San Francisco, CA
With a vest and a voice, helpers escort kids through San Francisco’s broken Tenderloin streets
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Wearing a bright safety vest with the words “Safe Passage” on the back, Tatiana Alabsi strides through San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood to its only public elementary school, navigating broken bottles and stained sleeping bags along tired streets that occasionally reek of urine.
Along the way in one of America’s most notorious neighborhoods, she calls out to politely alert people huddled on sidewalks, some holding strips of tin foil topped with illicit drugs.
“Good afternoon, happy Monday!” Alabsi says to two men, one slumped forward in a wheelchair and wearing soft hospital socks and one slipper. Her voice is cheerful, a soothing contrast to the misery on display in the 50-block neighborhood that’s well-known for its crime, squalor and reckless abandon. “School time. Kids will be coming soon.”
Further along, Alabsi passes a man dancing in the middle of the street with his arms in the air as a squealing firetruck races by. She stops to gently touch the shoulder of a man curled up in the fetal position on the sidewalk, his head inches from the tires of a parked car.
“Are you OK?” she asks, before suggesting he move to a spot out of the sun. “Kids will be coming soon.”
Minutes later, Alabsi arrives at the Tenderloin Community Elementary School, where she is among several adults who escort dozens of children to after-school programs. The students hitch up backpacks emblazoned with Spider Man and the sisters of “Frozen,” then form two rambunctious lines that follow Alabsi like ducklings through broken streets.
The smallest ones hold hands with trusted volunteers.
Long known for its brazen open-air drug markets, chronic addiction, mental illness and homelessness, the Tenderloin neighborhood is also home to the highest concentration of kids in San Francisco, an estimated 3,000 children largely from immigrant families.
The neighborhood is rich with social services and low-income housing but the San Francisco Police Department also has seized nearly 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of narcotics in the area since last May. Of a record 806 overdose fatalities last year, about 20% were in the Tenderloin.
But amid the chaos is a vibrant community stitched together by differing languages that has found ways to protect its most vulnerable and deliver hope, something many say the city has failed to do. Officials have sent in toilets, declared a mayoral emergency and vowed to crack down on drugs, but change is glacial.
A group of mothers fed up with drug dealers started the efforts in 2008 after a child temporarily went missing. The Safe Passage program is now part of the Tenderloin Community Benefit District, a nonprofit funded in part by Tenderloin property owners who also cleans sidewalks, staffs parks and hosts community events.
Alabsi started as a volunteer after the Russian native moved to the United States from Yemen with her husband and sought asylum a decade ago. They joined her husband’s mother and his siblings, who had settled in the Tenderloin.
Life was not easy in their new homeland. Alabsi, 54, and her husband Jalal, both medical doctors, had to start over years into their careers. The mother of two despaired when her younger son began to count poop piles he spotted from his stroller on their walks home from daycare.
Then she learned of Safe Passage. At her husband’s urging, she signed up to volunteer to help spare the children the worst sights on their walk after school.
Many people, Alabsi says, respond politely or tuck away their drugs or scoot their belongings out of the way when she reminds them that school time is over. But others ignore the request. Some even get angry.
“It’s better to give nice smile and say good afternoon or good morning, to show people I am friendly,” said a laughing Alabsi, who is fluent in Arabic and Russian and speaks English with an accent. “I am not monster.”
The program’s safety stewards guide the students along the cleanest and calmest routes, redirecting them to avoid people acting erratically or overdosing. Sometimes stewards use their bodies to block the children from seeing things they shouldn’t, like a woman crouched between two cars, no longer able to control her bowels.
On a recent afternoon, two girls with ponytails sashayed across an intersection, talking about becoming TikTok stars one day, seemingly oblivious to a couple hunched over at a bus stop across the street, struggling to light up. As they walked, Alabsi blocked their view of smeared feces.
The girls, one in first grade and the other in second, were headed to the Cross Cultural Family Center, one of some half-dozen nonprofits that provide after-school programs for the K-5 kids.
Alabsi and her immediate family moved out of the Tenderloin but are still an integral part of it. Their son is in the elementary school’s fourth grade and Alabsi now manages the Safe Passage program.
She loves the mix of Latin, Asian, Arab and American cultures in the Tenderloin. The big hearts of residents who are striving for a better life is what “makes it special,” she said.
One recent Saturday, Alabsi worked at an Eid celebration at the neighborhood’s recreation center. She helped monitor the block that was closed to traffic for the day while greeting her sisters-in-laws, who had joined the festivities with their children.
When the celebration ended at 4 p.m., she left with her soccer-loving son, Sami, to drop off her vest and radio at the office. They chatted in Russian as they passed tents, sleeping bags and blankets, an abandoned microwave and lawn chair and a human-shaped lump under a blanket, shoes peeking out.
From loud speakers, the doo-wop of The Moonglows singing “Sincerely” soared prettily over gritty streets. On a pole was a flyer with photos of a missing daughter: “Mimi please call home,” read the April notice. “You are so loved.”
“We can change world in better way by our presence, by our examples, by our positive attitude,” Alabsi said. “Every year it’s little bit better and better and better.”
___
Associated Press journalist Terry Chea contributed to this report.
Few things are more valuable in the Bay Area than real estate. In San Francisco, the median house price is now over $2 million. Last month, at least seven houses in the city sold for $1 million over the asking price, and buyers regularly offer to pay in cash or waive contingencies to stay competitive. Yet there is one thing that remains even more valuable than a house, and possibly more valuable than money itself: stock in Anthropic or OpenAI.
Last week, 160 Noe Street, an Edwardian home in San Francisco’s desirable Duboce Triangle neighborhood, was listed for sale at $2.9 million—or the equivalent amount in Anthropic or OpenAI shares, as based on those companies’ current valuations. Rachel Swann, the listing agent, says she was inspired to set these unusual terms after meeting several Anthropic employees at an open house for a different property. “These people have a lot of paper wealth, but they don’t always have the liquidity to do things they want,” Swann says. Some of these employees were expecting to come into as much as $50 million from their Anthropic shares, and wondered if they could use that as leverage to buy a house, according to Swann. “This kept coming up over and over again.”
Swann’s listing is unconventional, but not singular. In April, an investment banker named Storm Duncan offered to exchange his Mill Valley home and an adjacent parcel of land for Anthropic shares. And in May, Vijay Chattha, who owns an agency that does PR for tech companies, listed his Healdsburg home for $2.5 million, or $2 million in Anthropic stock. “I want to sell my house, and I want to invest in Anthropic,” Chattha says. “Why not combine the two?
Chattha’s house—a three bed, three bath with a pool and a bocce court in a part of Sonoma County that abuts some of the region’s most famous wineries—also comes with coveted short-term rental status, allowing the owner to list it on platforms like Airbnb. Only a handful of properties in Healdsburg come with that status, and only about a dozen come up for sale in a given year.
Chattha is offering a $500,000 discount to Anthropic employees because he believes the value of Anthropic shares will grow faster than any other investment, and his vacation home in wine country is the best bargaining chip he has to try to access them. “If you look at Anthropic’s growth last year, it’s insane,” he says, noting the $380 billion valuation the company claimed in February. “Now they’re raising at $965 billion. That’s three X in like three months.” He added that he was open to exchanging the house for shares in Anthropic, but not OpenAI, because he prefers using Anthropic’s products.
The real estate listings come at a time when investors are salivating at the record-high valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI, and even those considered wealthy by Bay Area standards are feeling FOMO about the affluence that could come from these companies’ debuts on the stock market. (On Monday, Anthropic submitted paperwork for its initial public offering; OpenAI is also reportedly preparing to file in the coming months.) Despite the unprecedented valuations of these companies, many people believe their stock prices will only go up, and that anyone who gets a piece now could win the jackpot.
People are clamoring to buy equity in OpenAI and Anthropic on the secondary market, leading to a frenzy of transactions that may or may not be legitimate. As a result, Anthropic updated its policy around “unauthorized Anthropic stock sales” this spring, which notes that “if someone purports to sell Anthropic shares without proper board approval, that transaction is invalid.” A spokesperson for Anthropic pointed back to this policy when asked about the possibility of exchanging company shares for real estate.
Welcome to our running tally of Election Night results. Or, as this is California, well beyond tonight, as results continue to trickle in.
The first batch of results should arrive at 8:45 p.m., with three more to follow tonight. The Department of Elections has the breakdown.
San Francisco is voting in three special elections, for District 2 and District 4 supervisors and for a Board of Education member. Both supervisor races are referendums on housing, especially District 2, while the main backdrop of the D4 race is all the hot feelings around the fate of the Sunset Dunes Park (nee Great Highway).
The winners of all three special races will have to compete again in November for their seats.
Keeping it local, SF is also voting on four ballot measures. Prop A is for a bond to pay for an emergency water-system. B is for term limits. C and D are dueling measures related to the “overpaid CEO” tax. (Links go to our reporting on each race or issue; or click here for our Election 2026 page.)
Vote local, think national: Which two candidates will advance to the November election to replace Nancy Pelosi?
Statewide races include the primaries for governor, education superintendent, lieutenant governor, and much more.
Polls close soon. If you haven’t voted yet, find your polling station here.
Tuesday, June 2, 5:40 p.m.
Two and a half hours until our polls close. Before we go down the local rabbit hole, a reminder that other states have primary action today: New Jersey, Iowa, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Montana.
Why does it take so long to get results in California? CalMatters has you covered on that story. We shouldn’t expect a call tonight on the governor’s race.
The last big election was November 5, 2024. (Remember?) Ten days later, there were still races to call in San Francisco.
So if you’re waiting for the pundits (and maybe even us) to tell you What It All Means, you might have to wait a while.
More from The Frisc…
San Francisco, CA
San Francisco voters to decide on dueling measures on Top Executive Pay Tax changes
San Francisco voters weighed in Tuesday on two competing measures that seek to change the Top Executive Pay Tax, with one of the measures also including a change to the Gross Receipts Tax.
Should both measures pass, the one with the most votes will take effect, according to the propositions’ legal text.
Currently, the measures state that most businesses with San Francisco gross receipts up to $5 million are exempt from the Gross Receipts Tax. And businesses that use more than half of their city payroll for in-house administrative and management services pay an Administrative Office Tax instead of a Gross Receipts Tax.
The Top Executive Pay Tax is a tax some large businesses pay if their highest-paid managerial employee earns more than 100 times the median pay of their San Francisco employees. Businesses that have city gross receipts up to $5 million and are not subject to the Administrative Office Tax are exempt.
Proposition C
Proposition C states it would increase the number of businesses that could be exempt from the Gross Receipts Tax and would stop any further increases to the “Top Executive Pay Tax” after a final rate bump.
The proposed measure says it would raise the Gross Receipts Tax exemption ceiling to $7.5 million. The $7.5 million ceiling would also apply to the Top Executive Pay Tax exemption.
As for changes to the Top Executive Pay Tax, Proposition C states it would implement the 2028 tax rate increase in 2027, but then stop any future increases.
Supporting Proposition C are Rodney Fong, CEO of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and Chris Wright, senior vice president of Advance SF, an organization of companies, which includes Bank of America, OpenAI, Waymo, the SF Giants CEO and others.
Fong and Wright, in their argument for the measure, say giving businesses more tax breaks would help keep more employees on payroll and would give companies the ability to “contribute to city services in a predictable and balanced way.”
Critics of Proposition C, such as the San Francisco Tenants Union, slam the measure as “billionaire-backed” and argue it would kill the Top Executive Pay Tax and would hand out more tax breaks to businesses at a time when the city is in a budget deficit and faces cuts to essential services.
Proposition D
Proposition D also seeks to change the Top Executive Pay Tax, which is collected from some large businesses where the highest-paid managerial employee earns more than 100 times the median compensation paid to other employees.
If approved, the measure would change the calculation of the tax using the compensation of all employees, not just employees based in San Francisco. Top Executive Pay Tax rates would also be increased for San Francisco gross receipts and payroll.
Supporters have billed the measure as a way to counteract federal cuts to Medicaid. A report by the City Controller’s Office said the measure could result in $250 million to $300 million in additional revenue.
“Proposition D is the solution to our budget deficit. It asks large corporations — not small businesses, not working families — to contribute a little more,” supporters said in the city’s official voter guide.
The measure has the backing of most of the Board of Supervisors, along with labor unions and Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
Opponents, including Mayor Daniel Lurie and state Sen. Scott Wiener, have argued Proposition D would negatively impact the city’s recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“San Francisco is already one of the most expensive cities in the country to live and do business. Adding extreme and unpredictable tax increases risks driving employers away just as we are trying to bring jobs, workers, and foot traffic back downtown,” said Supervisor Matt Dorsey in the city’s voter guide.
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