SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
stamping in anticipation, others
silent with anxiety, outside the
steamed-up windows of El
Jefecito Laundry.
Time for school.
On this chilly day 11 children
line up along Turk Street with
Baby Yoda backpacks and Spi-
der-Man lunchboxes, little par-
kas and big sweatshirts. This is
their school bus, a chaperoned
escort through the Tenderloin,
past the addicts with foil and
lighter flames in hand, past the
ill and the hustlers.
“Line ‘em up guys, line ‘em up,”
Aviaire Evans, a 33-year-old aero-
sol artist, calls out. “And .... we’re
going to school, guys, let’s go.”
El Jefecito quickly behind
them, the pedestrian bus edges
up the crowded sidewalk toward
Van Ness, where the brightly
tiled Tenderloin Community
School awaits. Evans, wearing
the white vest of the Code Ten-
derloin group, shouts for the line
to step right to avoid a smear of
human waste, sending a flurry of
rainbow running shoes and spar-
kly sneakers scampering out of
the way.
Terrill Jones brings up the
rear.
He is huge and, in his words,
“every bit of 50 years old,” al-
though he looks younger as he
shepherds tiny stragglers across
Turk. He has spent half his life in
prison on robbery and weapons
convictions. Out for three years
now, he has traded Soledad State
Prison for the Tenderloin.
“We’re gap fillers — finding the
gaps in this neighborhood and
stepping in,” said Jones, a mem-
ber of the Code Tenderloin com-
munity group that runs the walk-
ing school bus. “I made an agree-
ment with myself, and with God,
that I would put the same energy
I put into committing crimes into
helping this community.”
This is the attritional nature of
the Tenderloin project, military
in its approach to secure and
hold public areas. One proposal
to help clear the streets is to give
city authorities more authority to
take people who cannot take care
of themselves off the street, the
legal process of conservatorship.
But the state law remains very
restrictive and San Francisco has
used conservatorship only twice
in two years. City officials believe
roughly 150 people should be
candidates for conservator, still
less than two percent of the city’s
homeless population.
The crowd simply moves now
around the Tenderloin, a parade
of dealing, and addiction, and
shelter-seeking that follows the
paths of least resistance. The
so-called balloon effect — when
one part of a balloon is squeezed,
another swells up — is as much
an issue here as it is in the larger
war on drugs.
“It’s still a whack-a-mole,
push-people-in-a-circle situa-
tion,” said Charles Pitts, 50, a
registered voter who has been
homeless in the Tenderloin for
the past four years.
Divide and hope
Although she did not grow up
in the Tenderloin, Breed appears
to take personally the conditions
on its streets, something she has
publicly cursed about in recent
weeks. She noted angrily that
Black people now account for
about 4 to 5 percent of San
Francisco’s population and an
estimated 40 percent of its home-
less, many on the Tenderloin’s
streets.
Her brother, Napoleon Brown,
is serving a 44-year prison sen-
tence at the penitentiary in Va-
caville for a manslaughter con-
viction. In 2000, Brown pushed a
25-year-old man, Lenties White,
out of a robbery getaway car.
White was killed by an oncoming
car.
Six years later, on the eve of
her 26th birthday, Breed’s young-
er sister died of a drug overdose.
Breed acknowledges the trou-
bled history many San Francisco
residents, especially those of col-
or, have had with the city police.
In the Plaza East project where
she grew up, you didn’t talk to
police, only avoid them, she said.
“My beliefs stem from how I
grew up and where I grew up in
poverty in this city — it wasn’t
designed to be a part of any
ideology,” she said. “It’s really
based on what I saw, what I
experienced.”
But her critics say her plan is
simply a repeat of the nation’s
“war on drugs,” a demand-first
focus that punishes the addict,erecting with prison records and
nuisance fines barriers insur-
mountable to even some of the
most determined to recover.
“I will say that sadly, many of
the very left-leaning progressives
in the city who are politically
active, they have a playbook,”
Breed said. “And they use certain
things as excuses as to what will
or will not happen to incite fear
in people.”
Among the most obvious di-
vides over the Tenderloin is be-
tween Breed and the city’s elect-
ed district attorney, Chesa Boud-
in, a White Ivy League-educated
liberal who grew up in a far
different environment than the
mayor.
Boudin’s parents were mem-
bers of the Weather Under-
ground, a far-left militant group
founded in the late 1960s. When
Boudin was just over a year old,
his parents, David Gilbert and
Kathy Boudin, were convicted of
killing two police officers and a
security guard during a bank
robbery. Kathy Boudin was re-
leased from prison in 2003, Gil-
bert last year.
Now 41, Boudin was raised inChicago by university professors
Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ay-
ers, leaders of the Weather Un-
derground, which the FBI once
labeled a terrorist group.
He earned an undergraduate
and a law degree from Yale and
studied at Oxford University. InSan Francisco, he worked as a
public defender, leading a semi-
nal case that challenged the pay-
ing of cash bail to secure a
defendant’s pretrial release as
unconstitutional.
Asked in a recent interview
what he sees in the Tenderloin,
Boudin said, “I see, first and
foremost, San Francisco's most
diverse community, the neigh-
borhood that has the highest
density of different immigrant
groups and families of school age
children.”
“I see a neighborhood that’s
full of different ethnic cuisines,
that adjoins our City Hall, and
kind of glues together so many
different neighborhoods,” he
continued. “I see all that. And I
see a neighborhood with tremen-
dous resilience and one that has
for decades been plagued by a
combination of a very visible
public health crisis and higher-
than-average crime rates.”
In November 2019, Boudin ran
successfully for district attorney
after his predecessor, George
Gascon, declined to seek reelec-
tion. Breed won her first full
term as mayor on the same
ballot.
Gascon went on to win the
race for district attorney of Los
Angeles County, where his pros-
ecution philosophy, designed to
reduce overzealous charging,
mass incarceration, and exces-
sive sentencing, were developed
in large part in this city.
Boudin’s policies are largely
consistent with Gascon’s. A new
father of a 4-month-old, Boudin
is viewed by his more conserva-
tive critics as too lenient on gun,
gang, drugs and property crime.
Most recently, Boudin has
come out against Breed’s deci-
sion to send more police to the
Tenderloin.
Like many to the mayor’s left,
he says more patrols will only
punish homelessness and addic-
tion, making it harder for those
suffering most to build a life
beyond the streets with the lega-
cy of policy records or unpaid
public nuisance fines. The small-
time dealers, meanwhile, just
cycle through. San Francisco po-
lice arrested more than 65 people
last year on more than one occa-
sion for drug dealing in the
Tenderloin.
“Right now in San Francisco, it
is easier to get high than it is to
get help,” Boudin said, arguing
that the city’s top priorities in the
Tenderloin must be preventing
fatal overdoses and increasingaccess to residential addiction
treatment.
“The drug sales themselves are
in many ways a symptom of a
larger problem,” Boudin said.
“Most of the residents that I
speak with aren't particularly
upset that there are drug sales
happening there, but they are
particularly upset with all of the
collateral implications, with the
groups of people congregating on
corners, with the human misery.”
Boudin said his office has not
seen drug arrests in the Tender-
loin increase since the mayor
sent more police there. But he
said he prosecutes about 85 per-
cent of the felony drug cases the
police bring to his office, a rate
that has risen steadily over the
past two years.
He will face a recall election in
June.‘This is a God problem’
The fence around Boeddeker
Park separates James Walker
from his former life.
Tall and working up a slight
sheen of sweat, Walker is on the
park’s well-cared-for basketball
court in work clothes, shooting a
lunchtime round of hoops on a
crisp, bright day.
This half-hour is a gratifying
routine, a regular reminder to
Walker of his three decades as an
addict on these same streets and
his dozen years clean.
Around the park perimeter a
homeless camp has sprung up
quickly, using the chain-link
fence as support for cardboard
lean-tos and tents. Pint-size vod-
ka bottles, scorched tin foil and
cigarette butts bump against the
curb along the street.
When police and other city
workers cleared the homeless
from a postage stamp-sized park
a few blocks away at Turk and
Hyde, many simply moved here
or farther up the street.
Walker knew those cycles for
decades, the shifting geography
of the drug trade and safe-sleep
spots, before he became a hus-
band, and a father to a daughter,
and a limousine driver with a
place to live on the far side of the
Bay in Oakland.
He is 60 years old.
“So they will just fill all the
jails — and then what? I was a
part of all that and it did no
good,” said Walker, who is Black
and maintains many friendships
with people still on the Tender-
loin’s streets. “London Breed is
not going to solve this problem.
This is a God problem.”PHOTOS BY MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
San Francisco police patrol the Tenderloin on Jan. 27. I n December, Mayor London Breed (D) declared
the neighborhood an emergency and sent additional officers to help with drug enforcement in the area.A homeless man in a wheelchair m oves on a street i n the Tenderloin. “Right now in San Francisco, it is
easier to get high than it is to get help,” said Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco.FROM TOP TO BOTTOM, IN
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