Mayor of the Tenderloin, page 3
People bring with them “anything from diabetes to cancer, to being terminal, to just getting out of surgery.” Next Door’s nurse has “seen people come in with catheter bags.”
Before the nurse was assigned, Kathy’s supervisor found himself delivering a baby. “No one knew this woman was so severely mentally ill. No one knew how pregnant she was or if she was pregnant, because she was so incoherent. He delivered a baby in the bed. That sounds great, but it wasn’t. He was traumatized for days afterwards.”
People also “absolutely” bring in their addictions. “Active drug using. We are a harm-reduction model that the city mandates, which we believe in.” To Kathy, the now common term “harm reduction” means working with an addict to cut down on drug usage step by step, rather than demanding a cold turkey approach. She adamantly opposed “dry shelters.” If someone gets ejected for smelling like alcohol, what happened to staff time spent trying to find the root of the person’s problem? “They relapse and we kick them out? That doesn’t make sense, and it’s such a waste to maybe start all over again, maybe not get them back in for another six months. To me, harm reduction is realistic. [If someone comes into Next Door] who is actively using, staff here are very adept at knowing folks and saying, ‘Hmm, you’re a little bit too high right now. What are the chances of your going upstairs, not causing a ruckus, and sleeping it off?’” She added, “I want to emphasize, harm reduction isn’t ‘anything goes.’”
Whatever conditions residents arrive in, an increasing commonality is old age, coupled with lack of mobility. For them, “we have canes, walkers, wheelchairs.” Some shelter seekers are in their nineties.
As in other shelters connected to city governments, beds get allotted according to various criteria, such as whether a person is on GA (General Assistance, or welfare) or is a military veteran. Kathy missed her more manageable situation back in Massachusetts, where she directed a hundred-bed shelter. “We did an intake on every single person who walked through the door. What’s your medical history, what’s your housing history, what’s your mental health history, what’s your income, what’s your employment. Not to vicariously know about the person, although it’s an intrusive process, but to begin working on ‘What’s your path out of homelessness?’ It’s a no-brainer. I come here where, if you don’t have a case manager, we don’t know who’s walking through our doors. That’s the shocker for me.”
Regarding people with mental health issues, she added carefully, “They’re not getting the kind of case management I would say is useful.”
“Since 2009, we have absolutely fought for, begged, used our own [funding] to try to beef up our case management opportunities here [and hire more licensed behavioral health specialists] . . . . They will do crisis intervention, they will do some therapy, basic case management, but, for the most part, they’re absolutely not meeting with everyone.”
Next Door does offer dinner, limited personal storage space, and a library, as well as the rare privilege of pet companionship. When further crises—such as a spate of rough winter weather—challenge San Francisco’s unsheltered population, necessitating a temporary shelter, perhaps in a church, Kathy Treggiari has organized that too. “We got really good” at it, she said, smiling. “Take ‘em mats, take ‘em blankets, then go into the church. It’s only in the winter—to take sixty to a hundred additional men in out of the cold and the rain.”
After sending her “seasoned staff” to help with the temporary shelter, she noticed an entirely different reaction from the clients, as she called them. For one thing, they had few complaints. “A lot of it was the food, because you have all these different churches that bring in five-course meals. A lot of it was a calmer staff. A lot of it was just a smaller environment. People feel safe, people feel heard.” Neither the clients nor the staff could quite believe the others were the same people they had met before at the less calm Next Door.
Obstacles and challenges, administrative and physical, bureaucratic and mental, remained enormous, both for her and for people seeking shelter at Next Door. Despite the shelters’ drawbacks and restrictions, some 90 percent of San Francisco’s over three thousand shelter beds were occupied during one count in the summer of 2023, according to city government data. (Some were set aside for emergency situations.) And about five hundred people were on a waiting list to get a bed.3
In a sideways remark that seemed to slip out, Kathy said, “It’s a lot of effort for one lousy bed.” She added, “I will, till the day I die, say being homeless in a shelter is an abnormal way to live.”
CHAPTER 3
THE BIRTH OF CODE TENDERLOIN
IN FEBRUARY 2014, when young British software designer Shash Deshmukh visited San Francisco for the first time, he was shocked. “In London we get fed a lot of things about how San Francisco is brilliant for startups and why we should all move there. It’s this utopia.” He had come to town to participate in Launch Festival, a tech conference for companies like his nascent one, Paperfold, “a visual email app for mobile devices,” as his website described it.
“The first thing that hit me about San Francisco [was] obviously the homelessness.” There, in the middle of Market Street, he said, a significant portion of the public seemed to him to have no home. He said British authorities would consider the situation a war zone and send in the army.
The difference between tech festival and street reality continued to rattle Shash, a soft-spoken and self-effacing graduate of Oxford University. He cringed at seeing a “do-good” poster in the office of a tech friend who worked for a billion-dollar enterprise. The poster heralded the company’s fund-raiser for a homeless shelter—based on how many home runs the San Francisco Giants hit. Pictured was a sad-looking family presumably hoping for grand slams. “It’s insulting. It tells you about the thinking behind these companies. The problem is not that serious to them. It’s a marketing thing to make them feel good.”
Street scenes made Shash even more distressed. “On my way to my Apple event, I’m walking over bodies, basically. That’s not right.” He managed to arrange an appointment with a mayoral assistant at a Tenderloin café. Even the walk to meet her troubled him. “Every single place where the window meets the ground was full of homeless people. What I saw is tech people, like me, wearing their badge and having their laptops with them, sort of crawling to get into the place, then opening the door and pretending everything is absolutely fine, literally breathing a sigh of relief. The empathy gap made me a little angry, actually.”
If he lost his home in England, Shash said, his “state of worry would be a lot lower in approaching civic organizations for help. America is about going out there and doing things by [yourself] and winning. But if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to save face and pretend you’re winning? Or not ask other people for help? I think not being dependent on other people is a big American trait.”
Americans in need, including unsheltered populations, he felt, are given the equivalent of a flashlight in the dark. “Run only as fast as you can see without falling over.” In England, he said, government help comes without shame.
Expressing his concerns to the mayor’s representative, Shash said they had an honest conversation. As an outsider, how could he help? She named various groups he might contact. While he mulled that approach, he also decided to attend a conference TEDx talk titled “Teach Our Girls How to Code: A Former Pimp’s Call to Action.” The speaker was Del Seymour.
The TEDx video of the talk shows Del wearing a gray fedora, a gray suit with a colorful pocket square, and a dangling scarf. His open jacket reveals a yellow T-shirt reading Tenderloin Walking Tours, the bare-bones enterprise he had started a couple of years earlier. He paces the small stage, waving his hands, his dominant left adorned with two gold rings, one on his index finger. The young audience seems locked on Del’s words, as he implores them to help the Tenderloin community. “You folks need to meet my folks, because you folks are going to be down here, and you need to deal day to day with my folks. You need to feel our pain. We need to feel your pain. We need to understand you. You need to understand us.”
He urges his audience not to brand Tenderloin residents as lawless but instead to help them get straight jobs. “We got girls standing on the corner of Turk and Taylor selling crack. Been there for years because they don’t know how to get off that corner. The only difference between you and the little girl with braids on Turk and Taylor? You can code and she can’t.”
“They want Nikes, just like you,” he continues. “They want Pampers, just like your kids. And they got criminal records. Mainstream employers therefore will not hire them. They can’t go to Gap. They can’t go to Sears. You ever see these little girls at Apple stores? No.” Pacing the stage, pointing, gesticulating, Del issues a challenge. “Go down on Turk and Taylor. I’ll make the hookup for you. Get one girl and bring her into an incubator like this. Show her how to do something. Invest in one girl. Solve her problem. And when you solve her problem, you’ll solve her kids’, her mama’s, her grandkids’, her brother’s, her halfway dude’s, her neighbors.’ You’ll solve a whole bunch of people’s.” Del all but pleads, “All the minds in here, all the integrity, all the resources—come on, folks. Invest in our future. You can break the chain.”
Shash was the first person to approach Del off the stage.
They soon met privately, Shash quizzing Del about his plan to start a job readiness training organization. The basic idea, Del explained, was to get real jobs for people such as those he spoke about, people who for whatever reason—discrimination, addiction, homelessness, despair—felt incapable of earning a decent living legally. They needed encouragement and practical help. Del’s name for the organization he pictured was Code Tenderloin.
The name had nothing to do with software coding, he explained, as he subsequently repeated countless times. “‘Code Blue on floor 2’ or ‘Code Red in the emergency room’ means there’s a problem in that hospital. ‘Code Tenderloin’ means there’s a problem in the Tenderloin because we’re not working.” In his estimation, unemployment in the Tenderloin ranged from 50 percent to 80 percent.
He and Shash met repeatedly. Some discussions focused on basic needs of the people Del had in mind, said Shash, such as “classes to prepare them for specific things, like interview prep. Del was saying they need to have skills the startups need.” The two also worked on another element: exposing would-be Code Tenderloin students to new opportunities. Shash had seen a similar approach in his university years, a program taking inner-city London schoolchildren to Oxford to become familiar with the environment, so they might consider applying.
In his San Francisco visit, Shash spent what he had—time, enthusiasm, and coding skills but no money—developing a tech-oriented scenario for Del’s idea. Then he headed back to England and his investors, who wondered what he had been doing.
TO MAKE CODE TENDERLOIN VIABLE, Del needed everything, including teachers, students, and classroom space.
To recruit teachers, he turned to a like-minded neighborhood activist, Neil Shah, who rounded up volunteers, such as April Trinh, who taught on her days off from work, and Natalie Perales, a college student. Initially, Del planned to do much of the teaching himself. Who else knew better how to get out of homelessness?
To recruit students, he simply went “on the streets,” as he put it. His search did not take long. Virtually all candidates wanting a straight job were homeless. Almost all had criminal convictions. What Del offered for free was a program meant to launch them into not only jobs but also careers. The felony factor remained a concern, but he tackled that too, finding employers open to hiring vetted candidates. One later Code Tenderloin online ad referred to removing barriers, stating, “Previous history with difficult issues including substance abuse, mental health, education level, personal finances or criminal record does not disqualify you from securing work.” Classes would include what became a standard: mock job interviews.
For the initial set of classes, several days a week for four weeks, Del signed up about ten people. Funding for such incidentals as modest snacks offered at the first classes came from contributions to the walking tours he had been giving for a few years. “I’m broke,” he said matter-of-factly. One line he repeated to various audiences was “Sue me, because I’ve got no money.” His stylish-looking outfits came from thrift stores.
A fact kept fairly private within Code Tenderloin was how much he helped students anyway, giving them money not only for transportation and cell phones but also for food, childcare, and sometimes even rent. “Everything to make them competitive,” said Del one day. “Whatever they need. And we do that not only until they get a job but at least a month after they’re on the job, so they can save those paychecks and get permanent housing.” Additionally, students in difficult circumstances, sometimes with babies in tow, were found places to stay, including with Del. The word got out: people at Code Tenderloin care. One woman who phoned looking for a class was asked whether she was safe, whether she was hungry.
For classroom space, the three owners of a new scrappy nightclub/restaurant/performance space in the Tenderloin called Piano Fight—whom Del befriended on his walking tours—donated day use of two rooms used in the evenings for ragtag theatrical productions. (This made for arresting scenery backdrops during classes.) The trio also offered Del day use of Piano Fight’s main floor area.
Del met there with a constant array of visitors, among them potential students and possible funders, sometimes a journalist or two, as well as people who needed help outside the formal classes he was developing.
“At Code Tenderloin,” he mentioned one day at Piano Fight, “we have two different populations. We have the job readiness program, and then we have what they jokingly or lovingly or haltingly call ‘Del’s clients.’ I’ve had three of them in here this morning. Those are my folks I deal with one on one. I don’t [have] the highest expectations of them as I would in the job readiness course. But if I know about a job I think they can fill, I have no right to say, ‘No, you need to go to this course first.’” Del got one such person a job at UPS. “I’m really concerned about his first paycheck, because he’s newly clean.”
Meanwhile, Del kept fund-raising. Eventually Code Tenderloin won a few small grants. With some of the money, he reimbursed Piano Fight for his costs. “I don’t abuse stuff. When I’m in here by myself, I try to keep my footprint as small as possible. Lights or air conditioning I only do when I got students here for class. We’re using twelve hours a week of HVAC and lights and water and napkins and toilet paper. We figured out that would be about $500 a month.” He considered the Piano Fight trio “community partners, very socially conscious young men that actually donate the space. We just cover our expenses.”
Unlike periods in his earlier life, Del became assiduously law-abiding, reciting IRS rules about what is and is not deductible. He put Tenderloin Walking Tours, as well as Code Tenderloin as its subsidiary, under the oversight of a San Francisco arts organization. Before long, between tours and the classes, he forged a connection to an entity he especially wanted to reach: high tech.
Back in 2011, city supervisors, urged by Tenderloin supervisor Jane Kim, passed what was called the “Twitter tax break.” Whether San Francisco officials on their own lured high-tech companies, including Twitter, to move to the down-at-the-heels Mid-Market Tenderloin area by offering a tax break or whether the action followed fears, even threats, that the companies would move out of town, is still debated. Essentially, tech companies got a pass on paying a 1.5 percent payroll tax on new employees for six years. The first to take advantage of the offer was Zendesk, whose name prompted no alliterative phrasing. Thus did Twitter get the spotlight and the bulk of local anger. After the company refashioned two former Market Street furniture showrooms for its new headquarters, hundreds of people took to the streets to protest the “corporate tax giveaway.” To them, high tech, with its high salaries, became public enemy number one and a symbol of inequality.
Not to Del Seymour. He envisioned jobs, especially for the people of Code Tenderloin (“my folks”). Tech, though, was not his world. He needed connections.
An early crucial one came from Supervisor Kim. Del’s walking tours—which were attracting press coverage—caught her attention. She introduced him to several tech firms. He, in turn, introduced tech people to “hook-ups in the Tenderloin.”
The connections took off. Del and community outreach personnel in such successful firms as Dolby, Twitter, and Zendesk got to know one another. The firms hosted Del and Code Tenderloin students, so they might see a future place to work, while Del took tech employees on walking tours to see the neighborhood.
In general, San Francisco–based techies comprise a mixed group in terms of background, the stereotype holding that a good number have Asian (Indian or Chinese) ancestry. But the overall impression some people might get walking the TL, as Del and other Black old-timers do, is that a majority of newcomers, whether in tech or not, are white. He said the old-timers told him for years, “Del, the white folks is coming in and taking over the Tenderloin.” After denying it, he finally answered them, “Yeah, I know.”
Before long, however, that seemed less a concern to Del than other entities partially taking over the Tenderloin: violence and drugs. Code Tenderloin would respond to them too.
CHAPTER 4
SUCCESSES AND SETBACKS
DEL CLAIMED REPEATEDLY that no matter what effort he expended for Code Tenderloin, efforts that started at roughly 4 a.m. when he woke up, to 8 or 9 p.m. when he usually crashed, he would prefer to sit in his rocking chair on his back porch (he had neither) watching Oprah. But he said he felt hooked by Code Tenderloin’s success, an “almost addiction.” He could not picture stopping “until every person in the Tenderloin that wants to work is able to work.” Think of basketball, he said. If he played and the ball never went in the hoop, he would quit, but “the ball’s going in right now with Code Tenderloin. So it’s hard to stop. You get a few that miss, but it’s also sort of seductive intimately. You’re not meeting people on a superficial basis. You’re meeting people who are revealing deep things.”
