Gary Kamiya, a cofounder of Salon and long-time resident of San Francisco, has collected his essays – love letters, really – about his adopted City (always spelled with a capital C) in “Cool Gray City of Love.” Among the 49 views of San Francisco is this one about the Tenderloin – analogous to but not the same as our Downtown East Side (rather like all comparisons of SFO to YVR).
Here are a few quotes:
In the universe of San Francisco, the Tenderloin is the black hole, the six block-by-six-block area where the city’s urban matter is more intensely concentrated. It is the only part of San Francisco that remains untamed, its last human wilderness …
Many cities used to have ‘bad’ neighborhoods in the heart of downtown, zones of misrule where the primal human urges – to get laid, to get high, and to get money – were allowed to bloom furtively in the night. But most of them are gone now, victims of gentrification. New York Times Square feels like Disneyland, Vancouver’s Gastown has been tamed, Boston’s Combat Zone was rendered hors de combat years ago. And of those that remain, none take up[ 36 square blocks of prime real estate in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in the world. …
So why is it still here?
Because the city wants it to be here.
For decades, the Tenderloin has been carefully protected by the city and various non-profit organizations. It’s not that these officials, social workers, homeless advocates, and low-cost housing activists want to maintain a zone of crime and filth in the heart of San Francisco; it’s simply an inescapable consequence of their laudable commitment to defend society’s most vulnerable members. The problem is that by saving the baby, you also save the bathwater.
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A report on the Tenderloin by PBS Newshour, including an interview with Kamiya:
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Coincidentally, the Tenderloin is listed as No. 1 on the list of Top 10 Most Car Independent Neighborhoods in America by the numbers (outside NYC) in City Clock Magazine.
What is “the city’s urban matter”? I have a positive association to that phrase, but the rest of the write-up indicates that I should consider it a bad thing…
i live in the tenderloin and i’d like to add a couple thoughts on this reportage.
1) the tl is gentrifying and has been since the 1990s. there are people i know making well over 100k/year who have taken tl studios (most of the people people in my building) for a lot of reasons, but mostly proximity and character. the shops are changing, the gritty portion of the hood is shrinking measurably, and basically the people are different. there are over a dozen private high rise projects (probably more) in some stage of development right in the neighborhood, and we’re seeing the same pressures here as elsewhere. so, basically, it’s just wrong to suggest that the tl is resistant to gentrification.
2) the reason for the concentration of poverty in the first place is a corrupt bargain wherein the other neighborhood representatives basically see almost all social housing set up in the tl or inner mission/western soma. basically, they jam it in here so that they can keep their neighborhoods pristine.
the black dude who said he was filtered into the tl is right – for many, it’s the last stop before leaving the city or becoming homeless. but it’s not like it was back in the 1980s. basically, you could make compare it to the dtes of 5 years ago.