Two men circled each other with their fists raised, screaming unintelligibly. Jaw flexed, tongue hanging out, and hair falling over his face, one taunted the other before slamming a kick to his gut.
Bystanders egged them on, smirking as they recorded the brawl. The group of roughly 50 people — some smoking, others hawking stolen goods — clogged the sidewalk of United Nations Plaza. Wind ripped through the square, adding steel drums to the cacophony as metal barricades toppled and tin cans bounced along the streets. People lay strewn across the pavement, lost in drug-induced stupors. Others not involved with the group attempted to find their way to work or the nearby subway station.
The chaos was not an unusual disturbance. It was a Wednesday in the Tenderloin, 2023.
At night, the plaza, just two blocks from City Hall, transformed into a full-fledged illegal market. Enforcement was rare. People from all corners of the Bay Area stood shoulder to shoulder, selling stolen candy, clothes, and hygiene products. Children as young as 13 visibly sold drugs on nearby street corners. Music blasted. Tents lined the sidewalks. Businesses fled. Tabloids ran tawdry headlines about a lawless city.
“It was kind of like a drama-filled high school party,” said Jessica Stephens, who has been homeless in the city for three years. “When we first moved here, you could literally do anything. I took a bong rip right in front of a cop’s face, and absolutely nothing happened.”
Then came a shift. In May 2023, cops began arresting more people for being under the influence of drugs — a normal practice in many cities, but a sea change in San Francisco. The city’s progressive faction assailed then-Mayor London Breed. They argued that such arrests are cruel and ineffective at moving people into treatment. More drug users would die as they took to the shadows to evade enforcement, experts warned.
But the arrests only intensified and in July 2024, police took the crackdown a step further by targeting people for public camping.
As a result, the culture on the city’s streets has changed, drug users say. The camaraderie is gone. The drugs are mostly weaker. Anxiety is high. And effectively, they say, the party is over in the Tenderloin.
“I actually wonder where the fuck all the people went,” Stephens said. “Because there used to be thousands of people on the streets every single day. … Where did everyone go?”
‘The jails can’t hold everyone’
The sun beamed down on U.N. Plaza in early May as a pianist played joyful melodies to a crowd. Tourists took selfies. Kids rode skateboards. The sound of pingpong balls bounced across the courtyard. People chatted about how legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk had visited the park a few days earlier.
The city’s vision of turning the once beleaguered space into a community hub was in full bloom.
But a few blocks in any direction, scenes of suffering unfolded. On the corner of Sixth and Market streets, a man used his dirt-caked hands to scoop Chinese food off the sidewalk and into his mouth. At Turk and Taylor, cyclists swerved around a body sprawled motionless across the bike lane. Dozens of people, visibly in crisis, dotted the alleyways off Sixth, the center of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s drug crackdown.
Chalu Banarsee slouched against a wall near Harriet and Howard streets, hiding his head under a sweatshirt as he smoked crack. Wearing just a single shoe and a knotted trash bag as a belt, he complained of pain in his liver between hits of the pipe.
“It’s really, really uncomfortable out here now,” Banarsee said. “There’s not enough bathrooms. There’s not enough garbage cans. Anything that benefits homeless people, they take it away.”
Many contend that the constant displacement of drug activity appears to be the end goal — not a side effect — of the city’s crackdown.
“They know they’re not going to stop it, so they just push it around,” said Codey White, who uses fentanyl. “People can’t quit drugs overnight. And the jails can’t hold everyone.”
Experts say this catch-and-release tactic is contributing to overdoses, which are surging after falling to a post-pandemic low in October. Even a few hours behind bars can cause a seasoned drug user’s tolerance to drop significantly, increasing the risk of death.
More than a dozen users have told The Standard they were not offered treatment upon release from jail, despite the city’s stated intention to do so.
“These people used crack and heroin for 40 years, and now you’re arresting them?” said Candra Jordan, who lives in the Tenderloin and recently kicked her fentanyl addiction. “So many people are going in there, detoxing, and then dying.”
Three blocks from the idyllic scene in U.N. Plaza, at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, two regulars wrestled with their liberal ideals, arguing over the ethics of the crackdown.
Timothy Frazier, a longtime Tenderloin resident, said he’s noticed an improvement in the neighborhood’s street conditions. Still, he isn’t supportive of arresting people for drug use.
“It has cleaned up a lot,” Frazier said. “But I, the bleeding-heart liberal, think if everyone had a place to sleep, medical care, and food to eat, things would be a hell of a lot better.”
Lisa Marie pushed back between sips of her drink. The Tenderloin is one of the city’s most accessible and affordable neighborhoods, she argued, and its families shouldn’t be forced to navigate through gantlets of drug use.
“I love you, but healthcare, housing, and food are probably not in the cards,” she said to Frazier, pointing out who the president is. “I feel for people, but I live three blocks from the police station, and you never see them get out of their cars. … It’s not fair that this neighborhood shoulders all of the burden.”
Party on: The next phase
It was Civic Center’s loudest party in years.
Roughly 25,000 ravers had descended upon City Hall’s steps. They were draped in fur coats and neon, climbing trees and dancing under lasers and smoke. Skrillex, Fred Again, and Anderson .Paak sent basslines bumping through the Tenderloin. And then the concert ended, as soon as the clock struck 10 p.m., strictly following the city’s curfew.
In a part of town that rarely had reason to celebrate, the June 2024 show was seen as a resounding success. Breed danced on City Hall’s balcony, soaking in what appeared to be a massive victory for her reelection campaign.
She ended up losing, but her impromptu rager ushered in a new era. The city has since made boozy music events a linchpin of its downtown revitalization strategy. Keeping the party going, Lurie celebrated his inauguration with a concert in Chinatown featuring homegrown talent Zhu. And last month, he used a Breed-era law to permit five new entertainment zones where people can legally drink in the streets.
Meanwhile, in the Tenderloin, children were sending newly elected Supervisor Bilal Mahmood splashing into a dunk tank at a Ramadan street fair April 5. The event drew more than 1,000 people to the long beleaguered Golden Gate Avenue — part of what Mahmood says is the next phase of the city’s plan.
“There’s a lot of discussion about activating downtown and revitalizing it,” Mahmood said. “But you won’t have a revitalized downtown without having a revitalized Tenderloin.”
Not everyone’s feeling the vitality. People continue to die of overdoses at a rate of more than two a day. Meanwhile, residents of adjacent neighborhoods say they have absorbed the Tenderloin’s drug activity. Multiple Mission residents rallied last Thursday alongside advocates and politicians to call for more arrests on their street.
But even there, a night market bustled with live music just a block away on Valencia Street. People shopped, danced, and publicly imbibed. Children ran through the streets, playing hopscotch and twirling Hula-Hoops. Even some of the protesters partook in the festivities.
For many, it feels like the city is finally emerging from years of despair. A February poll by the moderate political group GrowSF found that just 34% of San Franciscans think the city is on the wrong track, down from 64% in September.
Douglas Liu has witnessed the change up close. As a Code Tenderloin night navigator for two years, Liu coaxes people into treatment and shelter after dark. And as a resident living above the now-cleared illegal night market in U.N. Plaza, he has also endured the onslaught of noise, crime, and sleepless nights.
Before the crackdown, music blared nightly, and stepping outside meant navigating a minefield of drug smoke and unpredictable strangers. But lately, he reports, the streets feel different — and so do his neighbors.
“It’s not only the people using drugs who deal with the trauma — it’s the residents too,” Liu said. “But compared to last year, it’s night and day.”