An effort to loosen a private prison corporation’s decades-long grip on a historic building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district was blocked Wednesday after a city board found no zoning violations in connection to the operations of a halfway house at the property.
In a hearing that stretched late into Wednesday evening, as nuances of the city’s planning code were dissected, the city’s Board of Appeals voted 4-1 to uphold a January letter issued by the city’s zoning administrator, which determined that Geo Group has a grandfathered-in right to operate a residential facility for the formerly incarcerated out of 111 Taylor St., a five-story building zoned for group housing.
Local activists and historians appealed that determination in recent months in an effort to push Geo Group, a for-profit Florida-based prison operator that runs immigration detention centers, out of 111 Taylor and reclaim the building as a community-serving space. A representative for Geo Group confirmed Wednesday that the company needed the determination to renew state and federal contracts to run its reentry program out of the property…