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While we're on this subject, and for those who like to read...

From: Sage Journals Online
http://uar.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/30/4/483

Gentrification and Grassroots Resistance in San Francisco's Tenderloin
Tony Robinson
University of Colorado at Denver

Since World War II, San Francisco has been transformed by the high-rise postindustrial restructuring of central cities and by corresponding gentrification pressures. In one low-income inner-city district, the Tenderloin, residents organized and fought successful battles against the gentrifying growth regime through the 1980s. Moving beyond being a reactionary antigrowth movement, Tenderloin activists have advanced a proactive, neighborhood-sensitive regime, with a social-production capacity of its own, represented by the neighborhood's nonprofit housing movement. Their example teaches about the neighborhood-responsive progressive forces that characterize San Francisco and about the potential of grassroots mobilization as a response to international economic restructuring.

From: http://www.hoteltravelcheck.com/sfo/...francisco.html

"San Francisco's Tenderloin: The Last Frontier"
This area is perhaps the last frontier in SF's ever-expanding gentrification trend, and you can still stumble on unpolished gems in the form of incredible cooking, unpredictable bar scenes, independently owned stores and great live music.

The streets aren't the cleanest, and you will be approached frequently by strangers, so just stay alert and don't let it get to you. You have to hunt a little harder for your treasures in the 'Loin, but in a city increasingly headed toward high-end everything, it's a small price to pay.

Tenderloin
The Tenderloin is a historic place full of preserved hotels from the early 20th century, some of which have been renovated into boutique tourist hotels and others into supportive housing. Squalid conditions, homelessness, crime, drug sales, prostitution, liquor stores (over 60), and strip clubs give the area a seedy reputation. However, these conditions have also kept rents in this area more affordable to low-income and working-class families in a city that is among the priciest in the country. The Tenderloin has one of the city's highest concentrations of children.

With some of San Francisco's most prestigious real estate only a few blocks to the north, and the Financial District's high towers, a major retail area, and hotels just to the east, the Tenderloin often surprises tourists to the city. As with other lower-income neighborhoods such as the Mission and SOMA districts, many artists and writers make the Tenderloin their home.

While the streets close to Market Street are among San Francisco's most undesirable neighborhoods, a gradual but distinct rise in income levels occurs as one travels north, ascending to the Nob Hill sector. Relative to other areas, the Tenderloin is the only largely working-class neighborhood within the downtown area.
The Dot Com boom in the late 1990s brought a great deal of redevelopment and resident inhabitation to the SOMA district in particular, but some revitalization funds put into the Tenderloin made a prominent impact — evident today by a much broader section of new ethnic restaurants and bars, as well as a more long-term young working class.

From the San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...AG58GG9EN1.DTL

SAN FRANCISCO
Tenderloin turning into new Latino neighborhood
Rent is cheap, but few social services for Spanish speakers
Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, January 2, 2006

The changing face of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood can be seen at St. Boniface Catholic Church, where 500 families typically flock to the Spanish-language Mass each Sunday morning.

While the parish in past years has had a majority of Vietnamese families, their numbers are being eclipsed by Latino parishioners, many of them new arrivals from Mexico and Central America, according to Sister Elisa Ruiz, a Franciscan nun who works at the church. The Latino presence in the parish is a reflection of the growing number of Latinos in the neighborhood, which is estimated at between 16 percent and 20 percent of Tenderloin residents, or close to 5,000 people, a jump of 80 percent from 1990 to 2000, according to census data.

On the nights leading up to Christmas, hundreds of Latin American immigrants tromped through the rain-slick Tenderloin streets enacting a traditional Mexican posada. The parishioners carried statues depicting Mary and Joseph on the road to Bethlehem and ritually knocked on doors, singing "In the name of God, I ask you for shelter. My wife is so tired, can we get a place to pass the night?"

After being repeatedly turned away and told "there's no room at the inn," the procession arrived at the Golden Gate Avenue church, where all were welcomed with hot drinks, tamales and a piñata for the children.

"They sing so loudly," Sister Ruiz said. "They really identify themselves with José and María, the idea of being immigrants in a land that's not your own."

"She was the mother of God, and she didn't have a place," just as many of these immigrants struggle to find shelter and a sense of belonging.

For more than a century, the gritty neighborhood has been a gateway for newly arrived immigrants in San Francisco. At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the Tenderloin's German immigrants built St. Boniface. Over the course of the 20th century, the neighborhood was an entry point for Greeks, Indians, Koreans, Filipinos and Italians.

In the 1960s, the area's studio apartments and residential hotels also became home to thousands of older single men, who had retired from jobs on the city's waterfront and were displaced when Third Street's skid row was bulldozed for redevelopment. And the Tenderloin has long been known as a crash pad for the homeless and for people with mental illness and drug abuse problems.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Southeast Asian refugees, especially from Vietnam, began moving into the neighborhood, with help from refugee resettlement agencies.

The newest arrivals, many of them Mayan Indians from the southern Mexican state of Yucatan, would previously have gravitated toward the Mission District, with its multitude of Latino markets and Spanish-speaking community organizations. But many have been priced out, as rents in the Mission have risen. In the Tenderloin, "you pay less than in the Mission, but you get less space, and the space is in worse condition," said Brad Paul, a senior program officer with the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, who advocated for many years to improve Tenderloin housing conditions.

In a neighborhood where 95 percent of the housing units are one-bedroom apartments or smaller, it's not uncommon for families to cram into studio apartments or residential hotel rooms.

Yucatecan immigrant Antonio Tuz and his wife are raising their three small children in a single room at a hotel on Jones Street. Bedbugs infest the building, the bathrooms down the hall are dirty and don't always work, the power often goes out, spoiling the food in their small refrigerator, and last week the couple's 7-year-old son got stuck in the elevator when it broke down.

"The manager just says, 'If you don't like it, then move,' " Tuz said.

But the rent is $600 a month, Tuz can walk to his job at a bar at a downtown hotel, and, he added, he feels safer there -- despite the winos outside his door -- than he did when he lived in the Mission District with its Latino gangs. Numerous nonprofit groups have developed affordable housing in clean and safe buildings in the Tenderloin, but many of the newest immigrants have entered the United States illegally and are not eligible for subsidized housing.

"When you get refugee status, you're entitled to certain benefits. When you're undocumented, you're not entitled to anything," said Yvette Robinson, director of tenant services at the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, which has had few Latino applicants for housing but many Latino children joining its after-school program in recent years.

Groups like the Southeast Asian Community Center provide legal aid, help with housing, citizenship information and small business development to Tenderloin residents who speak Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian and Lao.

But the neighborhood's new Spanish-speaking residents find few social service agencies equipped with the language skills and cultural familiarity to help them adjust to their new environment.

"I can't think of many groups specifically geared toward Hispanics," said Don Stannard-Friel, a sociologist at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont who has studied the Tenderloin for four decades. "Once the families get here, where do they go? This is the poorest of the poor."

Last year, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and the Central City SRO Collaborative began an effort, called La Voz Latina de la Ciudad Central (The Latino Voice of the Central City), to help Latino immigrant families speak up for better housing and a safer environment for their children.

The newest arrivals have many of the same concerns as previous immigrants.

"There's no place for kids to play in the Tenderloin," said organizer Alysabeth Alexander, who spends her days going door-to-door in run-down buildings and phoning city inspectors about bathrooms in disrepair and broken elevators. "They play in the hallways, and they come upon discarded needles and used condoms. It's awful."

For Latinos, as for many other immigrants, the Tenderloin is a stopover en route to a more stable community with better housing options.

"Once they get a better job, they move out," said the Rev. Jorge Hernandez, the new pastor at St. Boniface Church, who has seen a number of his Mexican parishioners move to Richmond and other cities in the East Bay, though they continue commuting to hotel and restaurant jobs in San Francisco.

It's hard to build a sense of community in such a transitory place, said Hernandez, who has also seen Vietnamese families leave the neighborhood. But the parish is an important first stop for many.

"If you come to this country and don't know anybody, the church is a good place to make contact," he said. "In this community, if you don't have a place to stay, people will reach out and at least give you a piece of their couch."

For others, like Jose Luis Navarrete, 44, the Mexican-born popover baker at Neiman Marcus, the Bay Area's sky-high housing costs mean the tiny Taylor Street studio apartment where he has lived for 15 years may be home for many more.

"There have been stabbings in the building and drug-related shootings," he said. "But my rent is $386. In spite of the dangers, that's why I'm still here."

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.