Tenderloin (San Francisco, California)

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The Tenderloin is a neighborhood in San Francisco. It is known for its immigrant populations, ethnic restaurants, bar scene, and close proximity to the Financial District, Downtown and Civic Center.

Located close to San Francisco's major hotels, the Tenderloin is a historic place full of preserved hotels from early 20th century. However, these conditions have also served to make rents more affordable in a city known as among the priciest in the country. Though the city is thought of as being uninhabited for its high rents, it is one of the few areas of the city affordable to low income and working-class families and has one of the city's highest concentrations of children. The squalid conditions, homelessness, crime, drug sales, prostitution, liquor stores (over 60), and strip clubs give the area a seedy reputation.

With some of San Francisco's most prestigious real estate only a few blocks to the north, and the Financial District's high towers and hotels just to the east (along Geary Street), the Tenderloin is often striking to tourists as a definitive example of microculture within the city. As with other lower-income neighborhoods like the Mission and SOMA districts, many artists and writers make the Tenderloin their home.

While the streets close to Market Street are among San Francisco's most undesirable neighborhoods, a gradual but distinct rise in income levels occurs as one travels north, ascending to the Nob Hill sector. Relative to other areas, the Tenderloin is the only largely working-class neighborhood within the downtown area.

The Dot Com boom in the late 1990s brought a great deal of redevelopment and resident inhabitation to the SOMA district in particular, but some revitalization funds put into the Tenderloin made a prominent impact — evident today by a much broader section of new ethnic restaurants and bars, as well as a more long-term young working class.
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco
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Coordinates:   37°46'56"N   122°24'54"W

Comments

  • Except for the people who don't smoke crack and still choose to call it their home. It yet still remains special to some.
  • I live there, and this is a pretty accurate description. It is a fantastic neighborhood with a deservedly seedy reputation. Some parts are more dangerous than others, but overall it is not as dangerous as some other SF neighborhoods.
  • I had two bikes stolen here, both of them locked.
  • Me and my friends always walked around the Tenderloin, sometimes with a $4000 video camera in plain view. We were never mugged for the camera. The Tenderloin is dangerous only to those who don't know how to present themselves there.
  • I accidentally wandered into the Tenderloin after getting lost on a recent trip to SF. Despite my tourist exterior and carrying around of an expensive camera, I was not accosted for more than money.
This article was last modified 7 years ago