“Any city that doesn’t have a Tenderloin isn’t a city at all”

– Herb Caen, longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist

Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name which derives from the late 19^th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes.

At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studies, and professional boxing gyms.

In 1966, trans people hanging out at the all-night Compton’s Cafeteria staged a militant protest against police harassment three years before the more famous LBGTQ uprising at the Stonewall Inn in NYC. During the last decade, the Tenderloin has become better known for its controversial side-walk camping, open-air drug markets, and fentanyl abuse.

The failure of municipal government to deal with those social problems— in a residential neighborhood for working-class families with 3,000 children—contributed to recent electoral defeats of a district attorney, city supervisor, and San Francisco’s second female and African-American mayor.

For the past 45 years, Randy Shaw has been a fixture of the place as co-founder of its Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC). After graduating from law school nearby, Shaw became involved in fights for tenants’ rights and more affordable housing at a time when blue-collar neighborhoods in San Francisco were starting to gentrify.

A Unionized Non-Profit

The THC, which now employs 200 SEIU Local 1021-represented staff members, began to acquire and develop its own network of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings in the Tenderloin, as an alternative to run-down private landlord owned ones.

Today, THC provides subsidized housing and wrap-around services to several thousand of the city’s most needy tenants—who might otherwise be among the social outcasts living in the surrounding streets. Shaw estimates that the Tenderloin has a higher percentage of housing in nonprofit hands than any central city neighborhood in the nation, an arrangement which safeguards its distinctive character as an economically mixed neighborhood that includes many low-income people among its 20,000 residents.

In this second edition to his book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco, Shaw recounts how this multi-racial working-class enclave managed to survive, if not always thrive, amid a city dominated by tech industry wealth and privilege.

That history of neighborhood resistance to displacement is also on display at the Tenderloin Museum (TLM). Created ten years ago, with much help from the author, this venue for community-based, historically-inspired cultural programming now operates under the direction of Katie Conry.

In her Forward to Shaw’s book, Conry describes the TLM’s many art shows, special exhibits, theatre productions, walking tours, and other public programs that have drawn 50,000 people to a downtown area many out-of-town visitors (and locals) are told to avoid. On April 11, for example, the THC is hosting a new production of The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot to commemorate that “collective act of resistance” and “the on-going fight for transgender rights.” (For ticket info, see here.)

Community Benefits Agreements

Other Californians fighting gentrification—or trying to make sure its benefits are more equitably shared—will find Shaw’s book to be an invaluable guide to effective activism around housing issues. It illustrates how persistent and creative grassroots organizing can challenge and change urban re-development schemes designed for the few, rather than the many. In too many Left Coast cities, it’s the latter who continue to get pushed out and left behind in the name of “neighborhood improvement.”

A central case study in The Tenderloin is the author’s account of how community residents won a pioneering “community benefits agreement” (CBA) with three powerful hotel chains. In the early 1980s, Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Ramada wanted to build three luxury tourist hotels adjacent to the Tenderloin. Given the city’s pro-development political climate at the time, these hospitality industry giants expected little organized opposition to their plans. Then Mayor Diane Feinstein lauded them for “bringing a renaissance to the area.”

However, as originally unveiled, their blueprint would have transformed nearby residential blocks by “driving up property values, leading to further development, and, ultimately the Tenderloin’s destruction as a low-income residential neighborhood.”

An Organizing Case Study

Among those faced with the prospect of big rent increases and eventual evictions were many senior citizens, recently arrived Asian immigrants, and longtime residents of SRO buildings in dire need of better ownership and management. Fortunately, this low-income, multi-racial population included some residents with “previously unrecognized activist and leadership skills” that were put to good use by campaign organizers, like Shaw, who were assisting their struggle.

During a year-long fight, hundreds of people mobilized to pressure the city Planning Commission to modify the hoteliers’ plans. As Shaw reports, the resulting deal with City Hall created “a national precedent for cities requiring private developers to provide community benefits as a condition of approving their projects.”

Each of the hotels contributed $320,000 per hotel per year for twenty years for low-cost housing development. They also had to sponsor a $4 million federal Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) for the acquisition and renovation of four low-cost Tenderloin SROs. In addition, each hotel had to pay $200,000 for community service projects, and give priority in employment to Tenderloin residents.

Four decades later, community benefits agreements of this sort are not so unusual. But, in the absence of major new federal investment in public housing built with union labor, they are still much needed.

Where tax breaks or rezoning encourages various forms of private development today, the only way to win additional low-income housing units, living wage jobs, local hiring, or preservation of open space for public use is through grassroots campaigning by community-labor coalitions, aided by sympathetic public officials.

Otherwise mayors and city councils under the thumb of developers will simply offer financial incentives with a few strings attached—whether the project involved is a new hotel, casino, shopping center, office building, or luxury apartment building.

Back in the Tenderloin, as Shaw reports in the conclusion to his book, residents in recent years have had to mobilize around basic public safety issues.  Pandemic driven economic distress flooded their neighborhood with tent dwellers, drug dealing, and street crime that added to small business closures, drove tourists away, and made daily life hazardous for longtime residents (except when state and local politicians cleaned things up for high-profile gatherings like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leadership meeting in S.F. two years ago).

Nevertheless, the author ends on an optimistic note (characteristic of organizers): “New restaurants and small businesses are again opening in the Tenderloin. Street and crosswalk changes make the neighborhood among the city’s most walkable. New housing has increased the Tenderloin’s population…”

But, Shaw reminds us, residents of this urban enclave must still fight to achieve “the quality of life common to other San Francisco neighborhoods” while “protecting an ethnically diverse, low-income, and working-class community” with a colorful past and always uncertain future.

HOUSTON (AP) — Wilmer Flores homered again and Luis Matos and LaMonte Wade Jr. also went deep to lead the San Francisco Giants to a 6-3 win over the Houston Astros on Wednesday to complete a three-game sweep.

It’s the fourth home run this season for Flores, who hit just four in 71 games last season. His four homers were tied with Aaron Judge, Kyle Tucker and Seiya Suzuki for second-most in the majors entering Wednesday night’s games.

Flores got things going with his two-run shot to the seats in left field off Framber Valdez (1-1) with one out in the first. Matos made it 3-0 with his shot to center field to start the second.

Heliot Ramos doubled with one out in the inning to extend his streak with an extra-base hit to six games to start the season, tying Felipe Alou (1963) for the longest such streak in franchise history. The double drove in two runs to push the lead to 5-0.

Jeremy Peña walked and stole second base with two outs in the second before scoring on a single to center field by Zach Dezenzo to cut the lead to 5-1.

Valdez allowed four hits and five runs with nine strikeouts in five innings after throwing seven scoreless frames on opening day.

The Astros loaded the bases with no outs in the fifth to chase Landen Roupp. Randy Rodríguez (1-0) took over and Yordan Alvarez hit a two-run single to cut the lead to 5-3. But Rodríguez retired the next three batters, with two strikeouts, to limit the damage.

Roupp allowed four hits and three runs with eight strikeouts in four-plus innings. Camilo Doval pitched a scoreless ninth for his second save.

Wade’s pinch-hit home run with one out in the eighth was his first hit after opening the season 0 for 16.

Key moment

Rodríguez’s performance in the fifth in working out of the jam to keep the Giants on top.

Key stat

It’s the first time the Giants have swept the Astros since August 28-30, 2012, in Houston’s last season in the National League.

Up next

The Giants are off Thursday before Justin Verlander (0-0, 3.60 ERA) starts their home opener against Seattle on Friday. Houston opens a series at Minnesota on Thursday with Hunter Brown (0-1, 3.00) on the mound.

___

AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb

“I ended up drinking at least a 12 pack. And then, the next thing I know, I’m at a park with people I’m familiar with and I’m smoking meth,” Murray, a Central Valley native, said. “It happened so quickly.”

The slip cost Murray his bed at Delancey Street, where drug use is prohibited.

“When I came back the next morning, they called me in to drug test me. I definitely failed, so I just walked out ‘cause I knew what they were gonna do,” Murray, 41, said. “I was about to graduate. And I’ve been trying to rack my brain, why I made this decision. It was a very unfortunate one. Now I’m stuck on the streets in San Francisco.”

Murray’s experience comes as San Francisco supervisors push for more low-income housing options that require sobriety in response to the city’s drug crisis.

Advocates say it’s a much-needed component of the city’s public housing inventory for people in recovery or low-income residents seeking a drug-free environment.

“I’ve been running transitional housing right down the street for the last 10 years. When they discharge, I gotta look and scramble for them to go to a place that’s safe,” Richard Beal, director of recovery services at Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said at a recent town hall about the city’s response to drug use and homelessness in the Tenderloin neighborhood. “We need drug-free housing. We need to complete the bridge.”

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who oversees the South of Market neighborhood, is leading the charge.

“Virtually 100%, or close to it, of permanent supportive housing right now has a drug-tolerant policy that people can’t be evicted for the use of illicit drugs,” Dorsey told KQED. “There are people that I hear from who are in recovery and in permanent supportive housing who are asking for drug-free options.”

Unhoused for the first time, Murray slept outside the first two nights. On the third day of homelessness, he visited a triage center on Sixth Street, where he heard he might find help.

“I’m hoping that this place will get me a bed in a shelter, if that’s what happens here. I don’t even really know. I just know they have food, and I haven’t eaten in a couple days; that definitely drew me in,” Murray said, sitting on the facility’s picnic bench one recent morning. “I just don’t want to sleep outside.”

A social worker found a shelter bed for Murray, where he’s since been sleeping as he applies to jobs and navigates the city’s web of social services. He said he hasn’t used drugs since the relapse, but every day is difficult trying to maintain sobriety while facing the harsh realities of homelessness.

“What’s creeping into my head and giving me anxiety now is having a uniform or the clothing that I’ll need for a job and the ability to maintain my hygiene,” Murray said on a phone call a few days into his shelter stay. “I’ve taken showers here, but I’m literally putting on the same clothes that I have.

“It starts wearing on you, like, the hopelessness.”

In 2004, under President George W. Bush, the federal government adopted a “housing first” model requiring permanent supportive housing providers to accept residents regardless of drug use, credit history or criminal background. The idea is backed by studies showing that having a place to live increases a person’s likelihood of stabilizing their health and income.

Recognizing that some people in recovery prefer abstinence housing, in 2022, the Department of Housing and Urban Development modified its policy to include drug-free programs.