A6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022
after program — and all of it
makes it worse,” Alameri said of
the city government. “It feels like
quicksand: the more money and
programs that come here, the
more problems and people it
sucks in.”
Hell or a haven?
The Tenderloin provides in-
stant sensory overload, head
spinning on arrival, even to those
who have visited often. One el-
ement is the sidewalk chorus of a
thousand voices, all seemingly
talking to themselves. The rise
and fall of many monologues,
mostly the result of drug use or
mental illness, serves as the
neighborhood’s musical theme.
The chorus sang out one re-
cent Monday morning, the after-
math of a weekend evident in
U.N. Plaza. In the morning sun,
City Hall’s brilliant white dome
refle cted winter daylight in a
million directions.
The city power-washing trucks
worked away, clearing up human
waste and hypodermic needles
that did not make the sanitary-
disposal boxes affixed to public-
toilet kiosks. A “clean-energy ve-
hicle” — in this case, a public bus
— zipped by soundlessly on Mar-
ket Street.
“You were in my way, man, my
way,” one young man shouted at
another. “My way, my way. My
way.”
It is the sound that a frail
Black man at the top of the BART
subway station escalator hears
from his contorted posture,
probably gripped by the early
stages of a fentanyl rush. So, too,
does the White man doubled
over in a nearby bus shelter,
rushing or withdrawing. Behind
him, in silence, someone leans
his head against the wall of an
expensive hotel and vomits qui-
etly.
Police officers in small groups
survey the scene — and do little
more.
But there is some hope here, a
line outside the Linkage Center,
the just-opened clearinghouse
for city housing, mental health
and substance-abuse services.
There are hot meals and, when
the group Dignity on Wheels
pulls up on Market Street, haul-
SAN FRANCISCO FROM A
ing a trailer full of portable
showers and washing machines,
there is a place to get cleaned up,
too.
The leased building is across
from U.N. Plaza, the most visible
landmark so far of the social
element to Breed’s Tenderloin
plan. It is staffed to serve 100
people a day.
Outside, hidden from public
sight by blue fencing, is an area
where those at the center can use
drugs to avoid severe withdraw-
al. There is no law yet allowing
such a place — known as a
safe-consumption site — but one
is in the works in the State
House.
“This is an overdose preven-
tion site, and we are practicing
harm-reduction here,” said Mary
Ellen Carroll, who directs the
city’s Department of EmergencyManagement and designed the
emergency plan. “The question is
how does what we are doing here
turn the dial on what is happen-
ing inside the Tenderloin. That
remains to be seen.”
Carroll is at the Linkage Cen-
ter almost daily now, sometimes
haunted as she was on a recent
afternoon by a woman suffering
mental illness with only the
clothes on her back and no
identification of any kind. She is
among the nearly 2,500 people
who have visited the center so
far, about a fifth of whom have
left with a referral to some city
service.
The short-term priority is
keeping her and many like her
inside the center until even a
temporary solution might be
found for shelter, for a shower
and snack, for an overdose pre-vented with naloxone. A dozen
doses were administered in the
center during its second week of
operation alone.
“There are people who come in
who can’t go for more than 30
minutes without using,” Carroll
said. “We are trying to engage
them and frankly with this popu-
lation, if you don’t give them
space to do what they need to do,
you can’t engage for long.”A future to fear
The Tenderloin has been a
carnival within San Francisco’s
cultural carnival for decades, a
neighborhood of very young and
very old, the newly arrived and
the barely alive, Red Light dis-
trict and political refuge.
In the 1970s, its lower-than-av-
erage property prices made it an
affordable first stop for Vietnam-ese and other Southeast Asian
refugees escaping war. Over the
years, the mix has shifted. Lati-
nos, many recently arrived from
Central America, and Middle
Eastern immigrants, many flee-
ing civil conflict in Yemen, have
changed the cultural streetscape.
On a single block there’s “Ko-
rean Comfort Food,” Gulf Coast
Mexican taquerias and Sudanese
cuisine. The range of ethnicities
is evident in the masked faces of
the kindergartners who file, in
best-behavior seriousness,
through the halls of the Tender-
loin Community School.
“The people who are coming to
the Tenderloin, many of them,
they’ve been displaced, they’ve
been traumatized, they’ve expe-
rienced violence, they’ve gone in
and out of institutions or jail or
prison,” said Matt Haney, wholives in the neighborhood and
represents it on the San Francis-
co board of supervisors. “They
have been let down at every level
in their lives.”
Here the city’s most concen-
trated population of people en-
during homelessness and addic-
tion live directly below $400-a-
night hotel rooms and glamorous
rooftop restaurants, a flickering
fire pit as the centerpiece of each
table.
Whole Foods will open soon
across Market Street from the
Linkage Center. A block down,
the “Market on Market” caters to
the nearby Twitter workforce, an
expensive and expansive selec-
tion of international wines and
other bougie fresh-food items
filling the shelves. There’s a T rad-
er Joe’s around another corner.
“What is especially painful is
that it’s so close to such wealth
and such innovation,” said
Haney, who supported Breed’s
plan and will face Campos in the
April runoff for the open Assem-
bly seat. “It’s ne w, it’s the future.
And if the future looks like this
you should rightfully be terri-
fied.”
The neighborhood sometimes
has the feel at times of a crisis
zone, where disaster relief is
being delivered, where food and
medicines are being dispensed
by a variety of volunteer groups.
There are the colored vests, for
example, a staple of any crisis
zone. The Tenderloin is ablaze
with colored vests.
Most of the vested are from
Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit
working under a city contract
that pays its employees to help
clear and keep clean the Tender-
loin streets. There are 450 of the
Urban Alchemy workers in the
neighborhood.
They wear black-and-green
vests. Most have served time in
prison, the organization’s credo
being that “the best people to
heal society are those who under-
stand what it means to harm it.”
Small clear holders, contain-
ing a d ose of naloxone, dangle
from a loop on their vests.
It’s work that happens along-
side the daily rituals of the Ten-
derloin’s residents. A little after
8 a.m. one recent morning, a
squiggly group of schoolchildren
line up in single file, a fewIn heart of San Francisco, an ‘emergency’ drug problem
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
BART riders emerge from a train station near a street corner with heavy drug use and drug sales in the Tenderloin on Feb. 8. Just blocks
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