Earlier this month, old-fashioned Xeroxed copies of a newspaper article appeared across the Mid-Market neighborhood in Downtown San Francisco. The article, from the San Francisco Chronicle, featured the headline: “S.F. D.A. Brooke Jenkins says she’ll consider murder charges for fentanyl dealers.” The article was taped to partitions on neighborhood corners often frequented by drug dealers. At the very least one in every of those Xerox copies had the headline translated into Spanish — all the higher for the dealers in query, most of whom are Honduran nationals, to get the message.
The photocopies were distributed by Matt Dorsey, Supervisor for the district that features the Mid-Market area, which is adjoining to the Tenderloin (in San Francisco, which is each a county and a city, Supervisors are the equivalent of City Council members in other cities). Dorsey’s office had organized a neighborhood clean-up and the Supervisor had handed the article for volunteers to advertise. Dorsey is himself a recovering addict and prior to becoming Supervisor, he was the Communications Director for the San Francisco Police Department. Ridding the neighborhood of drug dealers is his primary priority — a goal he shares with latest District Attorney Jenkins.
Strange as it’d sound to most non-San Franciscans, the sort of overt political opposition to open drug dealing that Dorsey and Jenkins represent is a challenge to town’s political establishment. San Francisco is governed by a leadership that’s so enamored of town’s progressive, humanitarian self-image that the thought of enforcing basic laws — even ones that save people’s lives like controlling drug sales and consumption — has come to be thought to be reactionary. But conditions in town have gotten so bad that San Francisco’s voters have begun to revolt. Living in a city whose downtown doubles as an out of doors drug den is becoming intolerable even for a lot of notoriously tolerant San Franciscans.
“Open drug use has been normalized to the purpose there are blocks where your complete sidewalk is stuffed with people passed out or getting high,” said Kevin Lee, a San Francisco resident who’s in recovery himself. “There shouldn’t be enough emphasis on creating access to treatment.”
Within the meantime, town’s drug-induced mayhem continues unabated. A block from where the Xeroxed articles went up, as an illustration, is a brand latest Whole Foods Market that opened in March of this 12 months. The shop, which is directly across the road from a city-supervised drug consumption site, is a monument to the distant, pre-pandemic aspirations of a once-booming San Francisco. Situated underground, beneath a colossal tower of luxury apartments for tech employees, the 65,000 square foot market was expected to ride the coattails of town’s exploding knowledge economy.
As a substitute, like the remainder of the neighborhood, the Whole Foods has turn into a hotbed of petty crime. In keeping with interviews with employees there, restrooms now include disposal containers for syringes because addicts from the open air drug market that surrounds the constructing use the bathroom stalls as shooting galleries. Those addicts treat the shop’s shelves as a veritable ATM, overtly shoplifting merchandise in clear view of each Whole Foods employees and cops working time beyond regulation shifts on the shop’s floor.
Once, a security guard tried to stop an addict from stealing and was thrown through plate glass near the cheese counter. One other security guard who got here to his assistance was strangled. Management began keeping ceaselessly stolen products within the rear stockroom; they’re brought out to customers on the registers upon purchase. Undeterred, addicts simply began walking into the employees-only section of the shop and rifling through coolers and boxes for coveted merchandise.
The once ubiquitous tech employees that were expected to patronize the shop are hardly seen in Mid-Market anymore. When firms began shifting to work-from-home, downtown San Francisco’s office buildings emptied out. By 2024, one study estimates that Mid-Market business real estate may have a emptiness rate of 43 percent (in comparison with barely 6 percent citywide before the pandemic). Prior to the pandemic, tech employees on hoverboards coexisted, awkwardly, with homeless people smoking meth on the sidewalk. Now the “normal” persons are mostly gone. The streets are almost entirely dominated by the dealers and users of the open air drug market.
Neither is the chaos contained to the Tenderloin and Mid-Market areas. The merchandise stolen from Whole Foods, like that stolen from Safeway, Goal, CVS, Walgreens, and each other big box store in downtown San Francisco, is sold to fences on the sidewalks of the nearby Mission District, which brings the organized larceny industry to that mostly residential neighborhood, as well. Addicts drawn to San Francisco by the Tenderloin’s notoriety live in tent encampments scattered all around the city. Along with shoplifting, addicts support their habits by breaking into cars and sometimes invading homes. The consequences of the open air drug market thus ripple through every nook and cranny of San Francisco.
San Francisco is a famously tolerant city, but beneath this low-level mayhem, town’s residents, who pay a number of the highest taxes on the planet, have been seething at their political leaders — often privately, and, increasingly, publicly. The general public’s exasperation with the political establishment erupted twice already: first with the recall of town’s comedically woke school board members in February, followed by the recall of former D.A. Chesa Boudin 4 months later.
Having been appointed within the wake of Boudin’s demise, latest DA Jenkins is currently running to be formally elected to her office next month. Boudin was a profession public defense attorney who essentially turned the prosecutor’s HQ right into a second public defender’s office. He made a degree of avoiding felony prosecutions for drug dealers, painting them as victims of human trafficking. On Boudin’s watch, dealers became more brazen than ever, barely bothering to hide their transactions, while fatal drug overdoses surged in town, claiming greater than twice as many lives over the course of the pandemic as Covid. Meanwhile, Boudin’s office secured just three convictions for drug dealing in your complete 12 months of 2021, and 0 for peddling fentanyl. All while some Honduran dealers are making upwards of $1,000 per day, in line with reports from former and current Assistant District Attorneys.
Nevertheless, a lot of the city’s political establishment (with the waffling exception of the Mayor) stood firmly behind Boudin. Only one in every of the 11 Supervisors supported the previous D.A.’s recall. The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee opposed the recall and recently endorsed Jenkins’ opponent — a candidate who’s, if anything, much more radical than Boudin — in next month’s election.
“Much of San Francisco’s political establishment together with town’s Democratic Party has turn into estranged from town’s heavily Democratic voters,” said Randy Shaw, head of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which provides housing to indigent San Franciscans. “Voters rejected the Party-backed Boudin in a landslide, yet the Party has gone on to endorse a Boudin-backer against an appointed DA who campaigned for the recall.”
This has put Jenkins within the strange and politically envious position of with the ability to run against San Francisco’s political machine, regardless that she’s the hand-picked appointee of the Mayor. Due to an ideologically intoxicated progressive political establishment increasingly out-of-step with San Francisco’s voters, in next month’s election, Jenkins is without delay an insider and an outsider. She will have her cake and eat it, too.
San Francisco’s politics are within the early stages of a realignment. But that doesn’t mean things will change overnight. The town’s challenges going forward are even worse than those behind it. Among the many 62 largest cities in America, San Francisco already ranks dead last within the post-pandemic recovery of its downtown. That problem is just going to worsen as business real estate contracts that were signed at the peak of the tech boom expire and fail to be renewed because employees at the moment are working from home.
Meanwhile, town’s open-air drug problems are more likely to turn into much more dire as a trio of latest “supervised” drugs sites are soon to debut; never mind that their infamous predecessor was a spectacular (and illegal) public failure. Downtown will thus proceed to be a ghost town, due to city leaders whose policies embolden drug dealers and users with little or no consequence.
“My son is stuck with politicians who just hand addicts free drug paraphernalia and double down on the identical failed policies,” said Jacqui Berlinn, who has tried for years to save lots of her son, who’s a homeless addict within the Tenderloin. “We finally have a latest DA who desires to bring real change but she will be able to’t do it until the remainder of town’s political leaders start working toward an actual solution as a substitute of creating the crisis worse.”
As mounting office vacancies begin to chisel away on the tax base of a city whose social service needs are ballooning with the worsening addiction crisis, we would soon see city agencies warring over limited resources, exacerbating the political split between progressives and pragmatists.
The current dysfunction of San Francisco may thus be only a harbinger of a full blown crisis to return. Nevertheless, given what passes for governance in San Francisco during normal times, perhaps a crisis is just what town must bring it back from the sting of the abyss.
Earlier this month, old-fashioned Xeroxed copies of a newspaper article appeared across the Mid-Market neighborhood in Downtown San Francisco. The article, from the San Francisco Chronicle, featured the headline: “S.F. D.A. Brooke Jenkins says she’ll consider murder charges for fentanyl dealers.” The article was taped to partitions on neighborhood corners often frequented by drug dealers. At the very least one in every of those Xerox copies had the headline translated into Spanish — all the higher for the dealers in query, most of whom are Honduran nationals, to get the message.
The photocopies were distributed by Matt Dorsey, Supervisor for the district that features the Mid-Market area, which is adjoining to the Tenderloin (in San Francisco, which is each a county and a city, Supervisors are the equivalent of City Council members in other cities). Dorsey’s office had organized a neighborhood clean-up and the Supervisor had handed the article for volunteers to advertise. Dorsey is himself a recovering addict and prior to becoming Supervisor, he was the Communications Director for the San Francisco Police Department. Ridding the neighborhood of drug dealers is his primary priority — a goal he shares with latest District Attorney Jenkins.
Strange as it’d sound to most non-San Franciscans, the sort of overt political opposition to open drug dealing that Dorsey and Jenkins represent is a challenge to town’s political establishment. San Francisco is governed by a leadership that’s so enamored of town’s progressive, humanitarian self-image that the thought of enforcing basic laws — even ones that save people’s lives like controlling drug sales and consumption — has come to be thought to be reactionary. But conditions in town have gotten so bad that San Francisco’s voters have begun to revolt. Living in a city whose downtown doubles as an out of doors drug den is becoming intolerable even for a lot of notoriously tolerant San Franciscans.
“Open drug use has been normalized to the purpose there are blocks where your complete sidewalk is stuffed with people passed out or getting high,” said Kevin Lee, a San Francisco resident who’s in recovery himself. “There shouldn’t be enough emphasis on creating access to treatment.”
Within the meantime, town’s drug-induced mayhem continues unabated. A block from where the Xeroxed articles went up, as an illustration, is a brand latest Whole Foods Market that opened in March of this 12 months. The shop, which is directly across the road from a city-supervised drug consumption site, is a monument to the distant, pre-pandemic aspirations of a once-booming San Francisco. Situated underground, beneath a colossal tower of luxury apartments for tech employees, the 65,000 square foot market was expected to ride the coattails of town’s exploding knowledge economy.
As a substitute, like the remainder of the neighborhood, the Whole Foods has turn into a hotbed of petty crime. In keeping with interviews with employees there, restrooms now include disposal containers for syringes because addicts from the open air drug market that surrounds the constructing use the bathroom stalls as shooting galleries. Those addicts treat the shop’s shelves as a veritable ATM, overtly shoplifting merchandise in clear view of each Whole Foods employees and cops working time beyond regulation shifts on the shop’s floor.
Once, a security guard tried to stop an addict from stealing and was thrown through plate glass near the cheese counter. One other security guard who got here to his assistance was strangled. Management began keeping ceaselessly stolen products within the rear stockroom; they’re brought out to customers on the registers upon purchase. Undeterred, addicts simply began walking into the employees-only section of the shop and rifling through coolers and boxes for coveted merchandise.
The once ubiquitous tech employees that were expected to patronize the shop are hardly seen in Mid-Market anymore. When firms began shifting to work-from-home, downtown San Francisco’s office buildings emptied out. By 2024, one study estimates that Mid-Market business real estate may have a emptiness rate of 43 percent (in comparison with barely 6 percent citywide before the pandemic). Prior to the pandemic, tech employees on hoverboards coexisted, awkwardly, with homeless people smoking meth on the sidewalk. Now the “normal” persons are mostly gone. The streets are almost entirely dominated by the dealers and users of the open air drug market.
Neither is the chaos contained to the Tenderloin and Mid-Market areas. The merchandise stolen from Whole Foods, like that stolen from Safeway, Goal, CVS, Walgreens, and each other big box store in downtown San Francisco, is sold to fences on the sidewalks of the nearby Mission District, which brings the organized larceny industry to that mostly residential neighborhood, as well. Addicts drawn to San Francisco by the Tenderloin’s notoriety live in tent encampments scattered all around the city. Along with shoplifting, addicts support their habits by breaking into cars and sometimes invading homes. The consequences of the open air drug market thus ripple through every nook and cranny of San Francisco.
San Francisco is a famously tolerant city, but beneath this low-level mayhem, town’s residents, who pay a number of the highest taxes on the planet, have been seething at their political leaders — often privately, and, increasingly, publicly. The general public’s exasperation with the political establishment erupted twice already: first with the recall of town’s comedically woke school board members in February, followed by the recall of former D.A. Chesa Boudin 4 months later.
Having been appointed within the wake of Boudin’s demise, latest DA Jenkins is currently running to be formally elected to her office next month. Boudin was a profession public defense attorney who essentially turned the prosecutor’s HQ right into a second public defender’s office. He made a degree of avoiding felony prosecutions for drug dealers, painting them as victims of human trafficking. On Boudin’s watch, dealers became more brazen than ever, barely bothering to hide their transactions, while fatal drug overdoses surged in town, claiming greater than twice as many lives over the course of the pandemic as Covid. Meanwhile, Boudin’s office secured just three convictions for drug dealing in your complete 12 months of 2021, and 0 for peddling fentanyl. All while some Honduran dealers are making upwards of $1,000 per day, in line with reports from former and current Assistant District Attorneys.
Nevertheless, a lot of the city’s political establishment (with the waffling exception of the Mayor) stood firmly behind Boudin. Only one in every of the 11 Supervisors supported the previous D.A.’s recall. The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee opposed the recall and recently endorsed Jenkins’ opponent — a candidate who’s, if anything, much more radical than Boudin — in next month’s election.
“Much of San Francisco’s political establishment together with town’s Democratic Party has turn into estranged from town’s heavily Democratic voters,” said Randy Shaw, head of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which provides housing to indigent San Franciscans. “Voters rejected the Party-backed Boudin in a landslide, yet the Party has gone on to endorse a Boudin-backer against an appointed DA who campaigned for the recall.”
This has put Jenkins within the strange and politically envious position of with the ability to run against San Francisco’s political machine, regardless that she’s the hand-picked appointee of the Mayor. Due to an ideologically intoxicated progressive political establishment increasingly out-of-step with San Francisco’s voters, in next month’s election, Jenkins is without delay an insider and an outsider. She will have her cake and eat it, too.
San Francisco’s politics are within the early stages of a realignment. But that doesn’t mean things will change overnight. The town’s challenges going forward are even worse than those behind it. Among the many 62 largest cities in America, San Francisco already ranks dead last within the post-pandemic recovery of its downtown. That problem is just going to worsen as business real estate contracts that were signed at the peak of the tech boom expire and fail to be renewed because employees at the moment are working from home.
Meanwhile, town’s open-air drug problems are more likely to turn into much more dire as a trio of latest “supervised” drugs sites are soon to debut; never mind that their infamous predecessor was a spectacular (and illegal) public failure. Downtown will thus proceed to be a ghost town, due to city leaders whose policies embolden drug dealers and users with little or no consequence.
“My son is stuck with politicians who just hand addicts free drug paraphernalia and double down on the identical failed policies,” said Jacqui Berlinn, who has tried for years to save lots of her son, who’s a homeless addict within the Tenderloin. “We finally have a latest DA who desires to bring real change but she will be able to’t do it until the remainder of town’s political leaders start working toward an actual solution as a substitute of creating the crisis worse.”
As mounting office vacancies begin to chisel away on the tax base of a city whose social service needs are ballooning with the worsening addiction crisis, we would soon see city agencies warring over limited resources, exacerbating the political split between progressives and pragmatists.
The current dysfunction of San Francisco may thus be only a harbinger of a full blown crisis to return. Nevertheless, given what passes for governance in San Francisco during normal times, perhaps a crisis is just what town must bring it back from the sting of the abyss.
