Editor’s note: As San Francisco moves to allow more housing density across much of the city, The Frisc is examining what’s in store for a handful of neighborhoods. We previously visited the Haight-Ashbury and the Outer Sunset.
It’s been nearly a year since all 11 San Francisco supervisors — some begrudgingly — approved a sweeping plan to build 82,000 new homes, setting in motion a process of housing reform that will take years to fully realize.
By the end of this month, under the watchful eyes of state regulators, the next set of major changes are due. The largest is a significant redraw of the city map that will do away with decades-old limits on building height and density in some neighborhoods, especially those like the sprawling Sunset and Richmond, which have seen barely a trickle of new development in decades.
Just as significant, though, are the neighborhoods that SF planners and lawmakers are leaving be, including the neighborhood that stands out for sporting some of the city’s densest, most diverse, and most troubled blocks: the Tenderloin.
“We’re not rezoning the Tenderloin,” SF’s acting senior planner Joshua Switzky tells The Frisc. “We made a conscious decision.”
At first glance, this might be a surprise. Planners are focusing the zoning overhaul on commercial corridors, major transit lines, and “lots that are underutilized,” such as parking lots and low-rise commercial buildings, according to Switzky. With busy commercial strips and heavy transit access, the Tenderloin fits several of those criteria. And like the Sunset and the Haight, it’s a neighborhood where SF capped building heights decades ago at the behest of neighborhood activists.
Right now, many YIMBYs are ringing alarm bells about the upzoning plan, alleging that the focus on only some transit corridors may not produce sufficient development.
“We need to set height limits to at least 100 feet on commercial corridors, going up to 240 feet on major streets, at minimum,” according to a letter SF YIMBY circulated in December encouraging SF residents to advocate for more density. Most of the Tenderloin is currently capped at 80 feet.
But while the most recent draft map assembled by city planners does scale up a few properties on the Tenderloin’s periphery, like lots along Van Ness Avenue and Bush Street that would ratchet up to 300 feet, the bulk of the neighborhood remains untouched. Here’s why.
Choice cuts
These days, the Tenderloin is classified as a “equity priority community,” one of a few specially designated zones singled out as home to many households “with minority or low-income status, seniors, people who have limited English proficiency, people who have disabilities,” and other vulnerable demographics. (Other equity priority communities include the the Bayview, Treasure Island, and the Western Addition.)
According to 2021 census data, 43 percent of the Tenderloin identifies as immigrant; 23 percent of the neighborhood is Latino, 31 percent Asian (the Vietnamese-American community dates back to refugees from the Vietnam War), and 23 percent multiracial. The neighborhood also has a long history as a queer community. Median household income here is just over $41,000.
What’s more, the TL is a rare SF neighborhood where low-income people can still catch a break on housing. More than 96 percent of housed Tenderloin residents are renters; some 89 percent of residential buildings are 20 units or more, and most renters pay less than 30 percent of their monthly gross toward housing.
By comparison, economists at the SF site ApartmentList report that in 2022, 49 percent of renters in the combined San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley area were “cost-burdened” — that is, paying more than 30 percent of their monthly income for their home.
Just in SF, that renter figure was 38 percent. Economist Chris Salviati tells The Frisc the lower figure for San Francisco likely reflects the fact that “many lower-income households have already been priced out of the area.”
Although they’ve been designated potentially vulnerable, many of these are places where San Francisco has been building or is planning to build thousands of new homes. The “equity priority” label exempts these neighborhoods from a few new laws that aim to make development faster and easier, but it does not preclude building.
These are the kinds of places where many density skeptics fear new housing will disrupt the long-standing culture and drive out the most vulnerable. Asked whether SF should consider building up the Tenderloin, Li Lovett, communications director for the Council for Community Housing Organizations, says: “Sometimes you can do a surgical and microscopic rezoning of a block or a couple of parcels, but do they [really] need to do that to that neighborhood as a whole?”
But here’s a really interesting thing about the Tenderloin: there’s likely no need to rezone it for more housing, because San Francisco has already been building there.
Gentrification-proof
“The Tenderloin has always been a working-class neighborhood,” says Katie Conry, executive director of the Tenderloin Museum.
The city in many ways has sheltered the Tenderloin. Conry credits neighborhood activism, starting with early queer rights movements in the 1960s, for applying pressure on City Hall. This was especially true during the 1980s, when residents rallied to downzone the community in a bid to keep hotel developers from expanding into the area.
This is not going to become a chrome-and-glass neighborhood in my lifetime.
Del Seymour, Code Tenderloin
Now, with a substantial amount of Tenderloin housing in the hands of nonprofits, or otherwise protected from redevelopment or significant alteration, Conry notes it’s not uncommon for residents to regard the neighborhood as “gentrification-proof.”
Del Seymour, founder of Code Tenderloin and a guide for walking tours of the Tenderloin and Mid-Market, agrees. “We’re not worried — we’re historically protected,” he says of gentrification anxiety, adding that “this is not going to become a chrome-and-glass neighborhood in my lifetime.”
Given all this, it’s surprising how much development the Tenderloin has seen recently. Per the Planning Department’s annual housing inventory reports, the Tenderloin added more than 350 new homes in 2022 – 40 percent of them affordable. While that’s a drop in the bucket next to the tens of thousands of new homes SF needs, it’s still more than all other SF neighborhoods built last year, except for the Mission and South of Market.
In fact, the Tenderloin has seen a surprising volume of new development for at least few years, ranking fourth citywide in 2021 and 2020 and third in 2018. (At this writing, SF Planning’s 2019 inventory was not available.) That’s impressive, given the neighborhood’s relatively small size. Depending on where you think the neighborhood begins and ends, the whole thing may fit within a perimeter of less than two miles, less than half the size of the Mission. There’s even new student housing on McAllister Street.
Conry believes there’s not a lot of room for new development, and even some outspoken YIMBYs agree. “The Tenderloin is where we’ve been putting housing for a long time — it already is a pretty dense neighborhood,” says Jane Natoli, organizing director of YIMBY Action. ”It’s a good example of what we should be doing more of elsewhere.”
The city capped most of the Tenderloin heights at 80 feet in the 1980s, in response to fears that the higher previous limits would invite soaring FiDi-style high-rises and hotels. But even so, Natoli adds: “I don’t have any problem saying we shouldn’t be focusing on the Tenderloin. The Tenderloin has done its part.”
The Tenderloin satisfies a lot of SF’s overall housing goals. New homes come in, but without disrupting the existing culture, and the neighborhood has time and again resisted the gentrifying pressures of boom markets. For over a century, it’s provided home and community for some of SF’s most diverse and vulnerable populations. Even some housing hawks and density skeptics agree not to mess with zoning there.
In this way, the Tenderloin can be framed as a success story. But perhaps only in this way.
Hell is where the heart is
Tenderloin residents are probably tired of their community being shorthand for everything wrong with San Francisco, especially for critics who don’t even live here. But they’re also tired of the city letting them down.
The Tenderloin was built during the Gold Rush-era boom, providing cheap, dense housing next to downtown and quickly developing a reputation for crime and vice — although that was also true of other neighborhoods in SF’s rough-and-tumble frontier days, as Wade Hudson and Rob Waters write in an essay in the 1998 anthology Reclaiming San Francisco.
During the 20th century, the Tenderloin emerged as one of the poorest working-class neighborhoods in the city, infamously dubbed “hell at your doorstep” by the San Francisco Examiner, with as many as a quarter of the city’s murders reported here during the 1970s. But those were the decades Hudson and Waters also credit as the Tenderloin’s renaissance, when neighborhood activists, including queer folks and immigrants, rallied to demand better treatment from City Hall and a voice in their own affairs.
That tug-of-war between some of the best of SF culture but the worst failures of public policy is still in play today. According to SFPD’s end-of-year data, of the nearly 5,500 violent reported crimes in SF in 2023, a disproportionate amount (more than 15 percent) came from this one small neighborhood.
The San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team reports that between 2021 and the end of 2023, they recorded more than 9,000 “outreach encounters” with unhoused Tenderloin residents, during which time as many as 20 percent of all “tents and structures” recorded on SF streets some months were there.
Those are just the visible problems. Seymour says that much of the cheap housing in the neighborhood, while a boon to those with nowhere else to go, masks a whole other kind of neglect. “They should all be torn down and replaced with affordable housing,” Seymour says about the local SROs, for example. These buildings provide critical housing for people who may otherwise face homelessness, but sometimes the tradeoff is deplorable conditions.
The city has labored to ensure that “you cannot displace anyone in the Tenderloin,” according to Seymour — but neither has SF proven particularly responsive in helping everyone who is there to stay.
Now that we have a Housing Element that is spurring other city neighborhoods to allow for more housing, especially affordable units, it’s possible that people who figured they would never leave the Tenderloin will finally have more options elsewhere in the coming years.
Correction 1/9/24: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story misquoted Katie Conry. Conry said, “The Tenderloin has always been a working-class neighborhood,” not “always been protected as a low-income neighborhood.”