The Peoples Temple relocated its headquarters from Ukiah to San Francisco in the early 1970s, establishing itself in the Western Addition neighborhood. Jones built a multiracial congregation that combined Pentecostal fervor with social activism. The Temple operated soup kitchens, drug rehabilitation programs, and senior care facilities. Members canvassed neighborhoods, registered voters, and turned out in force for approved candidates. In a city where political margins were thin, Jones's ability to deliver thousands of disciplined volunteers made him indispensable to ambitious politicians. His appointment to the Housing Authority was the payoff.

Investigative journalist Marshall Kilduff and others began reporting on allegations of abuse within the Temple, including physical beatings, financial exploitation, and the coercive control Jones exercised over members. Defectors told stories of staged healings, loyalty tests, and a climate of fear. Some of these reports appeared in New West magazine in 1977. But the Temple's political connections insulated Jones from serious scrutiny for years. Politicians who had benefited from the Temple's support were slow to distance themselves. The city's progressive establishment had invested its credibility in Jones as an ally of social justice, and unwinding that investment was uncomfortable.

As media scrutiny intensified, Jones moved the congregation to Guyana, establishing the agricultural commune known as Jonestown. On November 18, 1978, Jones ordered the mass murder-suicide that killed 918 people, including 304 children. It was the largest deliberate loss of American civilian life in a single non-natural event until September 11, 2001. The Peoples Temple's San Francisco chapter dissolved in the aftermath. The political figures who had courted Jones scrambled to explain their associations. The Temple's former headquarters in the Western Addition eventually became a U.S. Post Office. The building at 1859 Geary Boulevard, where Jones once preached to packed audiences, carries no marker explaining what happened inside. San Francisco's relationship with the Peoples Temple is one of its most painful chapters, a story about the cost of ignoring warning signs when the political math is convenient.