- By Natalia Gurevich | Examiner staff writer |
- Dec 1, 2024 Updated 20 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
Del Seymour says San Francisco remains “the craziest place” he has been in his life, but he strikes a much different tone about the Tenderloin.
A Chicago native who said he prefers Southern California, Seymour spent 18 years living on the neighborhood’s streets and dealing drugs. He first came to the Tenderloin in 1986.
“I call this the breakout neighborhood,” he said, meaning that if he was smoking his last cigarette and someone came and asked him for one, he’d break it in half and give it to them. “We help each other, we love on each other.”
Seymour said he thinks no other neighborhood in the world displays this level of compassion among its residents, because most everyone who lives there “has been there before” — homeless, on drugs, or just down on their luck.
“So when we see a neighbor in need, we know where he or she is at,” he said.
It’s this dedication to the Tenderloin that led him to found the Tenderloin Walking Tours 17 years ago, which morphed into Code Tenderloin in 2015. The neighborhood nonprofit provides job training and opportunities for homeless residents, among other services and resources.
Seymour, who is also the co-chair of San Francisco’s Local Homeless Coordinating Board, has become a well-known advocate for his adopted neighborhood and its inhabitants. He has long argued the Tenderloin’s residents are the most underserved in The City, and he attempts to bridge that gap by linking education, job opportunities, housing, and other resources to those living in the neighborhood struggling with homelessness, substance-use issues, mental health and other challenges, earning himself the nickname, “Mayor of the Tenderloin.”
Seymour said former Mayor Ed Lee gave him the moniker. It’s also the title of Alison Owings’ book about Seymour, which was released in September. He told The Examiner he initially wanted nothing to do with a book about himself, changing his mind when he realized it could be used to help others on the road to recovery from substance abuse.
“I remember when I first got clean, and I was depressed, because I ruined 18 years of my life,” Seymour said.
Attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and hearing the testimony of a man there “made me feel so much better and maybe helped me get my life together,” he said.
Seymour said, with a grin and a chuckle, that maybe his story would make someone else’s not seem so bad, and they would say, “at least I didn’t mess up like this.”
If Seymour is the Tenderloin’s mayor, then Code Tenderloin’s 55 Taylor St. headquarters is his City Hall. But the founder said he deliberately set up the organization’s offices so it wouldn’t feel like “a government agency” — he said he wants visitors to be able to walk in off the street without appointments.
“This isn’t the Department of Motor Vehicles,” he said.
Terrill Jones, the senior director of Code Tenderloin’s community ambassadors program, said he was once one of those people in 2019, needing an ID voucher.
After speaking with a case manager, putting together a resume, and eventually landing a couple of job opportunities, Jones said he brought “that experience back into the fold” at Code Tenderloin.
“I feel like we’re gap-fillers, meaning anything that comes up, we’re in the gap, filling that role,” he said. “That’s from getting housing help to ID vouchers — it could be as simple as that — or starting your own business, as advanced as that is.”
A large part of the organization’s work has been in expanding career opportunities for participants, particularly in technology. Seymour said he developed relationships with several tech companies such as Dolby, Zendesk and Twitter — now known as X — following Code Tenderloin’s founding.
Graduates of the organization have gone on to work at companies including Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Google. Although many tech companies have moved from their offices in The City in recent years, Dolby is still at 1275 Market St. — and that firm gave Code Tenderloin its first corporate grant.
“In advance of when Dolby moved to the Mid-Market neighborhood in 2015, we worked with Del to provide Tenderloin Walking tours to our employees to introduce them to our new neighborhood and ways to get involved,” said Joan Scott, senior director of social impact and sustainability at Dolby, in a statement.
Scott said she remembers when Seymour first shared the concept for Code Tenderloin with her over lunch, and that in the years since, Dolby has provided everything from mock interview sessions to serving on the Code Tenderloin board.
“When PG&E was close to turning our lights out. Dolby was over there that same day to ensure that we kept our programs going on,” Seymour said.
Sitting with Seymour on a recent rainy San Francisco day at Code Tenderloin, he led a reporter to an easy chair in the window of the front office. He pointed at the far corner of Turk and Taylor Streets — where, he said, he sold crack cocaine for nearly two decades.
By his count, he’d been arrested and charged with 14 felonies.
“I could sit here all day, literally,” he said of this new vantage point. “That helps me to keep my focus on.”
But he rarely spends his time just sitting. The original walking-tour host at Code Tenderloin’s predecessor, Seymour still spends a lot of his time traversing the streets of the Tenderloin, although the average walk down a block takes much longer than the average pedestrian, with Seymour stopping to shake hands, exchange words or hug passersby.
Ever the gentleman, he made sure to gently steer The Examiner’s reporter clear of any errant feces on the sidewalk.
Seymour took The Examiner to Boeddeker Park, which today is a lush oasis with green grass, a bright-blue basketball court and a playground.
Twenty or so years ago, Seymour said “there were so many people in here doing and using drugs, it was just like fighting cockroaches.”
Back then, Seymour said there wasn’t a police station across the street like there is now at Eddy and Jones Streets, and it was easier to come to the park when his corner got too “hot.”
“You would never understand drug dealing,” he said. “No one would.”
The park was one of the only places in the neighborhood at the time that was completely “safe” from police enforcement, he said. The park underwent an extensive renovation before reopening in its new form in 2014.
Touring his Tenderloin could have kept going for five hours, Seymour said, but he just didn’t have that much time to spare.
Seymour’s last stop on the mini walk with The Examiner was at the Tenderloin Museum at 398 Eddy St., where a special exhibition was on display. “Tenderloin Blackness” is running there through the end of November before moving to UC Law San Francisco.
Seymour organized the exhibition to honor historic Black community leaders, such as the late Rev. Cecil Williams and Leroy Looper, as well as to highlight the work of around a dozen current figures that he chose by crowdsourcing from the community.
Majeid Crawford, who serves on the board of directors of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, was also among the group.
“To be one of the people featured in [Seymour’s] ‘Tenderloin Blackness’ exhibit is truly humbling,” Crawford said. “It is a beautiful far-reaching campaign to recognize the Black community’s place in the Tenderloin and the impact our community is making.”
The exhibit features Black Tenderloin artists working in different media, from painting to doll-making to poetry.
“Part of the idea here was to have it expand over time and grow and accumulate,” said Alex Spoto, the program director of the museum. “[Seymour] hosted a couple of oral-history style open houses, where people would come in and tell their story that’ll be included in future exhibits, so that the project will live on.”
It’s just one of Seymour’s projects, and as he ambled back to the Code Tenderloin office for a meeting about outreach for homeless veterans, he once again said that no matter how much he disliked San Francisco, he’d always return to the Tenderloin.
“I try to leave, but I wind up being right back over here,” he said.
Asked when he has tried to leave, he chuckled.
“Every day,” he said.
