Opinion | The Coronavirus Is Worsening Class Divides in San Francisco - The New York Times

"One of the city’s poorest neighborhoods faces a looming health crisis as its most vulnerable residents — and medical advice — are overlooked.

Mr. Bensinger is a member of the editorial board.

People in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, in an image made by a double exposure

SAN FRANCISCO — After Mayor London Breed of San Francisco issued the nation’s first shelter-in-place order on March 16, the city of nearly 900,000 quickly fell in line. Nonessential businesses and schools closed, parks and playgrounds thinned out, and social distancing became a way of life.

And for those trying to maintain a semblance of pre-coronavirus normalcy, authorities have been quick to intervene. On a recent sunny Sunday, the police descended on Dolores Park, a popular picnicking spot, to disperse those who might come within six feet of strangers; the mayor even threatened to close the park if visitors didn’t comply with health guidelines. As of April 27, at least 17 citations had been handed out for violations of the mayor’s order.

But steps from City Hall, a different scene has unfolded. The streets and sidewalks in the city’s impoverished and overlooked Tenderloin district are humming with activity.

Groups of 10, 15 or more congregate on corners and spill into the street. Open-air drug use, rampant before the virus struck, continues unabated, alongside sidewalk bazaars of bric-a-brac. The walkways are fuller than ever, particularly as the number of street tents has tripled, by one estimate, to more than 300 in the 50-square-block Tenderloin. A city mandate for masks in public goes virtually unheeded, including in grocery and liquor stores.

Here, in the city’s densest neighborhood, police don’t enforce the six-foot social-distancing mandate — on just one block, a patrol car drove by three men sharing a glass pipe, a social circle of seven and two elderly women nudging a man sleeping in a doorway.

Bushra Alduais, who lives in the Tenderloin with her husband and three children, is accustomed to seeing the needle sharing, violence and mental disorder endemic to the neighborhood, but the outbreak of the coronavirus has brought a new element of danger. She said she hasn’t set foot outside her apartment in more than six weeks. “My kids are bugging me,” Ms. Alduais said. “They want to go outside, I want to go outside.” Her husband ventures out to buy groceries and other essential goods.

“Nothing has changed in the Tenderloin,” Ms. Alduais said. “It’s worse and worse.”

The Tenderloin and nearby South of Market, or SOMA, present a particular challenge for city officials. As one of San Francisco’s oldest neighborhoods, the Tenderloin is chock-full of historic buildings, theaters and restaurants, but decades of political indifference have also left it a haven for homelessness, drug use and prostitution amidst cramped living spaces like single-room-occupancy hotels, where residents share bathrooms and other facilities. You don’t move to the Tenderloin — you end up there.

Median household income in the Tenderloin from 2014 to 2018 was just $22,150, according to data San Francisco’s chief economist, Ted Egan, provided — far below the citywide median of $104,552. And almost 30 percent of residents in the district, including an adjacent neighborhood, live below the federal poverty line.

“The city treats the Tenderloin like a containment zone,” said David Elliot Lewis, who has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years. “They wouldn’t tolerate what you see here in the Marina or Pac Heights” — two of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods and home to some of its technology billionaires — “particularly with this virus that can spread so quickly.”

“It’s scary and it feels threatening to my health to just be outside,” said Mr. Lewis, who has been posting photographs of sometimes disturbing Tenderloin street scenes on his Facebook page. He straps on a mask and form-fitting goggles to venture to grocery stores and walks in the street, rather than on the sidewalk, to keep his distance.

Mr. Lewis is not alone in his frustration. A group of residents, businesses and the University of California Hastings College of Law, located in the Tenderloin, sued the city in federal court Monday to clean up the neighborhood, alleging “squalid” conditions that threaten people’s health in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

Rather than acting as an equalizer, the coronavirus is deepening socioeconomic rifts. The wealthiest receive the best care, have access to testing and enjoy emotional support from family members over video calls, while the most vulnerable are too often simply ignored. Less than 2 percent of the U.S. population has been screened for the virus, while wealthy enclaves like Bolinas, Calif., have arranged for each of its 1,300 citizens to get a test.

“We’re already having problems as it is with the Tenderloin,” Mayor Breed told me. “We think that just because there’s a pandemic that the problems that many people who are homeless face would just all of a sudden disappear and this would become the priority.”

“But people who suffer from substance-use disorder and mental illness, that just doesn’t turn off because of a pandemic,” she said.

When it comes to the poorest in places from Philadelphia’s Kensington to Los Angeles’s Skid Row, city officials grappling with Covid-19 are collectively shrugging. Their options are few and unpalatable: Put them in shelters, large encampments or even jails, where the virus has spread quickly, or in costly and logistically difficult hotel rooms; or simply let them fend for themselves. Critics say officials too often are choosing the latter.

And these solutions seem more like a Band-Aid than a long-term fix.

A lack of reliable information means many in the nation’s most-downtrodden districts resist wearing masks or altering their daily routines and still more simply have nowhere else to go other than makeshift tents.

Sheltering in place works, but it is a recourse for the privileged who can afford to stay at home for weeks on end, because their jobs or bank accounts permit it. Panhandling is only possible out in the open.

An even more troubling future is on the horizon. Local eviction moratoriums and rent-stabilization initiatives will help keep in their homes some of the 30 million who have filed for unemployment benefits in the past five weeks, but a new wave of homelessness is likely. More than 60,000 have filed unemployment claims this year in San Francisco alone, and the mayor expects at least 40,000 more, suggesting one in nine residents will have lost their jobs.

“You can’t pitch a tent in a wealthy neighborhood, so you’ll probably head for the Tenderloin,” said Matt Haney, a San Francisco supervisor who represents the area.

Mayor Breed quickly ordered quarantines, helping to keep infection rates low and winning her praise and national recognition (the crisis also delivered a timely distraction from a roiling fraud scandal involving a Breed administration official). Just over 1,600 positive coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the city and 29 deaths, paling in comparison with New York City, the pandemic’s epicenter. Even as tourism dollars have dried up, Mayor Breed extended the shelter-in-place order to the end of May, a contrast with states like Texas and Georgia, where officials are pushing to open more businesses more quickly.

But the mayor has also attracted the ire of supervisors like Mr. Haney and Hillary Ronen, who told me their districts lack sufficient portable toilets and hand-washing stations as officials focus their efforts on other neighborhoods. Demonstrators gathered outside Mayor Breed’s home on April 30 to protest a shortage of mandated hotel rooms for the city’s 8,000 homeless residents.

The 11-member board of supervisors had pushed through emergency legislation requiring the city to secure 8,250 hotel rooms for homeless residents — 1,250 more rooms than originally planned. But by the end of April, San Francisco had secured only about 2,500 rooms and had moved just over 1,000 people into them. Mayor Breed said she was working to lease or even buy more hotel rooms and pointed to the logistical challenges of transporting people to these rooms while maintaining social distancing. And there’s the hefty bill to contend with — about $56 million per month — that will be only partly offset with federal funds.

Mayor Breed bristled at a new encampment of an estimated 100 people that sprouted beside the Asian Art Museum downtown in the weeks after the coronavirus arrived, saying well-meaning philanthropic groups distributing tents could attract more people to the city.

The mayor said the city’s gains are threatened by neighborhoods like the Tenderloin where residents are resistant to change: “Even though we’ve been able to handle almost everything else in a way that has put us in a decent place as it relates to the number of infections of Covid-19 in the city, it could take off at any time because of our not only congregate living settings but also because of a population of people who are just not going to naturally comply.”

“We’re at an impasse as it relates to this particular population,” she said."

Opinion | The Coronavirus Is Worsening Class Divides in San Francisco - The New York Times