Becuase it was sunny and pleasant, on the day we visited The Mission area in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, we decided to walk from our hotel near Union Square. Not such a great idea. That trek took us through Tenderloin, one of the nastiest areas in the city. I suppose it’s good to see that side of life from time to time, and if you’re going to see it, seeing it at noon on a sunny day is probably the optimal time to do so. It’s a good way to sour your mood for an afternoon, though. In just one walk-through, I saw some of the hardest luck cases I think I’ve ever seen.

At any rate, reader Craig Quackenbush is a former San Francisco native low living in New York. He sends this interesting write-up of his time in Tenderloin:

The Tenderloin found its name at a point in time when police were paid extra to work its streets, and thus could afford “tenderloin”, superior cuts of meat. It is an area west of Union Square, east of Van Ness, south of Geary, and north of Market. It is neglected and dilapidated – the epitome of urban decay. It smolders with a sooty aura of oppression. It reeks with the stench of litter, urine, and cheap booze. It’s a place that locals and former visitors alike will recommend avoiding, especially at night. The Tenderloin is the blighted hub of the city’s human discards…

…one thing is certain – the Tenderloin attracts society’s fringe element. Here are the diseased and dying, the strung-out addicts, the dispossessed elderly, the mentally unstable, felons and parolees, and the transsexual street hustlers. Of course, the ever-present prostitutes flaunt the flesh, scraping out a meager survival while their pimps skulk in the shadows, predators with a bankroll. The ‘Loin is where our culture’s periphery congregate, fight, drink, and peddle their wares, be it drugs, skin, or otherwise. Father Alfred Boedecker Park on Eddy Street at Jones (one street south from where I lived) is the choice hangout for drunks, junkies, pushers, whores, and even the longtime ‘Loin resident.

One thing I noticed about San Francisco: where there is despair and urban destitution, it’s absolutely agonizing. D.C. of course has its share of homeless. But the homeless in San Francisco for whatever reason seemed to be particularly gut-wrenching displays of humanity. While we were in town, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an update of an ongoing feature in which the paper has been following the plight of a series of homeless folk in the city. It’s pretty painful stuff to read. Part of the problem of course might be that the city’s one of the homeless-friendliest in the country. One of the toughest parts of the Chronicle series was reading how many people were contacted by friends or relatives attempting to get them off the streets — and how they refused.

When Mayor Gavin Newsome attempted to cut the “stipend” the city pays its homeless from four hundred to one hundred dollars a month in his “Care Not Cash: program, activists went nuts. Newsome took a huge hit from the left for that. But hell, at least the guy did something. His predecessor — Willie Brown — once said the city’s homeless problem just “may not be solvable.”

Well no, not as long as you’re incentivizing homelessness, and in so doing, raising the cost of private aid.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2005 at 8:23 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.