywork, food, cleaning, repair, maintenance — of the building and of the people in it.
• ConnectCarrying knowledge across boundaries it doesn't normally cross. Between the street and the upper floors, the neighborhood and city hall, the practitioner and the funder.
• MakeWhat exists isn't the only thing that could exist. Building things together — tools, art, meals, arguments — with the people they're for.

Welcome. Notice. Care. Connect. Make. A twelve-year-old can follow that list, and so can a city official, and so can someone sleeping in the doorway outside. We wrote it that way on purpose.

How we avoid rebuilding the same hierarchy indoors

The obvious failure mode is that we reproduce the city inside the room. Donors upstairs, vulnerable people downstairs, professionals serving, artists documenting, administrators managing. Same arrangement as always, with better furniture.

The specific thing we'd design against is the provider-and-recipient split, because it's the one that hardens fastest. The practical version: hosting rotates. Today someone makes the tea; another day they're the one being told something they needed to hear; another day everyone's stacking chairs. A person who mostly receives services in the rest of their life should sometimes be the host here, and the person who funds the building should sometimes be the newcomer who doesn't know where anything is.

We mean this as an operating instruction for whoever ends up running the floor, written into how shifts, programming and the threshold role get structured, rather than as a line in a mission statement.

The older names for these five

For anyone who finds it useful: these five map onto figures that turn up in most cultures that have thought about how a community holds itself together.

The Host holds difference without requiring sameness — the one who asks who has entered, what they need, and what they might offer. The Witness refuses to let people become invisible. The Steward cares for what's been entrusted. The Messenger carries word across boundaries. The Maker insists that things could be otherwise.

Each has a shadow, and the shadows are what most institutions get stuck in. Governance that allocates without ever encountering consequences. Enforcement that keeps order and loses tenderness. Caregiving that becomes exhausted martyrdom. Commerce that prices everything and values nothing. Expertise that understands the system without touching what the system does to bodies. Art that represents suffering brilliantly from outside it.

None of these figures is wrong. The trouble starts when a person or an institution can only inhabit one of them, and forgets it's a role they're playing. A healthy city needs people who can move between them — the executive who is sometimes the listener, the outreach worker who gets to be the guest.

We put the Host at the center rather than the Healer, because a healer implies sick people, and rather than the Hero, because a hero implies someone who needs rescuing.

03 — Financial proposal

Three ways this opens

Money in this city is abundant and almost all of it is looking for a return. So rather than name one number and hope, here are three honest versions of the same idea at different funding levels. All three are real. Two of them we can start without anyone's permission.

For scale: a conventional restaurant buildout in 7,700 square feet on this corner runs one and a half to three million dollars. Everything below is a fraction of that, and the largest version still leaves the floor recoverable.

Read the one-page financial summary →

	A · Ember	B · Hearth	C · Funded
Total	$191k	$400k	Grant-scale
Footprint	~2,500 sf, rest curtained off	Full floor	Full floor plus network nodes
Runway	4 months	6 months, 12 with sponsorship	Multi-year
Staffing	GM half-time, one host	GM, two hosts	Full team plus programme staff
Days open	Four days a week	Seven	Seven, extended
Buildout	None. Rugs, fabric, scrim.	None structural. Same approach at scale.	Real buildout: flooring, plumbing, wet program
Recoverable	~85%	~75%	Phase 1 largely fixed

A · Ember — about $175,000

Activate a quarter of the floor and curtain the rest. This is the version that proves the concept exists and gets a facade lit on a dark corner, and it is the one we can raise without a lead funder.

Nothing touches the building. The carpet stays under large durable rugs. Fabric and scrim on the walls and hung from the ceiling grid hides the water-stained tiles, softens the acoustics, and doubles as projection surface. All of it walks out with us.

$22,000	Exterior projector in a weatherproof enclosure, bright enough for Market Street at night. The single least negotiable line here.
$22,000	Furniture. Refurbished commercial-grade, sourced secondhand where possible.
$14,000	Rugs, fabric, scrim, hanging hardware. Walls and ceiling handled without touching either.
$12,000	Interior projection and media server.
$12,000	Permits and a designer for drawings.
$10,000	Lighting and sound.
$6,000	Six VR headsets, cases, sanitation, device management.
$6,000	Beverage. Pre-packaged and partner cart only, since plumbing is out of scope at this level.
$5,000	Two portable treatment tables, partitions, linens.
$5,000	Network, cameras, signage.
$5,000	Insurance binder.
$12,000	Contingency.
$131,000	Capital
$20,000	Pre-opening
$40,000	Four months of working capital. Burn at this level runs about $15,500 a month against revenue covering 20% in month one and 50% by month four.
$191,000	Ember, complete

B · Hearth — about $400,000

The whole floor, seven days, twelve months of runway. This is the version worth actually doing, and the number we are raising toward.

$60,000	Furniture. Commercial-grade seating for sixty to eighty people, built to survive a public room.
$55,000	Projection, interior and exterior, with redundancy and a proper media server.
$35,000	Rugs, fabric, scrim, acoustic treatment across the full floor.
$30,000	Juice bar and kitchen with a three-compartment sink and hand sink, subject to Health.
$25,000	Lighting and sound at full-floor scale.
$18,000	Permits, drawings, and a code consultant on the assembly-use question.
$12,000	Twelve VR headsets and management.
$10,000	Treatment rooms, portable partitions, acoustic separation.
$10,000	Network, cameras, signage, wayfinding.
$20,000	Contingency at roughly 10%.
$275,000	Capital
$35,000	Pre-opening, including the GM hired six weeks ahead
$90,000	Six months of the gap between a $27,700 burn and a revenue line that starts near zero
$400,000	Hearth, opened and funded through month six

C · Funded

We have an application in to a large San Francisco philanthropic competition. If it lands, this stops being a pop-up: real flooring, plumbed treatment rooms, the wet programme, and additional sites in other neighbourhoods.

Two things about C worth being straight about. Awards are not announced until autumn 2027, so it cannot fund the opening. And finalist selection happens in the first half of 2027, which means B has to already be running for C to be credible. The scrappy version is not a fallback from the funded one. It is the thing that earns it.

How $400,000 gets assembled

Not one cheque. Six or seven, most of them modest.

• Founding sponsor of free access · $40,000/yrThe free tier for frontline workers costs about $36,000 a year and does not belong on an operating P&L. Frontier Tower is the natural first ask: your name on free access for the people who work these blocks, in your own building. Cleaner story than a rent concession and roughly the same money.
• Programme sponsors · $25,000–50,000 eachFour to six of them. Named programme strands: the youth technology programme, the artist commissions, the parlour, the recovery hours.
• Operator deposits and licence fees · $25,000–30,000Collected up front from stall and treatment-room operators, as food halls normally do. Available on day one.
• Grants · $50,000–75,000The programming and public-activation side is grant-eligible in ways retail never is. Arts, youth, and public-space funders.
• In kindEquipment loans from manufacturers wanting a downtown showcase, artist-supplied gear, furniture donation, professional services. Realistically worth $30,000–50,000 and it is how projects like this actually get built.
• Founder capitalMine, at whatever the gap turns out to be.

Getting from month six to breakeven. $400,000 opens the full floor and funds it through month six. Carrying it to month twelve at the same ramp costs roughly another $93,000, and there are three ways to find it rather than one. Sponsorship arriving during year one, which is the plan. Revenue running ahead of the ramp, which is possible but not something to budget on. Or trimming to four days a week with a half-time GM for a quarter, which drops the burn by about a third and buys the time back. Better to show you all three than to pretend the first one is certain.

Below about $150,000 we would rather not open. On this corner, a room that looks underfunded is worse than a room that is not there yet.

What it costs to run

$9,000	General manager, fully loaded including PEO burden
$5,500	Two part-time hosts across opening hours
$3,000	Programming and artist commissions
$2,500	Utilities, internet, waste
$2,000	Cleaning and overnight security
$1,500	POS, software, bookkeeping, accounting
$1,200	Insurance
$3,000	Repairs, replacement, consumables
$27,700	Roughly $28,000 a month at scenario B

Against that: percentage rent from licensed stalls and treatment rooms, memberships, ticketed programming, event hire, and apothecary retail. Percentage rent ramps slowly by design, because operators need time to build a following. We plan on revenue covering roughly 20% of cost in month one and 70% by month twelve.

Insurance. Commercial general liability at $1M per occurrence and $2M aggregate, with Frontier Tower and ownership named as additional insured. Workers' comp through the PEO. Each licensed operator carries their own policy naming us and you. Special event coverage for programming. Roughly $14,000 a year pending a broker quote.

The question that could change all three numbers

Going from vacant retail to assembly use triggers occupant load, egress, ADA path of travel, restroom count, and fire requirements. That is the largest hidden cost in this proposal and the most likely source of delay.

What we need from you early: what does the existing certificate of occupancy permit, and is any assembly use already entitled on this floor? If it is, months and possibly six figures come off. If it is not, the phasing changes and we would rather know now than in month four.

Separately, the water-stained ceiling tiles are a symptom of something above them. We have not budgeted to repair the building envelope and would not propose to. That belongs in the letter of intent.

Every figure here is ours to defend and all of them will move. What is missing is your side: carrying cost on this floor, CAM structure, what the building needs this space to return, the certificate of occupancy, and what is already entitled for the facade. Give us those and there is a full month-by-month model within a week, built by someone who has run these line items for four years in this corridor.

05 — Programming

What happens in here on a given week

• DailyJuice bar and kitchen. Apothecary open. Treatment rooms by appointment, with reserved free slots for frontline workers. The gallery volume open and free to walk into.
• WeeklyA parlor session — a real philosophical question, run by someone who knows how, open to whoever shows up. One session for kids and families, one for adults. Iris Oved's Parlor of Ideas is the model we have in mind for what this looks like done well.
• WeeklyMaking from the heart, not an industrial makerspace. Someone from the block needs something built: a tool, a site, a sign, a repair. It gets made with them rather than for them. Some of what's made gets given to the block.
• MonthlyA new immersive commission opens. Local artists first, commissioned rather than speculative, named, rights retained.
• MonthlyA convening: organizations working the same blocks who rarely share a room, around one question, with what surfaces going into a public record.
• OngoingWellness and longevity programming, including measurement for those who want it — sleep, recovery, stress markers. Available to the free tier on the same terms as the paying one, because a longevity program that only measures wealthy people is a marketing exercise.
• OngoingYouth technology access. See section 08.

07 — Hours of operation

Built around who is actually awake

Most retail hours in this corridor are designed for an office population that no longer exists in the same numbers. We'd rather design around the people who are genuinely on this block at each hour.

Hours	Who it's for
6:00–9:00	Shift change. Frontline workers coming off overnight — street teams, shelter staff, medics. Juice, food, a treatment room, somewhere quiet. This is the hour nothing else is open for them, and it's the hour we most want to exist.
9:00–12:00	Building tenants and neighborhood. Bodywork, apothecary, coffee and juice, quiet work.
12:00–18:00	Open floor. Gallery free to enter, kitchen running, walk-in trade, visitors. Weekend parlor sessions and family programming.
18:00–22:00	Programming. Parlor evenings, openings, convenings, ticketed immersive work. The revenue-dense hours.
22:00–6:00	Interior closed. Facade running all night.

Staffing the 6am open is a real cost and we've counted it. We think it's the single most distinctive thing on this schedule and the one we'd defend hardest.

09 — Team

Who's here, and the role we're recruiting

The most important line on this page is that we are looking for a general manager to run this floor, and it is not me. Better to say so plainly than to imply a staffing plan that does not exist.

My own operating experience is exactly why I know the difference between designing this and running it. A floor like this is a full-time job with real accountability and it needs somebody whose whole attention is on it. My contribution is the concept, the coalition, and the standard — not the daily operation.

• The open role — General Manager of the floorDaily operations, licensed operators, staffing, the threshold, and the free-tier commitment. We're looking first among people who already know this corridor from the inside. Urban Alchemy, Code Tenderloin and comparable organizations have people who have run harder rooms than this one with less recognition and less budget. If Frontier Tower knows candidates, we'd take that introduction seriously. The whole thing rests on this hire and we are not going to fake it.
• Michael Lopez — concept, coalition, civic recordFounding architect and convener, in a consulting and collaborating capacity rather than an operating one. Four years as General Manager of a 418-unit residential and retail complex in this corridor: leasing, buildout, vendors, permitting, compliance, incidents, ground-floor retail. Roughly fifteen years in this part of the city. That's how I know what these line items cost and what this block does at three in the morning. First place, PLACES track, RP1 Open Metaverse Hackathon; first place, Frontier Forecast 2026. Self-taught developer building spatial and civic software. I'll write the operating standard, convene the partners, and build the record. Background.
• Immersive and spatial designA 3D designer engaged and enthusiastic, plus an artist network reachable through Gray Area's community. Commissions run as an open call.
• Bodywork and restorative practicePractitioner network in formation. Licensed, carrying their own insurance, operating under room licenses rather than employment.
• Research and measurementConversations underway with a stress-lab researcher and with CIIS. We want someone external holding the measurement honest.
• Community and housingMarc Roth, longtime collaborator, Learning Shelter. Mark Juarez. Both engaged on the broader network concept.
• Still openThe GM above. An F&B operator for the kitchen and juice bar. An apothecary operator. Introductions welcome and genuinely useful.

Nobody named here has signed anything yet. A team that is genuinely forming seems more useful to show than a letterhead full of logos.