Neighborhood struggles
Why I left the Tenderloin
The TL was like a toxic boyfriend I spent years making excuses for in San Francisco.
We’ve published many love letters to San Francisco this past year, and a number of comments accused The Bold Italic of putting our head in the sand. We haven’t. We know San Francisco needs help.
By Adriana Roberts
I tried, I really did. But a mere seven weeks after I wrote my love letter to the Tenderloin for The Bold Italic, I moved. I couldn’t take it anymore. After two-and-a-half years of constant screaming in the streets, bumping Bluetooth speakers, and my own building’s constant fire alarms, I had to GTFO.
Look, it’s not like people didn’t warn me when I decided to move back to San Francisco in 2021 after a COVID-induced exile. I had plenty of friends and colleagues who shared tales about their colorful “first apartment experience in SF,” where they lived in the TL, fresh out of college with no money, or trying to escape their homophobic hometowns. If you don’t have a job, the Tenderloin definitely has the cheapest rent you can find that’s actually in the city. But most people get out as soon as they can.
I thought I was tougher than that. After all, I’d been living within a few blocks of San Francisco’s most blighted neighborhood since 2001. I felt familiar with what I was getting myself into. Everyone else were just thin-skinned dilettantes who couldn’t handle living in the big bad city. Not me, though! I was a bad-ass trans girl with street smarts. Getting cat called? Needles on the sidewalk? Crazy people yelling at me? Pffft, whatever, walk fast and with a purpose and everything’s fine.
But I admit I was being a bit speculative about moving into the Tenderloin. Things had slooowly gotten a bit better pre-pandemic. Third-wave coffee shops and art galleries had been popping up, always the first sign of hipster gentrification.
Throw in a few great Asian eateries, a fancy jazz supper club, even a Japanese onsen spa, and it was staring to look like the TL might be on the upswing. The Tenderloin Museum had opened in 2015, and started highlighting the historic significance of the neighborhood. Beautification projects were underway. But then, Miss COVID came and put the clamp down on all that.
Fast forward a year later, and other than all the new murals, the clock had sadly been turned back on the TL, and with all those new businesses gone, the unhoused and the drug dealers serving them came back with a vengeance.
Of course, a lot of this has to do with San Francisco’s lenient drug enforcement policies, as well as its reputation as a sanctuary city, making the threat of deportation for the Honduran dealers less risky. Add the more recent fentanyl epidemic to the mix, and in the 2 1/2 years I’ve lived in the neighborhood, it has gotten visibly worse, not better. One gets numb to living amongst the fentanyl users on a daily basis, and nobody should become this desensitized to human suffering. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
San Francisco voters recently passed Proposition F, which requires anyone receiving welfare from the city to undergo a drug test before receiving funds. If they test positive, they have the opportunity to enroll in a free treatment program in order to keep getting assistance. Will this change anything in the Tenderloin? Only time will tell, but fentanyl is a helluva drug. I highly doubt it.
I quickly learned the open-air drug market rotation and tried to avoid those blocks whenever possible — except when it moved to my block, and I had to wade through it all just to get into my building. From my perspective as a neighborhood resident, it seemed as if city officials were just shoveling all the shit into these few city blocks purposely. They certainly can’t police it, so better to just contain it, so it doesn’t spill over into the more tony surrounding neighborhoods of Union Square, Hayes Valley, and Lower Nob Hill.
And when I say “shit,” I don’t mean figuratively. The sidewalks of the Tenderloin are a literal mine field of shit piles, and one quickly learns how to play “Tenderloin Hopscotch.” It’s a delicate balance of keeping your eyes on the ground so you don’t step in shit, but also keeping your head up to be alert of your surrounding. It shouldn’t have to be like this, but it is.
Post-pandemic, the media paints San Francisco like this is what entire city is like, but the truth is, it’s just the Tenderloin. It’s only this 10-block radius, and only a few blocks are really that bad. The trouble is, being so close to Union Square and Civic Center, it’s hard for tourists to avoid. So unlike other city’s blighted Skid Row neighborhoods, ours is front and center, the centerpiece of all those “doom loop” stories the national media loves to run.
Eight hours after I turned in my keys to my landlord, there was a shooting at Turk & Hyde at 2:30 in the morning. One person died, and four were critically injured. Were the victims drug dealers in a turf war or innocent bystanders just walking by? All I know is, I would have been walking by that corner from my nightclub DJ gig at exactly that time, had I not moved out earlier that day. I literally dodged a bullet.
It’s much quieter where I am now, and it’s not even like I went very far. I moved literally only 5 blocks away, across the street from the TL, and for only a bit more money than what I was paying for my overpriced 1960s apartment whose entryway doubled as either an open-air drug market or a homeless shelter, depending on the week. Anyone familiar with San Francisco’s compact neighborhoods knows that things can change a lot in only a block.
Sure, I miss a few things about the TL, like throwing raging parties in my apartment because I could totally get away with it. When the neighborhood denizens, especially the drug dealers, are constantly blasting music through Bluetooth speakers at all hours of the night, my little house parties paled in comparison.
I still go to my favorite Tenderloin restaurants, especially all the great Thai and Vietnamese places in Little Saigon. And I still get my groceries at Fishtail Market on Turk Street, run by the super nice owner Ashok, better known to neighborhood residents as Sean, who always tries to special order my favorite foods if he’s out of stock.
Now that I’m finally out of the ‘hood, I can see the blight more clearly (like, literally, from my windows across the street). In hindsight, despite my best efforts to make the best of it, the Tenderloin was like a toxic abusive boyfriend I kept making excuses for to my family and friends, when asked why I continued living there.
If you ever need a reminder of social inequity or the scourge that fentanyl is, walking through the TL is a good reality check. But there are enough hidden gems to make it a good place to visit. It’s just a really shitty place to live.
Adriana Roberts is a DJ and performer with her Bootie Mashup parties, as well as a writer and trans influencer.
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