The Gubbio Project: Daytime Sleep for Homeless People in San Francisco

Originally published 2018-04-18.

The Gubbio Project is a San Francisco nonprofit that lets people experiencing homelessness rest and sleep inside a church during the day, with no paperwork, no sign-in and no questions. It was founded in 2004 by Father Louis Vitale, a Franciscan friar and peace activist, and community activist Shelly Roder, and for years its best-known home was St. Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin, where guests sleep in the pews while life in the church carries on around them.

It is a daytime programme, not an overnight shelter. That detail matters, because the gap it fills is the one many cities overlook: the hours after shelters close their doors in the morning, when people who have slept badly or not at all have nowhere safe to lie down.

How the Gubbio Project began

In the early 2000s, homelessness in the Tenderloin and Mission neighbourhoods had reached crisis levels. Vitale and Roder started the project as an initiative of the St. Boniface Neighborhood Center. When that centre closed in 2007, the work continued as an independent nonprofit under its current name.

The name comes from a story told about Saint Francis of Assisi. In the Italian town of Gubbio, residents lived in fear of a wolf until Francis went out to meet it, realised it was hungry rather than wicked, and brokered peace between the animal and the town. The project sees its role in the same light: helping housed and unhoused neighbours see each other as people rather than threats.

The Christian Science Monitor described it in 2016 as believed to be the first daytime sleep programme for homeless people in the United States.

What a day at St. Boniface looks like

Doors open early in the morning, around 6 a.m. according to 2019 reporting. Guests settle into the back two-thirds of the church, while the front third stays available for daily Mass and for parishioners and visitors who come to pray. People lie down on the pews, receive a blanket and are left to sleep.

Over the years the project has added small but meaningful extras: fresh socks, hygiene kits, foot care, massage, chaplaincy and referrals to other services. Coverage in 2016 put the number of people sleeping at St. Boniface at around 150 a day, with roughly 300 across the project's two sites, on a budget of about $350,000 a year.

A second site opened at the Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist in the Mission District as homelessness grew. The project's website now names St. John the Evangelist as its current rest space, where guests use cots, so anyone looking for help today should check the website or call before going.

No questions asked: why low barriers matter

The project's own description of its approach is simple: "No questions are asked when our guests walk into the churches." There are no intake forms and no sign-in sheets.

That can sound like a small thing, but many shelters require identification, registration, curfews or sobriety, and people with mental illness, trauma or past bad experiences often avoid them. Social workers call the alternative a low-barrier service: remove the obstacles first and build trust later. A quiet place to sleep can be the first contact that leads someone to a doctor, a caseworker or a housing programme.

Sleep itself is not a luxury. People sleeping outside are often woken by police, weather, noise or theft, and chronic sleep loss makes everything harder, from managing health conditions to keeping appointments. Physicians who work with homeless patients have praised the project for treating rest as basic care. Dr. Barry Zevin told the Monitor that it shows people who are usually overlooked that they are cared about as human beings.

Some coverage in 2018 quoted a survey in which 95% of guests said they always or mostly felt safe at Gubbio. We could not find the original survey, so the figure is best treated as unconfirmed, though the project's reputation for calm and respect is consistent across many reports.

Sharing a church with people who sleep there

The most striking thing about St. Boniface was that worship and rest happened in the same room at the same time. Housed parishioners prayed a few metres from unhoused neighbours asleep in the pews. The project argues that this shared space sends a message both ways: that people without homes belong to the community, and that the congregation includes the tired, the poor and the unwell.

The arrangement grew out of a long tradition. St. Boniface is run by Franciscans, and caring for the poor is central to that order's identity. Similar daytime welcome has since been offered by churches in other cities, often citing Gubbio as inspiration.

Photo credit: David Levene.

The other side: when cities push people away

Gubbio's welcome stands out partly because the late 2010s saw many examples of the opposite approach. Critics call them hostile architecture: design choices such as boulders, spikes, sloped benches and bike racks placed to stop people from sitting or sleeping in public spaces. Seattle, for example, installed bike racks at former camping spots in late 2017.

In San Francisco that same year, the SF SPCA animal shelter in the Mission deployed a Knightscope K5 security robot to patrol outside its building, citing car break-ins and vandalism. Residents complained that it was being used to move homeless people along, and the city ordered it off the sidewalk because it was operating without a permit, under threat of a $1,000-a-day fine.

In January 2018, about a dozen members of the group Break the Ban, including a 14-year-old, were cited for handing out food in Wells Park in El Cajon, near San Diego. The city had passed an emergency ordinance in October 2017 banning food distribution on city property, saying it was responding to a deadly hepatitis A outbreak. Organiser Mark Lane argued that the rules amounted to criminalising homelessness. Those cited were given misdemeanour citations and released.

Public health concerns are real, and outbreaks among unhoused people are serious. Advocates argue, though, that the answer is more toilets, handwashing stations and housing, not fewer meals.

Lessons for other communities

• Use the buildings you already have. Many churches, libraries and community halls sit empty for much of the day.
• Remove barriers before adding rules. The fewer forms, the more people come in, and trust can then grow into support.
• Treat rest as a need. Daytime sleep makes it easier for people to look after their health and to engage with services.
• Keep the community in the room. Shared space can change how neighbours see each other.

The Gubbio Project does not claim to solve homelessness; only housing does that. What it offers is dignity during the hardest hours of the day, and a model other cities can borrow at modest cost.

Sources: The Gubbio Project: About and history; Christian Science Monitor (2016); Aleteia (2019); 10News San Diego on the El Cajon arrests; Dezeen on the SF SPCA robot; Wikipedia: Hostile architecture; earlier coverage: The Mind Unleashed; photo: David Levene.