Tenderloin kids’ letter to mayor demands help

Kids bounded up the grand marble staircase at San Francisco City Hall on a recent afternoon and down the hallway to Room 200 where the mayor works. Alongside some teachers and parents, they handed a letter to Mayor London Breed’s secretary describing what it’s like living in the Tenderloin and demanding the mayor’s help.

But first they had questions.

Those questions were easy to answer. Other questions raised by the heartbreaking note

are not.

“We are immigrants and refugees. We are children and mothers and fathers,” began the letter, written by staff at the Tenderloin Community Benefit District on Nov. 5 and signed by more than 400 neighbors. “We are small business owners and the people San Francisco claims to respect and protect and celebrate. We are the Tenderloin, and you have failed us.”

Reading the letter and spending time with the children prompted a lot of questions.

Why does City Hall treat the Tenderloin, as the letter described it, like a “containment zone,” allowing the neighborhood filled with kids and seniors to be damaged by an open-air fentanyl market that kills, on average, two people a day?

Why should young children be at risk of violence while walking to school? An 11-yearold girl who wears a hijab was punched in the head on Sept. 29 by a woman who “made hate-related statements without provocation,” said Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the Police Department. The woman was arrested for assault, child endangerment and a hate crime, but the girl said she’s seen her around the neighborhood again since the incident.

Why did a shooting just after 8:30 pm Oct. 12 near Golden Gate and Hyde streets that involved multiple gunmen firing dozens of shots and wounding four people as families were out on the sidewalks not get more public attention like other mass shootings do?

Police data shows 34 shootings in the Tenderloin through September of this year, a 113% rise from the same period last year. This year’s shootings have killed nine people — including a 15-year-old boy in April — and injured 35 more.

If any of this happened in Noe Valley or the Marina or Pacific Heights, would the city’s response be the same? Of course not.

“We know you did not cause the conditions in the Tenderloin, but we demand you put an end to them,” the letter continued. “We demand that the city, your office and you do your job.”

The mayor was in a meeting and couldn’t take the letter in person, her secretary said. But Jeff Cretan, her spokesperson, later said the mayor “has directed city departments to treat what’s happening in the Tenderloin as the emergency that it clearly is.”

Cretan said her effort started several weeks ago with work in United Nations Plaza and has expanded to include a block-by-block approach in the Tenderloin. He said public health and police officials have been deployed to tackle drug dealing and violence. The expansion of street ambassadors hired by the city to help the neighborhood continues.

He pointed to Breed’s plan to open a supervised injection site, perhaps next spring, near the Tenderloin and ongoing work to buy more hotels for supportive housing for homeless people and to expand treatment programs.

“We know we cannot wait for those solutions,” Cretan said. “We need immediate action.”

While there aren’t perfect solutions to fixing the violence and misery in the Tenderloin, the city needs to start listening to the people it’s asking for input.

Much of the legwork for tackling drug dealing and the associated violence was completed by the members of the city’s Street-Level Drug Dealing Task Force, a group of city officials, people in recovery, Tenderloin residents and others who spent 18 months studying the problem and gave a 71-page report to the mayor and every supervisor June 30. The response? Nothing. “To my knowledge, there’s been no effort to move any of it forward,” said Curtis Bradford, a community organizer with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. and a member of the task force. Cretan said the mayor’s efforts in the Tenderloin will include the task force’s recommendations.

They include creating a task force charged with coordinating all city departments and community safety organizations that work in the Tenderloin. Directing more money to community safety initiatives in the neighborhood and ensure they’re coordinated with the police and District Attorney’s Office.

Providing easy-to-access, 24/7 substance abuse treatment in the Tenderloin and making housing easier to secure for people in treatment. Opening safe consumption sites where people can use drugs under supervision, reducing the risk of overdose.

Ensuring “consistent, meaningful” consequences for drug dealers who are repeatedly convicted for selling and violating stay-away orders from the neighborhood such as automatically revoking probation for a repeat conviction or requiring a fixed jail time before probation starts.

The task force said the city should publicly announce those penalties “so that the dealers know the full consequences of their actions.” Currently, the district attorney often releases dealers on probation or with stay away orders that are regularly ignored.

Bradford used to be homeless and addicted to drugs and said conditions in the Tenderloin are worse than he’s ever seen with the exception of the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, when hundreds of tents filled the sidewalks. A lawsuit from UC Hastings helped resolve that, but conditions have slid backward again. While the city has moved the open-air drug market off Turk and Hyde streets, it’s fanned out elsewhere.

“The suffering and general conditions of the Tenderloin are still in a crisis state,” Bradford said. “I don’t feel like the city is taking that seriously enough.”

That’s the truth. Seemingly everyone in the group delivering their letter to the mayor had a story to tell. Jalal Alabsi, 51, who immigrated from Yemen six years ago to flee the war there, has a good friend who was recently shot in the leg in the neighborhood. He said he’s asked police officers why they don’t do more about the open-air dealing and violence, and they say they can’t.

Abulez Alawdi, 11, said she hears gunshots regularly and witnesses fights. Omar El Shaer, 11, said he’s had people scream and swear at him as he walks in his neighborhood.

Suhaib Alameri, 9, said somebody tried to rob him on his way into a convenience store recently, but he ran to the shopkeeper for help. Now, he’ll walk outside only with someone who can protect him.

The story that stuck with me most came from Greg Moore, director of safe programs for the Tenderloin Community Benefit District. Last month, he was walking at Turk and Hyde streets when he saw a driver in a sport utility vehicle waiting at a red light doze off. The passenger’s head began nodding, too. The driver’s head bounced, and his eyes rolled back.

Moore knew both people in the running car were overdosing. Fortunately, the passenger was able to put the car in park before passing out. Two people injected the driver with Narcan, but it didn’t work. Somebody called 911, and paramedics revived the driver, Moore said. He said he doesn’t know whether the passenger made it.

Moore couldn’t shake the image — and a few days later, he saw another person overdosing as paramedics did chest compressions. Moore choked up as we talked. He’s 66 and still feels traumatized from witnessing the overdoses — and he gets to go home every night to Noe Valley. He said he can’t imagine being a kid in the Tenderloin.

What would City Hall do if people were overdosing in cars and on sidewalks in Noe Valley? If dealers took over entire blocks there? If shootings were spiking?

“I know they would take action,” Moore said.

“The suffering and general conditions of the Tenderloin are still in a crisis state.

I don’t feel like the city is taking that seriously enough.”