Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
The Tenderloin is a longstanding, super-poor neighborhood of packed-in SROs (essentially welfare hotels). It hasn't gentrified, and won't gentrify, by design. SF Chinatown is similar (if without the drug/homeless/yuck issues).
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From the point of view of San Francisco officialdom and possibly in reality there really aren't that many--enough they argue--SROs left in the Tenderloin. Decades ago San Francisco put in bans on conversion to tourist "by the night" hotels and to a certain extent that preserved some of them, but many others have been taken over for other uses including student dormitories and non-profit housing (after extensive renovation in many cases), and some have just flat been torn down and replaced with new buildings. If you walk around the Tenderloin today, there's an impressive amount of newly constructed low income housing mostly built by non-profit developers using funds provided by the city's mandate that for-profit developers provide a percentage of low income housing on or off site or contribute to the pool of funds available to the non-profits. And what's not new is usually renovated. There really are few old-fashioned, poorly maintained flop houses left.
Finally, much of the non-profit housing, both new and old, is occupied by recent immigrant families, many of them Asian. So much of the Tenderloin now has a distinctly Asian flavor. So much so that part has been christened "little Saigon".