Northtown businesses question HACHR's move to new Eureka office

A new Northtown address had not settled the same question that dogged HACHR’s old 3rd Street site: whether the office would bring needed harm-reduction services, or more sidewalk disorder for nearby businesses and neighbors.

The worry carried real history. In September 2020, the Eureka City Council voted 4-1 to oppose the Humboldt Area Center for Harm Reduction’s syringe exchange program and sent a letter to the California Department of Public Health saying the city could not support the program as HACHR was running it. That followed a months-long Eureka Police Department investigation into the 3rd Street facility.

State regulators reauthorized HACHR’s syringe exchange program in October 2020 for two years, but explicitly excluded the City of Eureka. The decision left HACHR free to keep operating mobile services elsewhere in Humboldt County while still facing Eureka’s restrictions if it wanted to work inside city limits.

By May 2021, after a five-month gap in syringe-exchange service in Eureka, HACHR’s mobile program had been back on the street for about three weeks. At the time, the outreach vehicle was staffed by two or three people and was stopping Monday, Tuesday and Thursday at city-approved locations, including the Samoa Bridge area and a parking lot on A Street near St. Vincent de Paul. City officials said then they had not yet received complaints about the mobile operation.

HACHR, founded in 2014 by Brandie Wilson, says it focuses on overdose prevention, advocacy and harm-reduction services for people who use drugs, people experiencing homelessness and people engaged in survival sex work in Humboldt County. Its current website says the syringe-service program now runs through mobile outreach, including Eureka stops on Tuesday and Thursday, while the office is used for non-SSP drop-in services. The group lists 707-407-6013 for coordinating services.

The broader public-health backdrop helps explain why the siting fight has stayed alive. Humboldt County public-health sources have said overdose deaths remain a significant concern, even after county and state reporting showed a sharp 40% drop in 2025, a decline tied in part to data-driven outreach. That makes the Northtown dispute more than a block-by-block nuisance fight. It is a local test of whether harm-reduction services can be placed near commerce without undercutting the foot traffic and sense of order that nearby businesses rely on.

For Northtown, the new office did not erase the old tension. It only shifted the argument to a different corner of Eureka, where the same tradeoff between public health and neighborhood impacts was still playing out.