When a group of French nuns secured a new home for their soup kitchen in a part of the Mission district long shaped by poverty, homelessness and addiction, they were eager to start serving people in need.
But opening and operating it from the ground-floor retail space of a condo building near the corner of 15th and Mission streets has been anything but simple. The nuns say their problems have not come from city inspectors or the people they serve, but from the building’s homeowners association, which opposed the soup kitchen long before it opened.
Most recently, the HOA has focused on a 7-foot-by-1.5-foot metal sign the nuns installed earlier this month above the soup kitchen’s front door. The blue sign has a white cross and reads “Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth House” — the religious order founded in France that the sisters belong to.
A few days after it went up, the nuns were told to take it down. In an email, HOA board member Piers Mackenzie issued a warning…