Segregating Addiction: San Francisco's Tenderloin

In Series 3 of the television drama The Wire, a local police chief decides to push all the west side drug activity onto a few city blocks of Baltimore. The local lads pushed off their corners and now openly selling their wares in this area began to refer to it as Hamsterdam. The thinking behind the retiring police divisional major was to try legalization and to try to isolate drug activity. Both were attempts to reduce escalating drug violence.
As a construction worker who lives in Oakland my main experience with San Francisco has been coming over to work in its financial district, in its high rises. The Tenderloin was a different experience.
I thought of the show on Sunday as I walked the streets of the Tenderloin. This neighborhood has the city's greatest concentration of homelessness and drug users. Massage parlors sit side by side with faith-based food bank, as do Liquor stores and porn stores. It reminded me of Hamsterdam, yet this is not a social experiment in reducing violence. This is ghettoization. This is the developer's program of driving the homeless out of neighborhoods, and of course, increasing the numbers of homeless people by their policies too.
I sat down in a Vietnamese coffee shop with my 3 and 6 year-olds. They were busy with a packet of Hello Kitty cookies and I sipped on a condensed-milk coffee. I could see three guys starting to yell at each other in the doorway. I tried to distract the girls and tried to laugh off the situation, while preparing for the worst: it spilling over onto our table.
The big guy, who was up against the smaller two guys pulled a huge knife out, while the other two grabbed chair, like lion tamers, and began pushing him out onto the sidewalk. At this point the yelling and profanity exploded and I could see the knife whipping back and forth.
I never felt the girls were in danger, but I did not want them to be having nightmares for weeks, so I played off that all these guys had had too much beer. Their backs were to the fracas and the knife was only visible by crooking my neck and looking out the window.
In the end, things de-escelated after someone called the police.
Talking to a comrade after the event she told me she's seen 3 fist fights in this neighborhood in a small number of times she's visited this part of town.
Capitalism created the Tenderloin. It is the brutal face of capitalism. The developers and politicians should be forced to live there.