When I returned to San Francisco after a pandemic-induced exile, I moved to the Tenderloin. As a nightlife entertainer who hadn’t worked in over a year, I was understandably on a tight budget. And if one wants to live alone in SF without paying a fortune, yet still be walking distance to, well, practically everything, the TL is pretty much it.
Everyone warned me how much worse the neighborhood had gotten since COVID, but I brazenly ignored their warnings. After all, I lived here during the crack-and-crime infested 1990s. How bad could it be in 2023?