San Francisco’s expensive and byzantine building permit system is often blamed for many of the city’s problems, whether it’s delaying affordable housing, dooming a small bakery into months of construction limbo or forcing a homeowner to flee the city because of legal fight over backyard sheds.
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But now even San Francisco’s most famous magic mushroom church is leaving the city and citing pricey permits and building requirements as the cause.
Dave Hodges, the pastor of the Church of Ambrosia, said the church has decided to close its San Francisco location in the SoMa neighborhood at the end of this month because they can’t afford to pay for expensive improvements to their ground level windows, which he said could cost over $200,000 to comply with.
He called it a “huge setback” for his religious organization, which is built around distributing magic mushrooms, cannabis and other psychedelic substances.
“We want to make sure people have safe access to the sacraments they need and there’s a lot of people who preferred to go to the SF location,” Hodges said.
The Church of Ambrosia is one of at least a handful of psychedelic churches operating in the city. Psychedelics remain completely illegal, but non-binding resolutions have been passed in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley that instruct law enforcement to treat the use of the drugs as a lower priority.
Hodges founded his church in 2019 around the belief that cannabis, magic mushrooms and other psychedelic substances are religious sacraments that give humans spiritual insights. Any adult can join by signing up and paying a $5 membership fee, which gives them access to purchase a wide range of psychedelic products. Last year, the church expanded from its original location in Oakland to a vacant building on Howard Street in San Francisco. The church now counts over 115,000 members.
The church said in a news release that the city’s Planning Department has “targeted” the church with structural upgrades and said the department was “bent on expelling the institution.”
The pastor also said he is concerned that the department has engaged in religious discrimination against the church, pointing to comments made by the Planning Department’s chief of staff, Dan Sider, in a San Francisco Examiner article earlier this year, where Sider said it appeared members of the church were on mushrooms during one city visit to the location. Hodges denied that anyone uses psychedelic mushrooms at the church location, and said he felt the comment showed the city was “not comfortable with us.”
Sider declined to comment on Hodges’ allegations and instead directed SFGATE to the Department of Building Inspection. Patrick Hannan, a spokesperson for the department, said the Department of Building Inspection has not seen the cost estimate Hodges is referring to but said that city inspectors have two ongoing cases for plumbing and electrical violations at the property.
“The building code represents the minimum legal safety standards for a structure. When a building isn’t meeting the minimum code standards, we require the property owner fix it so it’s safe for people to occupy. That’s what we’re doing here,” Hannan said in an email to SFGATE.
The city currently lists two violation notices for the property for safety violations and unpermitted work related to “various plumbing violations,” electrical wiring and emergency exit signage.
Hodges said the church has already spent over $150,000 making upgrades to the building to comply with city demands, including fixing longstanding building problems like a sliding glass door on the second floor.
“It hasn’t been a problem that there was this sliding glass door until we moved in and then it was this major thing that we had to replace or we had to vacate the building,” Hodges said.
The breaking point came when the city required the church to upgrade windows on the building’s ground floor. The windows are currently boarded up because they have repeatedly been broken into by people outside the building, and the city told the church they needed to remove the boards and replace the windows with permanent metal security shutters, according to Hodges.
“We’ve been dealing with all of those and done our best to fix all of these problems, but the final straw was this extra $200,000 to deal with the window issue,” Hodges said. “If it wasn’t for the high crime area and if the city was a safe place to be, having large glass windows at street level wouldn’t be a problem.”
Hodges said the repairs required by the city would take at least six months of operations for his organization to generate enough revenue to cover. He said it was another sign that San Francisco regulations are stifling the city.
“It’s crazy what the city’s planning department is doing. The city in general needs to make it easier for people who want to operate business and live and grow in the city,” Hodges said.
Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed, said in an email to SFGATE that Breed has “dramatically” improved the ability for small businesses to operate in the city by cutting taxes, waiving startup fees and making over 100 changes to the city’s building code.
“These are the most dramatic changes to small business approvals that have happened in years, and our departments have been implementing them diligently,” Cretan said in an email.
Hodges said in a news release that the church welcomes all of its members to its original Oakland location and that he is open to returning to San Francisco if local leaders make it easier for him to operate, but for now “the signs of the universe are saying, ‘Get out of SF as soon as possible.’”
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