How has City Hall responded to public drug use dominating Tenderloin sidewalks? Seven months after new leadership took office, the community is still beset by open air drug markets. The Lurie Administration has not meaningfully reduced public drug use. The Tenderloin has seen no sustained “drug market interventions.” No plan has been developed for closing the Tenderloin’s open-air drug markets
Nor has the new team at City Hall offered additional police or ambassadors for the Tenderloin. And through its ongoing funding of the Monarch, Adante and 685 Ellis Street hotels turned shelters, City Hall is spending millions of dollars making the Tenderloin’s drug crisis worse.
Part One of this story gave the numbers. And we called for these numbers to be part of City Hall’s focus on strengthening “data-driven accountability.”
When will City Hall be held accountable for operating three Tenderloin shelters whose private rooms allow residents to use drugs? Or held accountable for these residents using drugs on nearby sidewalks, a fact confirmed by outreach workers and police?
Kevin Miller, who lives near the Monarch at 1015 Geary, sends multiple emails each day to City Hall demanding that the drug users outside the hotel be removed. He includes photos. City Hall ignores his onslaught. The city has done nothing to reduce drug activities caused by its conversion of the tourist Monarch Hotel to a shelter.
Miller wrote on August 1 that “the only thriving business on Lower Polk is the drug dealing.” He refers to the nearby businesses forced to close since the city converted the Monarch from a tourist hotel to a shelter— despite its location across the street from the city’s huge Multi Service Center North shelter.
City Hall’s pro-business agenda seems to exempt protecting small businesses in the Tenderloin or nearby areas.
If City Hall were really committed to “data-driven accountability,” the Monarch would already be closed. Yet despite all the complaints and all the harm the city funding of the Monarch is causing, HSH has no plans to close the hotel until March 2026.
Compare the city ignoring problems caused by the Monarch with how City Hall responded to Supervisor Melgar’s raising concerns about RV’s negatively impacting residents in her district. A new law enabling their removal was quickly passed. The RV owners probably figure they should have parked their vehicles in the Tenderloin. The city would have looked the other way.
The photo above highlights the sidewalk drug-use outside a city-owned shelter at 685 Ellis Street bordering Little Saigon. I wrote how the city bought the hotel claiming it would be permanent housing but has operated it as a shelter ever since (See “Did SF Falsely Obtain $18.2 million in State Housing Funds,” June 5). City Hall claims to support reviving Little Saigon but its continued use of 685 Ellis as a shelter works against that goal.
The stark reality is this: City Hall deems it more important to give drug tourists free hotel rooms with private baths than to reduce sidewalk drug activities in the Tenderloin. That’s what the data shows. Complaints about drug activities spawned by these city-funded projects are ignored.
The San Francisco Comeback
Mayor Lurie regularly announces evidence of a San Francisco “comeback.” Lurie’s optimism is contagious. Polls show people like how he’s always trying to boost San Francisco.
But can we have a San Francisco comeback while drug users dominate multiple blocks of the historic Tenderloin neighborhood? The city’s most affordable city neighborhood with the highest percentage of kids?
If most other San Francisco neighborhoods had 25% of the drug activities we found in the Tenderloin, the city would be depicted as being in crisis. But if the drug crisis is limited to the Tenderloin and nearby areas, it doesn’t seem to impact the San Francisco Comeback.
I began working in the Tenderloin in 1980. I’ve seen a lot of drug scenes. But until two weeks ago I had never seen an entire Tenderloin block with people splayed out on the ground with their faces touching the sidewalk.
This scene occurred on Golden Gate between Jones and Taylor, next to the Golden Gate Theater. We don’t see scenes like that at major theaters in other cities. They continue to happen in San Francisco because for all the talk, resolutions and legislation, the data shows that City Hall still promotes and tolerates sidewalk drug-use in the Tenderloin.
Tenderloin Containment Zone
That’s what City Hall’s creating and maintaining a drug containment zone in the Tenderloin is all about.
Police and/or outreach teams are rarely seen in the Tenderloin. Blocks patrolled by Urban Alchemy are typically drug user free but unpatrolled nearby sidewalks are filled with drug users.
City Hall is aggressively fighting a federal court lawsuit filed by families claiming the city uses the Tenderloin as a drug containment zone. A federal injunction against San Francisco may be the only way to get the city to stop funding programs promoting drug-filled sidewalks in the Tenderloin.
The Tenderloin Marches On
I describe in my updated book on the Tenderloin—The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco— how since 1907 the neighborhood has often battled against City Hall. City Hall’s conversion of three Tenderloin tourist hotels to shelters for drug users is part of this anti-Tenderloin legacy.
But attacks on the Tenderloin did not stop it from being one of the city’s most prosperous neighborhoods into the late 1950’s. As much as City Hall tries to shut down the Tenderloin—which it did officially in 1917—it remains in 2025 the last Tenderloin neighborhood in America.
Despite all the drug activity, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot play in Little Saigon continues to sell out every seat. Onsen Spa has reopened its restaurant, along with its massage treatments. The Tenderloin Museum is expanding to include exhibits on neon signs, Newman’s Gym, and the first permanent exhibition of the Indian-American hotel industry, whose national roots often grew from the Tenderloin.
UC Law SF is on track to partner with Local 2 for a major new housing/office project on Golden Gate and Jones. UC Law’s Academic Village is bringing hundreds of permanent residents into the community.
A recent hearing at the SF Police Commission found support for redrawing the district lines of Tenderloin Station. That will help give the neighborhood the police it has lacked since the 2015 redistricting shifted resources out of the neighborhood. Tenderloin Station has a highly motivated new captain eager to take on the challenge of closing drug markets.
Imagine what the Tenderloin could be if the city cared enough about closing its drug markets to actually make this happen. Except we don’t have to imagine: former Mayor Ed Lee helped the Tenderloin make dramatic positive strides during his tenure.
Mayor Lurie has the chance to do the same. But it requires City Hall to stop contributing to the Tenderloin’s drug problems. It requires the city to use the data on drug-filled sidewalks to do what it takes to clear them from the Tenderloin once and for all.
That would be a true San Francisco Comeback.
