by Randy Shaw on March 24, 2025 (BeyondChron.org)
1980 Campaign to Stop Luxury Hotels
Resurgent Tourism Can Drive Tenderloin Economy
Tourism. I have a long history opposing new tourist hotels in the Tenderloin. I joined with residents in seeing tourists as ignoring community needs. We saw tourist hotels as converting neighborhood-serving retail spaces into postcard and t-shirt shops. Tourists would spend money outside the neighborhood rather than supporting nearby restaurants, bars or cultural venues.
I was wrong. It took me forty years and COVID to realize that. Here’s why I shifted from opposing new tourist hotels to promoting tourism as essential for the Tenderloin’s revival.
The Luxury Hotel Fight
My earliest Tenderloin experience was in 1980 when I joined the community’s historic campaign against three luxury highrise hotels planned for the neighborhood’s border. The community learned of these projects by the Holiday Inn, Hilton and Ramada (soon changed to the Parc 55) national chains only a few months after we opened the Tenderloin Housing Clinic in February 1980.
I embraced the growing community struggle to stop the Tenderloin’s “touristification.” Residents saw the hotel plans as part of a larger strategy to flood the Tenderloin with highrise hotels and tourist businesses.
Fortunately, the neighborhood preempted such plans. It did so in 1981 by initiating a rezoning petition that imposed across the board 13-story height limitations and prevented any new tourist hotels in the Tenderloin. The rezoning became permanent in 1985. The Tenderloin’s pro-active response to a major development threat became a case study in my first book, The Activist’s Handbook.
To our surprise, the three luxury hotels brought neither people nor revenue to the Tenderloin. We also did not expect the Hilton to become a neighborhood political ally, which continued for decades.
But I now opposed new tourist hotels for a new reason: their failure to support local businesses. I felt convention attendees were eating inside the Hilton or outside the neighborhood instead of sampling Tenderloin cuisine.
Yes, I went from opposing tourist hotels out of fear they would trigger the wrong kind of community investment to opposing them because they weren’t boosting Tenderloin businesses enough. I was so down on the impact of new tourist hotels that I wrote an op-ed for the Berkeley Daily Planet opposing a proposed tourist hotel in downtown Berkeley. I used my Tenderloin experience to argue that the project’s benefits would not go beyond the hotel doors.
COVID Wake-Up Call
COVID changed my perspective. The pandemic completely cut off the Tenderloin’s revenue stream. Initially, this was attributed to two factors: the surrounding of Little Saigon by drug activities and city, state and federal workers working from home.
Few were going to walk by the drug dealers surrounding Little Saigon to get a quality meal. Many of those deterred by drug activities were tourists.
There were seven tourist hotels in or just outside Little Saigon when COVID hit: the Cova, the Embassy, 587 HTL, the Epik, the American Youth Hostel, the Best Western and the legendary Phoenix. Only the Phoenix had a top quality restaurant. This led hotel guests in the others to dine in Little Saigon or nearby.
At least 350 tourists from these seven hotels who regularly came to the Tenderloin largely stopped doing so starting in March 2020. Add to that the customers from other nearby tourist hotels— the Monarch, 1015 Geary, the Adante, 610 Geary, and the Line Hotel (recently renamed the Timbri), the Proper, Yotel, and Aida Hotels at Seventh and Market—- and we are talking a loss of roughly 700 tourist customers per day from Tenderloin-Mid-Market small businesses.
Need to see the data behind the impact? According to a September 2024 story, “the Tenderloin has seen a 68% drop in sales tax revenue compared to 2019. It’s a sharp turnaround from before the pandemic: between 2017 and 2019, sales tax revenue in the Tenderloin had grown 76%.
Tragically, the prior City Hall administration contributed to the elimination of tourist income by converting four tourist hotels around Little Saigon to shelters (the Cova, American Youth Hostel, Monarch and Adante). The prior administration’s spending $22 million on a drug user paradise called the Linkage Center at Seventh and Market badly damaged hotel businesses in the surrounding area.
What happened when tourists stopped coming to Little Saigon? Over a block of vacant storefronts provides the answer (See “While City Hall Still Fiddles, Little Saigon Still Falls,” March 11, 2024).
Bringing Tourists Back
So that’s why I’m now pushing to get more tourists in the Tenderloin. How does that happen?
It starts with closing down drug markets. Larkin Street is usually clear but connecting streets like O’Farrell bordering Larkin still have dealers. Cedar Alley north of Little Saigon does as well.
The police make arrests but the flow of users from nearby city-funded tourist hotels converted to shelters ensures a steady customer base for dealers. A quality restaurant will not open in Little Saigon without believing people will feel safe eating there.
Let’s assume that Mayor Lurie’s single-minded focus gets the drug markets closed. The Tenderloin still must attract customers.
A projected five day a week return for local, state and federal employees in the Civic Center area has not materialized. President Trump’s order requiring federal workers to resume Monday-Friday schedules was undercut by him laying off half the workers slated to return.
Governor Newsom’s return to work order doesn’t impact the majority of employees in nearby state buildings because they are not under the governor. They are either independent state officials or part of the court system.
Mayor Lurie’s four-day return order could help by bringing more City Hall workers to Tenderloin lunch spots but that’s the only city building a short distance from the Tenderloin (1 South Van Ness might also count).
That’s why the Tenderloin needs an upsurge of tourists. The tourists who helped propel the Tenderloin’s revitalization in the pre-COVID years.
SF Travel and other citywide tourist advocacy organizations need to promote Tenderloin hotels. Reviews have always praised the hotels themselves. Once the drug activities are gone travel businesses must help these hotels return to pre-COVID occupancy rates.
A rise in tourism that in 1980 once threatened to destroy the historic Tenderloin neighborhood is now necessary to revive it. It will make a powerful comeback story!
Want to learn about the Tenderloin’s rich history? Pick up Randy Shaw’s updated book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. To support the Tenderloin Museum, buy the book at https://www.tenderloinmuseum.org/buy-the-book
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 new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. 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.
