A converted parking lot at Turk and Hyde streets — one of the few places in the Tenderloin where residents can sit, eat lunch or let a dog run without leaving the neighborhood — is set to lose its city-funded caretaker, and two San Francisco newsrooms have now independently tied its closure to Mayor Daniel Lurie's budget.

The "oasis," opened by the nonprofit Urban Alchemy in 2022 on a lot once notorious for open-air drug dealing, is among the Tenderloin safety-net programs on the chopping block as the city works to close a deficit of more than $600 million. Mission Local first reported June 12 that the city will stop funding Urban Alchemy's contract to manage the space, with the date set for June 21. A day earlier, the San Francisco Examiner — reporting from a City Hall rally, not Mission Local's account — independently named the same oasis closure as a casualty of the same budget. For a neighborhood the Planning Department says has fewer open spaces per resident than anywhere else in San Francisco, the loss lands hard.

For the Tenderloin, the lot at Turk and Hyde never needed to look like much. Since 2022 it has offered seating, a dog run, restrooms, food and music in a district where greenery and a safe place to sit are scarce. Urban Alchemy built it as its first "oasis," a model the nonprofit says it has since exported to other cities.

That arrangement is ending. Mission Local reported June 12 that the city will cease funding its contract with Urban Alchemy to manage the space, with the closure dated June 21. The site itself sits on a lot owned not by the city but by SEIU Local 87, the janitors union — a wrinkle that has turned the oasis's future into a negotiation among the union, the mayor's office and the supervisor whose district includes the Tenderloin, Bilal Mahmood.

"Everyone in the community knows that having that lot be vacant is going to be bad for the neighborhood," Mahmood told Mission Local.

What makes this more than a one-outlet scoop is that the Examiner got there independently. In a June 11 dispatch from a budget rally outside City Hall, reporter Natalia Gurevich described Tenderloin organizers pleading with supervisors to restore safety-net money — and singled out the same oasis. David Elliott Lewis, chair of the Tenderloin People's Congress, told the Examiner the closure was "heartbreaking." "We don't have a lot of green spaces," he said. The two accounts were reported separately, yet land on the same fact: the Turk-and-Hyde oasis is going dark because of the budget.

The closure is not an isolated line item. According to the People's Budget Coalition, the Tenderloin stands to lose $3.8 million in program funding affecting 5,600 residents — more than any other neighborhood — if Lurie's proposal is adopted. Curry Senior Center, the Glide Foundation, Episcopal Community Services and the Southeast Asian Development Center are all named by the coalition among those facing reductions. The Tenderloin Community Action Plan, a $4 million neighborhood initiative launched under former Mayor London Breed in 2022, was not renewed in last year's budget either.

"These are not just numbers on some spreadsheet," Curtis Bradford of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation said at the rally, per the Examiner. "These are cuts to meals … to safety, to dignity, to health, to recovery, to stability — and yes, cuts to hope."

Urban Alchemy, for its part, is leaving on a defensive note. "We're incredibly proud to have pioneered the innovative oasis model here in San Francisco," spokesperson Jess Montejano told Mission Local, calling it "a safe and healthy place for some of the most vulnerable people in our community to find respite and get connected to services."

The mayor's office has framed the withdrawal as a transition rather than an abandonment, telling Mission Local it is "identifying community-driven opportunities to continue activating the space at Turk and Hyde." But no replacement operator or programming has been named, and it remains unclear whether the lot survives as any kind of public space once Urban Alchemy's workers leave.

Lurie's budget must clear the Board of Supervisors, whose Budget and Appropriations Committee — chaired by Supervisor Connie Chan — is reviewing and amending the proposal through the month before a final vote in July. That leaves a narrow window in which the oasis, and the dollars behind it, could still be restored. For now, the corner that took years to pull back from the drug trade is scheduled to lose the program that helped do it.