If her parents had had their way, Sierra Nguyen might still be training to become an anesthesiologist.

The child of Vietnamese refugees who escaped after the fall of Saigon, Ms. Nguyen grew up in Martinez, a small city in Northern California. She excelled in the sciences and got a scholarship to Saint Mary’s College of California, where an act of filial disobedience set her on an unexpected course.

After years of grueling labs, she began studying for medical school exams. But one day she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror holding one of the thick textbooks.

The first thought she had: “I don’t want to do this.”

The second came in the form of a poem by the Sufi mystic Rumi, which she had studied in high school: “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

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“And so I did a complete 180, broke my parents’ hearts and, as clichéd as it sounds, I followed my own,” she said. “And I found myself at an art gallery.”

So Ms. Nguyen, now 28, became an assistant at a gallery in San Francisco, a job that involved vacuuming, changing printer cartridges and getting salads for her boss, for $15 an hour in the beginning. She struggled to pay her rent, much less save enough for a down payment on a home in a city where the typical two-bedroom condominium goes for $1.2 million, according to Zillow.

But her gamble paid off: She landed a job at Dolby Chadwick Gallery. She had been there mere months when the pandemic shut down the city, and the world. Into that void, the gallery owner and her new hire began a collaboration — a daily email to the gallery’s listserv that paired a poem and an artwork from the gallery’s inventory. Sales went through the roof.

Ms. Nguyen was promoted to gallery manager, and then associate director and, finally, director, a position that came with a percentage of the art she sold. As the years passed, she managed to set aside about $230,000 for a home purchase. Even then, it was unclear what, if anything, she could afford to buy.

Last fall, she called Pattie Lawton, an agent with Sotheby’s International Realty, and sheepishly asked if she might be able to find a two-bedroom in San Francisco with an $850,000 budget — about $350,000 less than the median price of a two-bedroom.

Ms. Lawton showed up with pink streaks in her hair and a can-do attitude. The properties she suggested included condominiums as well as tenancy-in-common listings, or T.I.C., a kind of group homeownership that is common in San Francisco and more affordable, but comes with added risk.

With a T.I.C., a group of people — either friends or strangers — enter into an agreement to buy a property. They share the legal title, and the agreement spells out the percentage of the building that each has the exclusive right to use. (This arrangement differs from that of a cooperative, where residents own shares in a private corporation that, in turns, owns and manages the building.)

Andy Sirkin, a lawyer whose firm, SirkinLaw APC, focuses on real estate co-ownership, said that a T.I.C. is “like a marriage,” whereby multiple owners share a single parcel of undivided property. The city sends a single property tax bill to the building, and it’s up to the owners to divvy it up.

“There are more shared obligations in a T.I.C. than in a condo,” Mr. Sirkin said. “That raises the level of risk.”

When this form of ownership was created, the owners also shared a group mortgage, so if one party stopped paying, the others were on the hook for those payments. But beginning in the 2000s, a form of financing known as a fractional mortgage allowed buyers to obtain separate mortgages on a fraction of a T.I.C. building, making it possible for someone like Ms. Nguyen to get an individual mortgage, which mitigates the risk somewhat.

As Ms. Nguyen began her search, her parents took the $200,000 they had saved for her college education — money she didn’t need, thanks to the scholarships she had earned — and put it toward her down payment, increasing it to $430,000.

Among her options:

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SAN FRANCISCO — Business owners in the San Francisco Tenderloin neighborhood said they have seen a drop in crime recently. And they’re thanking District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.

 business owners like Jesus Kauil say they have seen it all: from people shooting needles in the bathroom to drug dealers running inside his business, trying to escape from the police.

“They would come in here looking to hide so that they wouldn’t get arrested, and there’s no way to tell them, don’t come in. So they would come in here waiting for things to calm down, and then they would go back out,” said Kauil, the owner of Los Yucatecos, a restaurant he opened three years ago on Ellis Street.

But he said, luckily, he hasn’t witnessed this in quite some time, at least over the last year.

“So I don’t see those people anymore, and that’s why I can notice and say, something is changing,” Kauil added.

He’s just one of many business owners and residents who are paying close attention to San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ actions. 

On Wednesday, Jenkins released new data regarding her office’s efforts to combat drug trafficking in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods.

“We have seen an overwhelming decrease in the amount of drug dealing going on in the Tenderloin. We still have a long way to go to get the Tenderloin to where we wanted to be. We still have trouble spots, but we have seen a massive change in the amount of activity during the day that’s going on,” said Jenkins.

Jenkins notes that these efforts have led to an increase in convictions. So far in 2024, there have been 128 felony narcotics convictions, with 92% of these being felony offenses compared to just 20% when Jenkins first took office in 2022.

“We are here to do a job, and that’s to make sure that our streets are safe and clean, and I want them to fear consequences. We have to have a healthy fear of consequences in San Francisco to get our streets to where we want them to be, and that’s another part of the commitment. No more we’re giving misdemeanors. We believe in true accountability,” Jenkins emphasized.

This is exactly what Kauil wants to keep seeing. He said the complicated quality of life in the Tenderloin means fewer customers. These days, he can barely get 120 people, while back in the day, he said he would get at least 400 daily.

“We like it here. We have great support. We have customers, but sometimes there’s a little fear, especially at night,” Kauil explained.

Despite the challenges, Kauil is hopeful. He’s not going anywhere and believes things will keep getting better because, ultimately, this is his home.