S.F. philanthropists are revitalizing the city’s public spaces. We need a human infrastructure fund, too.

July 6, 2026

The following op-ed by St. Anthony’s CEO, Larry Kwan, was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle. We’re pleased to share it here with our community.

Teena arrived in San Francisco with two suitcases, a baby, and nowhere to go. When she walked through the doors of St. Anthony’s on Golden Gate Avenue, she received a meal, a case manager at our Women’s and Children’s Services, and eventually a path to an apartment of her own. A year later, Teena works in the kitchen at St. Anthony’s, helping feed the community that once fed her when she had nothing. “All I needed was a start,” she says, “and I took off running.”

Every morning in San Francisco, thousands of people walk past extraordinary wealth and extraordinary suffering within the same city block. A founder leaves for a matcha break at an AI startup valued in the billions. A family waits in line for free breakfast in the Tenderloin. Engineers negotiate compensation packages larger than most people will earn in a lifetime, while seniors and families choose between medicine and groceries. One of the most innovative cities in human history still struggles to guarantee safety, stability, and a fair shot for many of its own residents.

As San Francisco comes back, so does its wealth, minting a new wave of multi-millionaires and billionaires almost overnight. Cranes are returning to the skyline, the venture-capital floodgates have reopened, and optimism is high. But so are the reminders of who gets left behind.

The city is making real progress on its most visible crises. Street homelessness has fallen to a multi-year low, and overdose deaths have come down from their peak. That is worth applauding, but it is not the whole picture. Roughly one in three San Francisco households cannot cover their basic needs. The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank carries a waiting list of more than 8,000 households. The visible emergency is easing, yet the everyday one is not.

This year, St. Anthony’s will serve its 50 millionth meal. It is not a number to celebrate. It is a marker of how great the need is, and how constant. So should the commitment to meet it, from everyone with the means to help build the strongest safety net possible.

In every tradition, the principle is the same: we are responsible for one another, especially in moments of vulnerability. The moral contract to take care of our neighbors is frayed, not because generosity has diminished, but because the need has outgrown scattered acts of giving.

San Francisco faces a defining choice. The next chapter of this city can be a story of prosperity that reached only some of its people, or a story of a city that chose to take care of them all.

Our city has always understood that the right investments last for generations. Private capital helped build the libraries, hospitals, parks and museums that still shape civic life, and it is doing that again today. To revive downtown, business leaders have pooled private money to fund cleaner streets, public spaces, and the arts. The model works, but those are investments in the city’s places. The investment we make least often, and need most now, is in people, through human capital that reaches residents facing the greatest needs and the steepest challenges.

They deserve the same ambition: a fund for San Francisco’s human infrastructure, built with the same start-up energy fueling the comeback. It would move private capital quickly to the organizations already doing this work, aimed at individuals and families instead of storefronts. This is not about more dollars for government programs. It is a strategic compact to support the organizations on the front lines, who are meeting these needs every day.

St. Anthony’s is one of them. Last year we served 840,000 meals, 100,000 more than the year before, and the need keeps climbing. As I’ve seen first-hand in providing care to our guests, our medical clinic has seen similar increases. We meet this need not through government resources, but through private donations.

The city funds its physical infrastructure to last. A fund for its human infrastructure would work the same way, a sustained source of support so the people most at risk are never left behind.  

But this is bigger than money. At St. Anthony’s, we are guided by our Franciscan values: dignity, respect, and care, the difference between handing someone a meal and looking them in the eyes so they know they matter. It lives in the volunteers who serve, the neighbors who show up, the companies that make a cause their own. The opportunity now is for everyone this boom has lifted to be part of that, to give not only their resources, but their hands.

San Francisco takes its name from a man who gave up his family’s fortune to serve the poor. In the wealthiest chapter this city has ever known, there is no better example to follow.

History rarely remembers valuations, but it will remember whether prosperity widened the circle of opportunity or left people behind. 

Teena needed only a start, and with all of us behind it, this city can make sure she is far from the last.

Larry Kwan is a practicing physician and the Chief Executive Officer of St. Anthony Foundation, a non-profit serving the San Francisco community for more than 75 years.