Sixteen months after San Francisco stepped up efforts to battle blight in the city's troubled Tenderloin District, KPIX 5's Wilson Walker investigates what has changed.
SAN FRANCISCO -- In early 2022, San Francisco mobilized to tackle the problems that had been building over decades in the Tenderloin District: Homelessness, an exploding drug crisis, the growing presence of drug cartels and a sense that things were spinning out of control. Sixteen months later, what has changed?
Mazza is taking on a challenge some might think impossible. As the Tenderloin Streets operation manager, he sees a lot of these streets.All that walking reflects a shift in city strategy -- this one driven by the Dec. 2022 closure of what debuted as the Tenderloin Linkage Center. Then there is the scale of the challenge in a city with an unsheltered homeless population of about 4,400.
"This group, they would go inside if they were eligible for what they want," Mazza said, talking about another group on the street."They want hotel rooms and they don't meet the eligibility requirements so they want to stay out here." "These guys are out here every day, often getting yelled at, working hard," Mazza said of his team."People are mad at them. People who are on the streets are mad. People who are housed are mad at them."
"If you're placing a regulation or rules or a process that needs to be followed," Eusope said."It has to be equally distributed and everybody has to act the same way and I just feel like that's what is missing here." Days later, more arrests at the very same corner. There are new rules. A uniformed officer must be on hand but it's not slowing them down. At the start of April, Tenderloin Station had made 217 arrests, putting it on pace to pass last year's total by more than 50 percent.
"The defense that was offered in both of those cases is that the defendant had been trafficked and that's why they were selling narcotics," Jenkins said."This is a new issue. When I was handling drug dealing cases five years ago, there was no allegation that anyone was being trafficked so it's something that we are having to adapt to rapidly."
In the same way Urban Alchemy only patrols some of the neighborhood, police can't be everywhere at once. "The police, they need to make more walking routes, you know," a man named Gordon said of what he'd like to see from SFPD."Walking around -- at least scare these guys." "I just want my voice to be heard," Smith said."I want people to be able to see what I see. Understand what I deal with every day when I walk out my door."
"There's a regular. He's out there all the time and there he is using a mule," they explained, pointing to some of the videos they had collected."It was something that people would just deny -- that's not going on -- but there it is, you know? Just look at it. You can see the drugs. You can see what's happening.""They are well aware of it," they said of the dealers."They have moved their operations up a block.
"People were -- initially -- they were directed to services to some capacity but you know that wasn't always happening," Mayor London Breed said of her decision to close it."We had all of the different services at one location and that wasn't completely translating to help and other locations." In the day-after-day, camp-by-camp effort to connect people on the streets with some kind of shelter, there is the one element that looms over just about everything.
"It is very weird because it's like I'm not used to this inside environment they're trying to give me," Phillip said."I wanna be somewhere where I'm comfortable.""The drugs that I do, because I do heavy drugs -- I do opiates and, for people who do these types of drugs, they can end up living and dying on the street, you know. It's really easy," he explained.
As hard as it can be to find housing and get someone placed in it, the city is having a much harder time with something else: Getting people into successful drug treatment or recovery."That's funny because it was asked to me a couple times and I gave a blank answer to that," he answered."Because it's hard. The opiates that I do, the detox and withdrawal, it's not a good feeling. So I would probably leave that as an unanswered question.
"My overall goal is to see the Tenderloin be a place where people can live in peace and safety," Mayor Dianne Feinsten said shortly after taking office in 1978. "Business owners come to my officers on a daily basis and they thank them," Captain Chin said."You probably say 'you guys are pretty successful at this location and why not at this location?'"
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