by Randy Shaw on September 5, 2022 (beyondchron.org)
La Cocina Marketplace now has outdoor seating
A Terrific Neighborhood — Once Dealers Removed
What would San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood be like if the city closed its open drug markets?
The Tenderloin would be a fantastic place to live and work. An ethnically diverse, low-income community of families with kids, seniors, people with disabilities and single adults. All would be enjoying the benefits of living in San Francisco without fear of displacement. The Tenderloin is a community where people know their neighbors and local business owners and collectively prove the benefits of a racial, ethnic and economic inclusion.
Consider the neighborhood’s advantages:
*The Tenderloin is centrally located. It is walking distance from the Civic Center transit hub, City Hall, Union Square, Chinatown and North Beach. It is close to the UN Farmers Market and a Whole Foods supermarket at 8th and Market.
*The Tenderloin is part of the national Uptown Tenderloin Historic District. It has 409 contributing historic structures. This makes it one of the nation’s largest residential historic districts.
*Over 100 Tenderloin buildings have historic plaques, the most of any neighborhood.
*The Tenderloin has legendary historic landmarks. They include the site of the 1966 Compton Cafeteria riots, the Hibernia Bank, and the Hyde Street Studios where the Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and other leading groups of the era recorded their iconic hits.
*The Tenderloin has 92 historic neon signs, far and away the most of any neighborhood. It will have even more now that the city is approving legislation allowing the restoration of historic neon signs throughout the neighborhood.
*The Tenderloin has over 100 historic streetlights.
*The Tenderloin may have the most entertainment venues of any neighborhood. The Golden Gate Theater, PianoFight, Counterpulse and Cutting Ball theaters along with jazz at the Black Cat shows there is always a live performance to see (Exit Theater is closing after forty years and the Orpheum is just outside the Tenderloin’s borders but nearby).
*The Tenderloin was among the first neighborhoods to ban right turns on red and to reduce legal car speeds to 20mph. It’s core streets, Eddy and Ellis, are now two-way for greater pedestrian safety. The Tenderloin is ahead of other neighborhoods in streetlight changes favoring pedestrians.
*Visitors can connect to the Tenderloin’s fabled history at the Tenderloin Museum, which celebrates its seventh anniversary at the Phoenix Hotel (favorite lodging of legendary rock star Kurt Cobain) on September 8.
*The Tenderloin’s La Cocina Municipal Marketplace is the first women-run market of that type in the nation.
*The Tenderloin remains the most affordable neighborhood in San Francisco.
Most neighborhoods with drug markets are rundown, blighted, and dominated by abandoned housing and retail spaces. That’s not the Tenderloin. In fact, as I describe in my book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco, the Tenderloin has suffered from acute economic downturns for less than twenty years since the neighborhood was rebuilt in 1907.
That’s a better record than many currently thriving San Francisco neighborhoods.
That’s why City Hall’s allowing open drug markets in today’s Tenderloin faces such resistance. We have a great neighborhood that city officials are allowing East Bay drug cartels to damage. A single problem—open air drug sales—alone blocks the Tenderloin’s success.
Rebounding Post-Covid
I’ve previously described how the Tenderloin was on the path toward revitalization before COVID. But as devastating as COVID has been for the neighborhood, only open drug markets impede an imminent revival.
Why do I remain so bullish on the Tenderloin’s future? Because unlike downtown and Mid-Market, the Tenderloin has the residential and worker economic base to support its restaurants and bars. Unlike those other neighborhoods, nobody describes the post-COVID Tenderloin as a ghost-town. The Tenderloin is bustling with people outside of the drug trade. Tenderloin apartments remain filled with service workers who eat out, go to bars and attend entertainment venues.
To be clear, the absence of state and federal workers hurts lunch activity in Little Saigon. But I see this as temporary. Unlike private sector workers upon whom downtown and Mid-Market depend, public employees based in Civic Center will eventually return to in-person work ( why state and federal employees still work from home 30 months after COVID is a mystery).
A 14-story student dorm for Hastings and UCSF will bring 670 new fulltime residents to the neighborhood in 2023. When coupled with three recently completed new housing developments along Golden Gate and Turk bordering Market (60 Jones, 1028 Market and 950-974 Market), there will be over 1000 new residents looking for restaurants, bars and cafes in the Tenderloin.
These new customers will make up for any ongoing decline in in-person public sector jobs.
Two destination restaurants will open in the Tenderloin by the end of October: Azalina at 499 Ellis and a still to be named Korean spot at 222 Hyde. That both restaurants continued their plans despite the neighborhood’s problems is a testament to confidence people in the Tenderloin’s future.
Is Closing Drug Markets a Pipe Dream?
Because I have seen in 2014 the city close down a longstanding open drug market with 50-100 dealers on the first block of Turk Street (link is to story that preceded the shutdown), I know it can be done. It’s a question of political will.
Mayor Ed Lee had the political will. He ordered then-Chief Suhr to provide two officers, 24-7 on the unit block of Turk to root out the dealers once and for all. Suhr disagreed. He told the mayor that he “knew” the Tenderloin from his days as a beat cop and that “that’s how the neighborhood has always been.”
Mayor Lee famously responded, “It’s not going to be that way anymore.” And he forced Suhr to do what was necessary to eliminate what the SFPD had deemed an impossible situation.
Mayor Breed confronts a shortage of SFPD officers. This makes it harder to staff the hot-spot policing strategy necessary to close drug markets. Breed also confronts far more open drug markets and a more disciplined drug cartel.
But the situation is worse today because the city allowed it tog get worse. Further, we never heard about an officer shortage when SFPD swarmed Union Square for a month following the Louis Vuitton viral video thefts. Yet we continue to hear how officers are in short supply when it comes to closing drug markets in the Tenderloin.
City Hall must stop holding the Tenderloin back. It must stop acting like open air drug markets are just part of city life or Tenderloin’s life. No other major city sees open drug markets only a few blocks from City Hall and a short walk from its upscale shopping area.
The Tenderloin can be some politician’s huge success story. It is a story that should start being written today.
Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s latest book is Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. He is the author of four prior books on activism, including The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. He is also the author of The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco
