SAN FRANCISCO – For decades, San Francisco’s Tenderloin District has been at the center of the city’s challenges, and that’s only become more apparent in recent years.

Since 2021, San Francisco has been mobilizing emergency response to save the neighborhood and bring relief to the many people who call it home. The drug crisis and the human desperation it brought drew the world’s attention, ultimately prompting this response from the city’s mayor.

“It’s coming to an end,” Mayor London Breed said 16 months ago, “if we take steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement that has destroyed our city.”

It was December 2021 when Breed announced the emergency response. There would be a linking center to connect people to services. There would be increased law enforcement and an uncompromising push to clean up streets of trash and unsanitary conditions. The announcement alone has brought new focus to the neighborhood and has everyone wondering what it actually takes to bring about significant change.

So what’s different? What works and what doesn’t? KPIX will be publishing a series of reports on the tenderloin and efforts to transform the neighborhood.

“It’s almost every day,” says Jorge Alvarado, who sweeps his sidewalk in the morning. “Every single day they have a mess here.”

For the people who live and work in the Tenderloin, every day is an attempt to address the immense challenges this neighborhood faces. And for some, more than a year after Breed declared a state of emergency, it will continue to be a struggle for survival. Measuring what has changed since then is not easy. There was initially a very aggressive push for sidewalk cleaning.

“It’s a blessing to have a clear path to be able to see a few blocks down,” Alex Alvarado said at the start of the effort.

One year later:

“If we hadn’t cleaned up here,” Alvarado said of the garbage problems. “This place would be a complete disaster.”

But clearing all the trash on the sidewalk was just a challenge.

“Well, what are you going to do with all the people that are here? I’m not sure,” a neighbor said in 2022.

A year later you pick the right corner and little has changed.

“How many months do you keep calling?” Alvarado asked. “See that place over there, almost no place for humans to survive, right?

The Tenderloin Center, controversial when it opened, was closed in December amid controversy. Efforts to provide aid are now proceeding block by block.

“He’s being brought home by deployment,” said Mark Mazza of the city’s emergency department, helping someone on the street. “He’s in a warm place, now the streets are clean and people can pass. Nobody walks through the street.”

But as the city’s approach changes, so do the conditions on the road.

“There are more people out here now,” resident JJ ​​Smith said. “More people deal in drugs and take the drugs.”

Overdoses continue at a slightly increased rate for the first two months of this year. And as for drug law enforcement:

“We need to be more aggressive with law enforcement,” Breed said of announcing the emergency.

That promise has materialized in recent months as police have stepped up arrests with a new undercover unit.

“Hyde’s 300 block has been one of our biggest challenges,” Deputy Police Commissioner David Lazar said. “Right now, things haven’t looked this good in a long time.”

“All of our alternatives to the police have a significant impact, getting people into treatment, getting them to the clinic, our street medicine team, our homeless team, our crisis response team,” Breed told KPIX. “They are on the ground every day to help people in crisis, but at the end of the day our officers have to arrest those who are breaking the law.”

“We’re not going to have any more luck clawing our way out of this crisis by arresting street dealers than any previous administration of this or that country has had,” countered Supervisor Dean Preston, whose District 5 now covers part of the fillet.

The expanded policing and increased cost of policing is causing some backlash. And there’s always been frustration that efforts to curb drug trafficking, law enforcement, or otherwise, will only postpone the problem.

“So they’re moving them from block to block,” observed local resident Tony Kushmaul. “Or move them around the block.”

So the tenderloin moves and changes, as does the effort to fix the problems here, while the residents wait and hope for progress.

“So I think we need to resolve this matter in the tenderloin,” Alvarado said. “That’s all I can say.”

Wilson Walker

Wilson Walker joined KPIX 5 in July 2007. After 10 years as a news producer, Wilson became a Multimedia Journalist (MMJ) in 2012, meaning he shoots, writes and edits all his own stories.

The post San Francisco steps up emergency effort to carry Tenderloin again from brink appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Don’t be fooled. The downtown area, the city’s primary economic driver, is teetering on the edge, facing challenges greater than previously known, new data shows. The wounds suffered by the economic core are deep, and city officials have yet to come up with a plan to make the fundamental changes that some economists and business leaders argue could make the area thrive again.

“A general economic decline is what we’re trying to avoid,” said Wade Rose, president of Advance SF, a business group that advocates on behalf of several major employers in San Francisco. The group is working with the city on short-term ideas to bring more people back downtown, but Rose agrees that the problem needs a rethink in the long run.

What’s SFNext

SFNext is a Chronicle special project to involve city residents in finding solutions to some of San Francisco’s most pressing problems.

Send feedback, ideas and suggestions to sfnext@SFChronicle.com

Where to find more SFNext content

Before the pandemic, office work was responsible for a whopping 72% of the city’s gross domestic product, according to the Controller’s Office — work that was heavily concentrated in the Financial District, the Market Street corridor, the Embarcadero and Mission Bay. A  precise definition for downtown doesn’t exist, and various city agencies use different boundaries, with some regarding it as the northeast portion of the city.

It is easy for San Franciscans who don’t work downtown to ignore it. The city is made up of neighborhoods that serve many of the needs of residents living in them. Relative to many other American cities, few people live in what is loosely considered downtown. The result is that many see the area as largely for office workers, tourists, conventioneers and a handful of destination restaurants.

When all office work shut down, BART ridership dropped catastrophically, and it is not projected to recover fully until the 2029-30 fiscal year at the earliest. The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap. Without commuters spending money near their San Francisco offices each day, other downtown businesses closed, destroying the incomes of many who could ill afford it.

If swaths of shops, restaurants and cafes downtown stay shuttered, it could cause lasting harm to tourism, said Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of  San Francisco Travel, the city’s primary tourism and convention trade association.

“We don’t have a Disney park here,” D’Alessandro said, so San Francisco relies heavily on its hospitality industry to attract families and business groups. “Most of the hospitality industry is made up of small businesses,” he said.

Office employees make their way to work down a deserted Sutter Street at Montgomery Street in San Francisco. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

A slow recovery

It has been a year since vacant office-space rates soared to their highest levels since the 2008 Great Recession, as some business activity has picked up. And while other major cities face large numbers of workers not going back into offices, San Francisco’s numbers are among the highest nationwide.

The San Francisco metropolitan area has consistently lagged behind nearly all other major urban centers in worker returns, according to office-occupancy trend data from Kastle Systems, a security company that monitors access-card swipes at client buildings.

In San Francisco’s downtown area specifically, office attendance has been even lower than reported. At The Chronicle’s request, Kastle provided swipe data for the eight ZIP codes that make up the city’s office-heavy northeast. The data shows the rate of worker return, relative to pre-pandemic levels, has not broken 30% and was 26.4% the week of May 18, the most recent period the company provided.

Other news reports have cited higher figures — for example, 34.6% for the same week in May — because they drew from Kastle data that included swipes from Oakland and Hayward, the two other large cities in the San Francisco metro area. And this is despite efforts by Mayor London Breed and some business leaders to urge workers to come back to their offices. A recent COVID-19 variant surge isn’t helping.

If those suites and retail spaces remain empty in the long run, “the buildings will be devalued,” Rose said, “which ultimately means that tax revenues will decline dramatically” and endanger city coffers. Another potential challenge, Rose said, is that many tech firms might see San Francisco, with its high real estate prices and taxes, as no longer worth it, given how many employees are working remotely.

“If the number of companies diminish and the number of people working in the tech industry diminishes, the network effect diminishes, and the digital engine starts cooling down,” Rose said. “And that is not a good thing.”

Even if tourism returns to pre-pandemic levels by 2024, as projected, the levels of remote versus in-office work will be the major factor in when and how the city, and downtown in particular, recovers. And the outlook is not encouraging.

“San Francisco is not likely to ever get office workers returning more than 50% of the time,” according to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economics professor who studies remote work trends. In other words, an average of 2.5 days per workweek. Attempts to surpass that threshold would be like “trying to push water uphill,” he said.

Some downtown office buildings are all but deserted. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Bloom is part of a team that has conducted monthly nationwide surveys since early in the pandemic, each with between 2,500 and 5,000 participants. Respondents reported their employers’ latest plans for post-pandemic work policies — the number of days per week that staff would probably work from home.

In August 2020, the first instance of the survey, employers expected staff to work an average of 1.6 days per week in the office once society normalized. The figure has steadily risen since then and was 2.3 days in April, the most recent period measured. It appears to be stabilizing.

“It will likely flatten out at 2.3, 2.4, 2.5,” Bloom said. “I’ve talked to hundreds of employers, and that’s the same message we’re getting. So that triangulates very well.”

But remember: That’s just the national average.

“San Francisco would just look like a more extreme version of this,” Bloom said, because it surpasses many other cities in key traits that foster remote work. With its highly educated workforce and prevalent technology and finance industries, many of its employees can work on a laptop from the comfort of their own couches.

Indeed, a separate, one-time survey that Bloom conducted from January to March of this year found San Franciscans wanted to work remotely 53% more often than they did before the pandemic, outpacing office workers in the other cities studied.

A single commuter exits the Embarcadero BART Station near California and Drumm streets downtown. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Those figures stand in sharp contrast with budget projections from the city’s Controller’s Office, which rest partly on the assumption that remote work will normalize at 33%, meaning workers would be in the office two-thirds of the time.

“There’s not a precise calculation that led to our specific estimates,” said Carol Lu, citywide revenue manager for the office. “There is a lot of uncertainty about this projection.”

Her team based its estimate on the level of office attendance that some major employers like Google and Apple were requiring, as well as what smaller employers expected and what experts in the commercial office market were hearing.

Two days per week of telecommuting, or 40%, was the most common answer. The office lowered it to 33% “to account for employees who choose to come into the office more,” Lu said, as well as “financial and legal industries which seemed to expect more days in the office than the technology companies.”

But Lu acknowledged “we don’t know how well hybrid plans will work for companies. We don’t know how telecommuting will evolve over time. We don’t know what employees’ expectations will look like a year from now.”

Bloom, on the other hand, is more certain.

“It’s pretty clear what’s coming,” he said. “The sooner I think we face that, and adjust, the better it will be.”

City revenues may suffer

Over time, multiple tax revenues for City Hall could be at risk: property taxes, from emptied buildings that drop in value; sales taxes, from businesses that are struggling or gone, and others. That could lead to a reduction of public services, Bloom said.

“My biggest fear is the city either has to slash spending on, say, police, or it aggressively puts up taxes on businesses to cover the shortfall and drives them out of the city,” he said.

In March, the Controller’s Office said it expects a budget surplus of $74.7 million over the next two years, based in part on the city’s projections of office-worker returns, federal financial aid and record-high returns on pension investments. But that estimate was revised downward to $15 million last month, in large part due to expected salary increases for public-sector union workers.

Remote work aside, vacant offices — space that is either not leased or leased by an absent tenant who is trying to sublease it to recoup rental costs — are of continuing concern. A record high 20.4 million square feet of San Francisco office space, or roughly 24% of the citywide total, was vacant at the end of the first quarter of this year, according to real estate brokerage firm CBRE.

Vacancies could increase as companies get better at coordinating their hybrid staff, efficiently staggering in-office days so they can permanently reduce their total square footage, Bloom said.

A former Walgreens is one of many deserted storefronts along Kearny Street in the Financial District. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Businesses hobbled

The impact on local businesses cannot be overstated. During the pandemic, absent office workers’ earnings stopped flowing to cafes, retail outlets, restaurants and entertainment. Even once office work normalizes, the average worker will still spend an estimated $5,293 less per year in San Francisco, according to joint research by Bloom and economists at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and the University of Chicago.

The fallout: Empty, abandoned office and commercial spaces mar the Financial District and surrounding areas. Many of the windows are bannered with signs for leasing opportunities, an odd appeal along these sparsely inhabited streets, where depressed consumer demand is obvious.

On one stretch of Kearny Street between Sutter and Pine, The Chronicle counted 11 closed ground-floor businesses out of nearly 50.

Casualties include neighborhood favorites like Topsy’s Fun House bar and Pachino Pizzeria. At Anthony’s Shoe Service, Gino Gentile is holding on for now. His family has run the business for 56 years, and in the “before times,” Gentile managed a team of five people. Now it’s down to him, and he’s far from turning a profit.

Gino Gentile of Anthony’s Shoe Service looks out the window of his shop on Kearny Street in the Financial District. Gentile now takes clients by appointment only, and has scaled down from a six-person operation to working solo due to reduced clientele Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

“As far as really getting an income? Not an option. Not even close. I’m just living off my savings,” Gentile said. “Eventually, I’m going to have to scale down.”

Some commercial real estate firms say that as interest in opening businesses downtown has dropped, it has risen in other areas of the city.

“We had our best year in 2021,” said Santino DeRose, managing broker at Maven real estate. “The neighborhoods by far, where people lived and worked, came back the fastest.”

Top: a closed sign sits in the window of the former Vision First optometrist now shuttered along Kearny Street. Above: an office building at 181 Fremont St. is seen through an empty Salesforce Transit Center in the South of Market district of San Francisco. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Searching for solutions

For city planners, businesses and residents, the question is, what’s to be done?

City officials and business leaders are working together, understanding that unless the city can defy national remote-work trends, its economic core will be forever altered.

“The goal is not to assume that offices and those tenants renting those offices are themselves going to just go back to five days a week in the same size footprint in the office buildings that they were in,” said Kate Sofis, director of the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development. “I think that’s a permanent change.”

Sofis’ office is working with business leaders to craft a strategy for bringing the economic core back to life. The immediate plan is to hold recurring events like concerts in local bars, restaurants and public spaces to entice office workers and others to the area. Breed has pitched spending $48.9 million over the next two fiscal years on a variety of  pandemic recovery efforts, including events.

As these efforts get under way, Sofis will watch for upticks in tourism and daily commuters into the city, among other key metrics. If, about six months from now, those figures are stalling out, “that’s when we really need to sort of look at bigger guns,” she said, declining to clarify what that might entail.

The city is searching for ideas to bring workers and others back to Financial District streets like Sutter and Kearny, which were emptied by the pandemic. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

“It’s a bit premature for us to share specifics at this stage,” said Gloria Chan, the office’s director of communications, in a follow-up email. Ideas for new initiatives would result from conversations with the area’s stakeholders, she said, focused on things like keeping streets cleaner, attracting new businesses and encouraging office workers to eat at local restaurants.

Sofis said the six-month timetable might change in response to big environmental upsets, for instance “another significant wave of the coronavirus.”

“You don’t want to be planting something in the ground where the ground is still shifting,” Sofis said. Bloom agrees that there is no rush, citing the uncertainty of the pandemic.

“It seems little,” said UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti. “Concerts and events like those are a good idea, but they’re likely to help on the margins. I don’t think they’re going to be transformative.”

If officials are looking for immediate fixes, then Breed should require all municipal workers to fully return to the office, Moretti said. To sweeten the deal, maybe the city could cover those people’s transit costs, he added.

“I’m surprised by how slowly the mayor is bringing back the public workforce,” Moretti said. Requiring a full return would set an example for the private sector, increase BART ridership, “and it would be a shot in the arm for the small businesses that have been struggling for two years.”

In November, Breed required that city staff work on site at least two days per week, though individual departments could demand more — and that is still the policy, said Aliya Chisti, senior policy analyst at the San Francisco Department of Human Resources. Chisti did not directly answer the question of whether Breed could immediately require full-time office attendance. Instead, she said in an email: “The Interim COVID-19 Telecommuting Policy is an addendum to the City’s already existing standard Telecommuting Policy … and will continue for the duration of the local emergency unless ended sooner by the City with reasonable advance notice.”

Data on how many public employees have worked on site during the pandemic “is currently not centralized,” Chisti said, though she estimated it was about two-thirds. The total public workforce is 36,782 people, said Mawuli Tugbenyoh, the department’s deputy director of policy and external affairs.

The owners of Nigella SF on Market Street in the Financial District have to keep one door locked to discourage unwanted intrusions. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Public safety a big concern

Any strategy that the city undertakes will have to account for fractious politics and two big, related concerns: homelessness and public safety.

“I hear it all the time, that people don’t feel safe walking around,” said Andy Chun, owner of Schroeder’s restaurant and multiple other businesses in the downtown area, and a board member of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which advocates for restaurants’ interests. Chun said he frequently sees “drug abuse, people using the street as a toilet,” though he said he doesn’t personally feel unsafe during the day.

Nancy Oakes, chef and co-owner of Boulevard on Mission Street near the Embarcadero, said the area is a hot spot for car break-ins — it’s happened to her twice — and can feel generally threatening. She recounted an instance in February when a man wandered in off the street and got aggressive with the floor manager.

“The manager approaches him, he gets punched. It happens again. Three guests get up and help remove him from the building,” Oakes said.

“It would be nice if we could feel safer,” said Rubie Kade Campbell, co-owner with James Russell Austin of Nigella SF Botanical Boutique, on Market Street near the Embarcadero. The duo moved into their downtown location during the pandemic, capitalizing on lower commercial rents and hoping to hold out until the streets came back to life and they could grow their clientele from interested passersby. The strategy worked, and orders have risen in recent months.

But with the renewed foot traffic, they must always be ready to react when someone struggling with severe mental illness enters and gets loud and frightens customers.

Nigella SF co-owner Rubie Kade Campbell  and co-owner James Russell Austin have confronted  safety concerns in their recently leased Market Street space. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

“On any given day, we keep one door locked, and we’re ready to close the other very quickly,” Campbell said, adding that they try to avoid calling the police because they don’t want to land anyone in jail. “We’ve had people kick in our door. It’s hard. We feel for people, but we need to run a business.”

Stanford professor Bloom believes the city should consider using vacant commercial space for new housing that would help address San Francisco’s interminable affordability crisis. It would also create a local clientele to offset the impact of remote work.

“Apart from the transition cost, what’s not to like?” he said. Numerous news stories have detailed the high cost and complexity of conversions. But that only makes it difficult — not impossible.

UC economist Moretti supported the idea of converting work spaces to homes. “I don’t see an enormous downside, and I see all the potential upside,” he said. He cautioned that it wouldn’t immediately breathe life into the city’s core. Even in a hypothetical scenario “that let the property owners switch without any cost tomorrow, it would take many, many years for that to occur.”

Richard Florida, an urban theorist and professor at the University of Toronto, offered a more expansive version of the idea: Yes, downtown should get more housing, but that should include homes for low-income people and give rise to a “15-minute neighborhood.” All of a resident’s needs — work, recreation, groceries, laundry, school for children — should be within a 15-minute walk from their doorstep.

Florida presented the idea in an April meeting with city officials and business leaders. Robbie Silver, head of the Downtown SF Community Benefit District, said he has a forthcoming plan that emphasizes a more walkable downtown. It’s unclear how closely it will follow Florida’s vision.

Whatever plan takes root, the result had better be interesting, Florida said, quoting urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs:

“When a great place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

The post Downtown San Francisco is on the brink, and it is worse than it seems to be appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

In 2000, syphilis rates were so low that health officials believed eradication was on the horizon. However, rates rose in 2001, rose steadily over the next two decades, and increased 74% since 2015. There were nearly 130,000 cases nationwide in 2019, according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In California and the United States, about half of all syphilis cases occur in men who have sex with men. More than a third of women in the western US with syphilis also use meth, a drug that has seen its own surge in recent years.

These are just some of the trends that have caused national STD cases to hit all-time highs, hitting 2.5 million cases for the past six straight years. And the consequences now can be traced back to babies who get syphilis from their mothers. These congenital syphilis rates nearly quadrupled between 2012 and 2019.

This was all before the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States. With contact tracers and testing supplies being redirected from sexually transmitted diseases to COVID-19, the CDC predicts the 2020 numbers won’t be any better.

“We’re pretty concerned about this and have seen this trend over time,” says Dr. Erica Pan, California State Epidemiologist. “Unfortunately, many employees who had focused on sexually transmitted diseases and syphilis follow-up care for years did not have enough public health funding and infrastructure for years and of course last year, both local and state levels, really got diverted to the pandemic.”

Several factors fueling the surge

There are many factors that contribute to the rise in sexually transmitted diseases, and syphilis in particular.

In the gay community in San Francisco, for example, the rise of mobile dating apps like Grindr and Tinder has made finding a date “faster than home delivery of pizza,” said Dan Wohlfeiler, STD prevention specialist and co-founder of Building Healthy Online Communities using these apps to improve gay men’s health.

When the dating apps first hit the market around 2009, it was more difficult for disease researchers to track the spread of STDs and notify potentially infected people because men don’t always know the names of the other men they are joining With.

“Sometimes they only know how they interact online,” says Dr. Ina Park, Associate Professor at the UCSF School of Medicine and author of Strange Bedfellows on the history of sexually transmitted diseases. “And when the sex wasn’t going well, they sometimes block the person from their app and don’t even know how to get back to that person.”

Online dating began in the late 1990s, when effective drugs to prevent the transmission of HIV became available around the same time: first antiretroviral drugs that suppress the virus in HIV-positive patients, and later, in 2012, pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, that prevents new infections in people who are HIV negative but are considered at risk for exposure to the virus.

With the risk of developing a fatal disease dipping to near zero, condoms have fallen even more out of favor than they already were, Park says.

“If one man is on PrEP and the other is virally suppressed, there is no risk of HIV at all,” she says. “So why use condoms if you don’t mind having a hint of syphilis?”

Diagnosing syphilis is difficult

While syphilis is not benign – it can cause blindness, deafness, or brain damage – it is easy to treat. Usually a shot of penicillin in the buttocks will cure it.

Diagnosing syphilis can be difficult, however, says Park, who treats patients with sexually transmitted diseases at the San Francisco City Clinic. She often crouches deep in the exam room, “lifting her scrotum and lifting her penis” and craning her head to get a view from all angles.

She does this gymnastics to find rashes related to syphilis. Some are obvious, some are subtle. She says doctors in regular family medicine clinics are often not trained in where and when to look.

“The patient came in and said, ‘I’m tired,'” says Park, referring to a common symptom of syphilis. “How many people are going to say, ‘Take off your pants and lift your scrotum, I want to check it out? We only do that in the STD clinic because that’s what we do.”

But specialized public STD clinics, like the one Park works at, have been closed across the country. One reason is persistent underfunding of public health programs, a trend that became apparent during the coronavirus pandemic. Another is the Affordable Care Act. In an odd way, the 2010 Health Care Access Extension Act actually contributed to the closure of STD clinics.

The post As soon as on the Brink of Eradication, Syphilis Is Raging Once more in San Francisco and Past appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.