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How did we get to this point everyone? Ask anyone who lives or has lived in the Bay Area about the Tenderloin and you’ll get some pretty interesting reactions. Yuck. Gross. Scary. Weird. Heartbreaking, disturbing, tragic, dire, and heart wrenching. It’s bad here and it has a terrible reputation. Whenever you hear about homelessness and crazy people and drug addicts in San Francisco, this place is the center of it all. It’s worldwide famous for being a place of misery and of grief. So of course I had to go there. On an early morning in late October, before most of the city’s workers had even begun their office commutes, I took a drive through this notorious neighborhood. It was everything I thought it would be. Especially with the windows down. Which I would soon learn would be very dangerous. A second time. And then, just to make sure I got the full experience of the Tenderloin, later in the day, I tried to walk through it. As I discovered, it was probably the riskiest walk I had ever taken for a YouTube video. The Tenderloin district is a smallish neighborhood that takes up about 225 square acres of downtown San Francisco. It’s about 50 square blocks, and it’s wedged about halfway between Chinatown and the Mission District. According to the internet, this neighborhood is home to art spaces, concert venues and a mix of upscale and trendy casual restaurants. But even if those do things exist here, they’re simply overwhelmed by the sights, sounds and smells of the worst human condition I had ever seen. This part of town has the highest rate of homelessness and crime in the city of San Francisco. The district got its name because like a Tenderloin, it is the soft underbelly of the city. Back in the big earthquake of 1906, this place was destroyed, and in its place they put up a bunch of seedy hotels and gambling halls. In the 1920s, it first became known as a place for graft and drug use, prostitution and an alternative lifestyle. Later in the 1970s, this part of town became home to a large number of refugees from southeast asia. As you can tell, this part of town has resisted gentrification and today, it almost looks like it’s been handed over to the saddest lot you can imagine. The squalid conditions, the drug use, the shootings and stabbings, the graffiti and liquor stores and the strip clubs all serve as a backdrop for a population of residents that have all but been separated from the rest of society. Just a few years prior, 300 lamp posts in the Tenderloin had to be replaced because they had been corroded by urine. #california #moving You can buy my music here: iTunes: More places to get my music: -Google Play: -Amazon Music: This channel is about America! The best video on this topic!
