When it comes to the scary behavior San Franciscans see on our streets — people ranting at no one, stripping off their clothes or threatening strangers — there’s often a clear culprit: methamphetamines.

Starting this spring, there will finally be a clear, short-term answer: a sobering center designed specifically for those high on meth. Believed to be the nation’s first sobering center aimed at people experiencing meth-induced psychosis rather than high on any sort of drug, the facility will open late this spring on a city-owned parking lot at 180 Jones St. in the Tenderloin.

A sobering center was the No. 1 recommendation from Mayor London Breed’s meth task force, and the mayor said it can serve the dual purpose of getting high people off the streets and connecting them to addiction treatment and other services once they’re indoors.

“The reality is that drug use and overdoses are on the rise, and doing nothing is not an option,” Breed said in a statement. “The public drug use we see every day hurts those who are suffering from addiction as well as the surrounding communities.”

The spike in meth addiction in the city has been a main driver of the crowding of the psychiatric emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital, overwhelming medical staff there and sometimes resulting in patients being released back to the streets before they’re ready.

From 2017 to 2018, 47% of all visits to the city’s psychiatric emergency room were related to meth use. The hope is that the sobering center can relieve some of that pressure.

The future site of the center was the subject of a mini-controversy when the Mayor’s Office of Housing asked the public for ideas to enliven the garbage-strewn, underused lot at Turk and Jones Streets in the Tenderloin as it awaits ground-breaking for a 71-unit affordable housing complex. In the slow world of San Francisco development, shovels won’t go in the ground for two years.

The only applicant to activate the space in the meantime was Amy Farah Weiss, a two-time mayoral candidate and founder of the St. Francis Homelessness Challenge, who proposed building a tiny-home village and wellness center on the site. She even had a way to pay for it: funds from an early employee at Facebook who wants to remain anonymous.

The Mayor’s Office of Housing in December told her the whole idea was “on hold” and left the sad lot empty and ringed with homeless people in tents. When I wrote about it last month, a spokesman for the housing office said cryptically that the mayor’s administration was looking at “city-owned sites that may be viable to aid in addressing needs related to those experiencing homelessness.”

Now we know the plan.

Tents will be erected on the site sometime in the next few months to house 15 beds for people to come down from their meth highs and a staff of nurses and peer counselors to advise them about longer-term help like treatment beds, shelter beds and care for their mental and physical health.

The facility will be open around-the-clock and will be run by HealthRight 360, one of the largest providers of drug treatment in the city. It will have a driver and van stationed outside to pick up anybody spotted exhibiting meth-induced psychosis. It may eventually accept people from hospital emergency rooms, but will begin by accepting people only from the streets.

Those calls for help could come from police officers, outreach workers or other city staffers. The Department of Public Health is also working on a way for regular city residents to get their calls to 311 diverted to the sobering center if they see a person exhibiting signs of meth-induced psychosis.

Each person delivered in the van will be assessed at the sobering center’s front door and has the option to leave at any time. The person could stay at the sobering center as long as needed, but the estimate is most people would stay eight to 10 hours. The facility will have security guards on site, as well as showers and storage for people’s belongings.

It doesn’t appear that the mayor’s office has done much community outreach to let the neighborhood know about the sobering-center plans, and it could receive push-back from neighbors tired of the Tenderloin being the home of so many homeless and drug services.

But the mayor’s office maintains the center will be an improvement to the site — and, frankly, it would be hard for the blighted lot to get any worse. Plus, a meth-sobering center is clearly needed, and the first one has to go somewhere. The mayor plans to open more, and here’s hoping they’re sprinkled around the city.

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, co-chair of the meth task force, has said he would welcome sobering centers in his district, which includes the Castro and Noe Valley.

“Bold, persistent experimentation should be the order of the day right now,” he said. “We should be trying everything.”

Dr. Anton Nigusse Bland, the mayor’s point person for fixing San Francisco’s broken mental health and drug addiction treatment systems, said the goal is to make the sobering center “safe, warm and welcoming.” A similar 12-bed sobering center for people who are drunk exists at Seventh and Mission Streets and is open around-the-clock. It had 5,000 visits last year.

Nigusse Bland said the goal is for the center’s staff to develop a relationship with people who are addicted to meth and eventually get them to accept longer term help. Breed in December implemented an online bed tracker so anybody can see in real time where treatment beds are available. She is also working to add more mental health and drug treatment beds to the system as a whole.

Nigusse Bland said people high on meth often experience paranoia and hallucinations and think they’re being attacked when they’re not. That’s why it’s not unusual to see crazed people seeming to fight the air or yell at nobody.

“They might not even recognize other people are there depending on their state,” he said. “Oftentimes, they’re just afraid and need somewhere safe to be.”

Soon, they’ll finally have it.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight usually appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf