The Hearth — a proposal for the ground floor at 995 Market

Concept: A hearth for the Tenderloin. One floor, several independent operators, a shared living room.
Uses: Juice bar and kitchen · apothecary · bodywork rooms · immersive art · philosophical inquiry and public programming · interactive facade
Structure sought: Pop-up to permanent, revenue share during activation, with defined conversion terms
Why it pencils: Risk distributed across several small operators rather than concentrated in one tenant
Operator: Four years running a 418-unit mixed-use residential and retail complex in this corridor

01 — Vision

The hearth in the heart of it

You asked for a ground floor that becomes the public gateway in — where the city meets the community inside. At 6th and Market, that gateway has to work in both directions, or it isn't a gateway. It's a lobby.

What we want to build is a hearth. The oldest civic technology there is: the place with the fire, where anyone can come get warm, where food happens, where people who don't know each other end up sitting near each other and something starts.

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

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. Nobody is forcing wellness on anybody. We're drip-feeding it to a block that has been told for years that this kind of care is for other people, and charging a fair premium to those who have more than enough and to the visitors who will walk 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 already lived at 995 Market. They just never shared a floor.

02 — Business model

Many small bets, one floor

The single biggest risk on 7,700 square feet is a single tenant. One concept, one operator, one point of failure, and a dark corner at 6th and Market if it doesn't work.

So we'd rather borrow a structure that already works. Avanti Food & Beverage on Pearl Street in Boulder runs roughly 13,000 square feet as a two-story hall with about seven chef-driven concepts in modified shipping containers, operated as an incubator — concepts test, some graduate, some rotate out, and the hall absorbs the churn without going dark.

We're proposing the same structure applied to more than food. At 7,700 square feet that means fewer stalls and more commons. Not six restaurants — a kitchen and juice bar, an apothecary, two or three treatment rooms, a gallery volume, and a parlor, each run by an operator who is good at that one thing, with us operating the floor, the threshold, and the shared program.

Revenue to the floorStall licenses and percentage rent from independent operators; a share of treatment-room bookings; event and private hire; ticketed immersive programming; memberships; retail through the apothecary; facade commissions and sponsorship.
Revenue to Frontier TowerRevenue share during the activation period, converting to a defined base plus percentage on a schedule we'd agree. Structured so your downside is capped while the concept is unproven and your upside is real once it isn't.
What the surplus doesCross-subsidy. Full-price memberships, walk-in retail, events, and visitor traffic pay for free access for frontline workers — outreach staff, shelter staff, medics, street teams. This is not a discount program bolted on. It's the reason the business exists, and it's what makes the space legible to the neighborhood rather than resented by it.
Why tenants will comeA small operator cannot get a corner on Market Street. They can get a stall in one. We take the lease risk and the buildout; they bring a concept and a following.

Why the ground floor of this particular building

Frontier Tower has hundreds of founders, engineers, scientists and artists upstairs. That's a captive daytime population with money, poor sleep, and — if the last few years of health data are any guide — a strong interest in exactly the services we'd be running. They are the premium side of the cross-subsidy, and they're already in the building.

Meanwhile the corner is one of the most-walked and least-loved in the city. A ground floor that only serves upstairs is a moat. A ground floor that serves both is a gateway, which is what you said you wanted.

03 — Financial proposal

Numbers, and which ones are real yet

We'd rather show you the structure and be honest about what we haven't built than hand you a spreadsheet with invented confidence in it. Here's the shape; the figures get filled in with you, against your actual carrying costs and your appetite.

Activation period — months 1 to 12Percentage of gross to Frontier Tower at [__%], no base rent, we cover our own buildout at the light level. You get a lit corner and foot traffic during a period when the alternative is a boarded window.
Conversion — month 13 onwardBase of [$__/sf/yr] plus [__%] over a breakpoint of [$___], on a [__]-year term with options. Conversion triggered by agreed performance thresholds rather than by the calendar, so neither of us is locked into something that isn't working.
Sublicense incomeStall and treatment-room operators pay us; we pay you. You have one counterparty and one payment, not seven leases to administer.
Free-access budgetA fixed percentage of net revenue, stated in the agreement, ring-fenced for free services to frontline workers. We want this contractual rather than aspirational, and we're happy for you to hold us to it.
Grant and philanthropic layerThe programming and public-activation side is grant-eligible in a way that retail isn't. We're pursuing that separately, and it reduces what the commercial side has to carry. See section 09.

The honest version: the operating model is built from four years of running mixed-use in this corridor, and I know what these line items cost. What I don't yet have is your carrying cost on this floor, your CAM structure, or what the building needs this space to return. Give me those and you'll have a real model inside a week.

04 — Capital investment

Three phases, smallest first

Phase 0 — Pop-up · weeks, not months

Furniture, lighting, a juice counter, a projector on the facade, and programming. Demountable, largely reusable, and cheap enough that if the concept is wrong we all find out for the price of a decent party rather than a buildout.

Capital: ours. Estimate [$__k].

Phase 1 — Light buildout · months 3 to 12

Stall infrastructure on the Avanti model, commercial kitchen, two to three treatment rooms with acoustic separation, apothecary casework, gallery volume with rigging and blackout, permanent facade projection. Plumbing to treatment rooms is the main cost driver.

Capital: shared, split to be negotiated. Estimate [$___k]. TI contribution sought: [$___k].

Phase 2 — Wet program · year 2 and beyond, only if earned

Bathing infrastructure — the thing this is ultimately for, and the thing we're least willing to build before we've proven the rest. Serious capital, serious permitting, and structural questions about a wet floor in this building we haven't yet asked anyone to answer.

Contingent on Phase 1 performance. Financed separately, not from operations.

The point of the phasing is that you're never exposed to more than the last phase proved. If we're wrong, we're wrong early and cheaply, and you have a lit corner and some data instead of a failed tenant and a restoration bill.

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 and we hope the partner.
WeeklyMaking from the heart, not an industrial makerspace. Someone from the block needs something — a tool, a site, a sign, a repair — and 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.

06 — Public activation

The facade, and the corner it stands on

The windows are boarded. I've managed property in this corridor long enough to say plainly: glass at 6th and Market gets broken, repeatedly, and the boards are a rational response, not a failure of will.

That's an opportunity, not a problem. Projection doesn't need glass. A boarded facade is a better projection surface than a window, and it can be built to take abuse in a way a storefront can't.

So the exterior becomes the most public thing we make: an interactive facade where your own movement changes what's on the wall. Durable at the physical level, intimate at the experiential one. Free, requiring nothing of anyone, running at the hours when this corner is hardest.

Most people who encounter this building will never come inside. The facade is for them. Somebody standing outside at two in the morning, on whatever they're on, probably isn't looking. But sometimes they will be, and in that moment they'll see themselves reflected in something beautiful that responds to them. That's worth building for.

We'd run it as an open commission — local artists first, then invited work from elsewhere, rotating. Every piece credited. The reference point for what the medium can do is Dataland in Los Angeles.

Permits, and what we'd need to check

Exterior projection and illuminated signage at this scale likely touch San Francisco Planning and possibly DBI, and the rules differ for temporary versus permanent installation. We'd want your team's read on what's already entitled for this facade before committing to a schedule. This is the piece most likely to slip, and we'd rather flag it now than discover it in month four.

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.

08 — Community

The block, and a debt to pay

I've worked this corridor for years — most recently four of them running a 418-unit mixed-use complex with ground-floor retail a few blocks from here. I've been asking people in the Tenderloin one question for a while now: if you had a home tomorrow and every physical need met, what's the first thing you'd do? Almost nobody names a thing. They want to call their family. They want to stop being looked through. That's the finding this whole proposal is built on, and it's written up at length in What the City Forgets.

Concretely, here's what community means in the operating plan:

HiringThe threshold role — the person at the door — is a real job requiring real training, and we intend to hire it from the neighborhood, through organizations that already do placement here.
Free tierContractually ring-fenced, not discretionary. Frontline workers at partner organizations get treatment-room slots and food at no cost.
Partner organizationsConversations underway or intended with Urban Alchemy, Code Tenderloin, the Tenderloin Museum, Gray Area, and Paradox Lab. None has committed and we won't imply otherwise until they have.
What we're notNot a clinic, not a shelter, not a crisis-response site. Claiming otherwise would set someone up to be turned away at the worst possible moment. What we can do is know the neighborhood well enough to walk someone to the right place and follow up next week.

One more thing, and it's the reason this building rather than another one.

John McCartney sat at the desk in this lobby for more than twenty years. Doorman was the job title. As he told Noah Chon Lee, who now sits in the same seat: "I'm not a doorman. That's just what people see."

The block knew him as the Mayor of Sixth Street. Neighborhood business owners, people coming in for Compass Family Services, people from Urban Alchemy — both of which had offices in this building — and eventually their kids, all got greeted by name. Through the pandemic years, when the building was dark, he sat in that lobby alone.

And when some men with German accents came by asking whether he approved of the building, he did what he always did. He made them feel welcome, told them its history, and put in a word with the owner so they could buy it.

Frontier Tower exists in part because the man at the front desk was good at making strangers feel like they belonged here.

He died in October 2025. His celebration of life was the largest gathering the Tower had ever held. What he'd been telling people, right to the end, was to link up and be a community again.

He told me about street geeks more than once — a place where kids from these blocks could come in and learn technology and see what they might become. He never got the room to do it in. That room is the ground floor of the building he worked in, and it is currently boarded up.

09 — Team

Who's here, and who isn't yet

Michael Lopez — operations and leadGeneral Manager of a 418-unit residential and retail complex in the SoMa/Tenderloin corridor for four years: leasing, buildout, vendor management, permitting, compliance, incidents, ground-floor retail operations. Roughly fifteen years in this part of the city before that. First place, PLACES track, RP1 Open Metaverse Hackathon. First place, Frontier Forecast 2026. Self-taught developer building spatial and civic software. Background.
Inquiry and public programmingIris Oved, PhD in philosophy and cognitive science, founder of Paradox Lab, runs the Exploratorium's After Dark Philosophy Salon. In active conversation about the Parlor of Ideas anchoring the programming side. Not yet committed.
Immersive and spatial designA 3D designer engaged and enthusiastic, plus an artist network through Gray Area's community. Commissions to be run as an open call.
Bodywork and restorative practicePractitioner network in formation. Licensed practitioners required; this is a hiring line, not a volunteer one. I'm entering massage school myself, which is a personal commitment rather than a staffing plan.
Research and measurementConversations underway with a stress-lab researcher and with CIIS. We want someone external holding the measurement honest.
Community and housingMark Roth, longtime collaborator, Learning Shelter. Mark Juarez. Both engaged on the broader network concept.
Still openA food and beverage operator for the kitchen and juice bar. An apothecary operator. A general manager for the floor itself once it's running. If Frontier Tower knows people, we'd welcome introductions — that's a genuine ask, not a courtesy.

Being straight with you

What's still emerging

You asked for proposals that rethink what a public gathering space can be, and you said you're open to entirely new concepts. Taking that seriously means showing you a concept that isn't finished, rather than a finished concept that's smaller than what you asked for.

What's solid: the operating experience, the corridor knowledge, the cross-subsidy logic, the phasing, the facade strategy, and the reason this belongs at 6th and Market specifically.

What isn't yet: the financial model against your actual numbers, signed partners, an F&B operator, the entity structure, and whether Phase 2 is even feasible in this building. We'd rather work those out with you than present them as settled.

We also know Frontier Tower's own position may be more complicated than a standard lease conversation, which is part of why we're proposing a structure with a low floor for you and a real upside if it works.