Tenderloin rallies at City Hall to fight program and service cuts

Nearly 200 Tenderloin residents, workers, and allies rallied on the steps of City Hall on Wednesday to demand that legislators find a way to restore funding slated to be cut from programs and services in the neighborhood. 

“We’re here today because the Tenderloin is facing proposed budget cuts that would hurt real people,” said Curtis Bradford, community organizing manager for the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, a local housing provider. “We stand together, Tenderloin. Different languages, different backgrounds, different stories, but we have one shared message: No cuts to Tenderloin programs!”  

Organizers have been gearing up for weeks to advocate for their community’s needs, including by combing through various city documents to decipher how the Tenderloin would be affected. The full picture didn’t become clear until Mayor Daniel Lurie released his official proposal to balance the budget earlier this month, designed to close a projected two-year deficit of $642 million. That plan restored some of the anticipated cuts but left many in place.

According to the People’s Budget Coalition, the reductions expected to affect the Tenderloin now add up to about $3.8 million, down from an estimated $6.8 million. Over the next few weeks, members of the Board of Supervisors will have to negotiate to keep or win back funding for the programs that are most essential to their constituents. 

So community members were at City Hall to make clear to legislators what is at stake. The event was organized by GLIDE, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, the Tenderloin People’s Congress, the Iman Network, the Southeast Asian Development Center, and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood’s office.

A series of speakers enumerated the most painful proposed cuts, including those that would completely wipe out certain programs. The Michael Baxter Clinic, which serves vulnerable young people in the Tenderloin, would close. City funding for the popular outdoor event series Sunday Streets would be eliminated. And a program at the Southeast Asian Development Center that helps immigrants and refugees find housing, secure jobs, and access healthcare would end.

“We do the services that the city cannot do alone,” said Thao Bui, the organization’s service navigation lead. “This is a total elimination of the most essential lifeline our community has. If these cuts go through, our community members will lose everything they rely on overnight. The city is turning its back on the Tenderloin community, especially the Vietnamese community.”

Then Bui addressed the mayor, whose office was directly above the site of the rally, with a reference to the chipper line that has become his social media catchphrase. 

“Mayor Lurie: ‘Let’s go, San Francisco,’ but please don’t leave us behind!” 

Several people shared stories about the ways neighborhood programs, and the organizations that ran them, had helped them, shaped their lives, and given them a sense of belonging. 

Shavonne Allen, lead artist with the performance ensemble Skywatchers, recalled her battle with addiction years ago, after being overprescribed opiates following medical trauma. When she got sober in 2019, she said, she moved into a single-room occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin, alone.

“Or, I thought I was alone,” she corrected herself. “But you’re never alone in the Tenderloin.”

She met people through her participation in programs at organizations like GLIDE, Code Tenderloin, the Healing WELL, and Skywatchers. 

“I am clear that I am here because they were there,” she said. 

Common narratives about the Tenderloin focus on drug use and crime, “but we don’t always talk about the young people growing up with it,” said Bushra Hussain, speaking on behalf of Arab and Muslim youth and an organization whose programs she attended called the Iman Network. 

“These programs help young people stay connected to positive influences. … They remind us that our voices matter and that our dreams are worth pursuing,” Hussain said. “Today I ask you to look beyond the budget numbers and see the faces of the people behind them.”

The Iman Network itself is not facing cuts — but that’s because it wasn’t slated to receive money in the first place. It got a one-time investment from the city years ago and has stretched those dollars to survive. Dr. Iman Farajallah, the founder, hopes the city will fund them again in the future. At the mic, staff and clients rallied in solidarity with nonprofits whose futures are at risk under the current plan, and urged lawmakers to support programs for Arab and Muslim residents.

“Every day we hear about the shooting of a Muslim or an Arab youth or one of them falling into drugs, and there are no services being provided respecting their culture or their religion or their background,” Farajallah said.

“We are saying today, enough is enough!” she said.

Gabbie Listana, who represents supervisorial District 6 on San Francisco’s Youth Commission, grew up in the Tenderloin and is now on her way to study at Harvard University. 

“I am standing here today because someone invested in me, because someone invested in these programs with the belief that the immigrant families that live in the Tenderloin deserve believing in,” Listana said. “And they still do.”

After the rally, a contingent of attendees made their way inside City Hall to speak directly with supervisors and their staff about the cuts. 

A small group of them had an appointment with District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin. Mahmood does not sit on the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee, which will hold most of the deliberations about the budget. But he has repeatedly expressed support for the residents and organizations raising the alarm about the proposed cuts. He was also involved with arranging the rally.

In the meeting, Mahmood revealed that he had pushed the mayor’s office to provide some funding to the clinics facing closure, including the Michael Baxter youth clinic. If the money were approved, it should stave off closure for at least a few months, he said.

But when the supervisor asked them to lay out which cuts they thought were the most important to restore, a few repeatedly steered the conversation toward their broader frustrations with the city, its politicians, and bureaucracy.

Even the way the budgeting process works is unfair, said one attendee.

“The community is not involved until after the cuts are made,” said Justice Johns, a resident and member of a group called People of Peace. The mayor suggests what should be sliced before there is an opportunity for community input, forcing people to intervene if they want to prevent that outcome.

Many in the Tenderloin say that City Hall’s budgeting process is opaque, which puts them at a disadvantage to guard against its fallout. In recent weeks, organizers had to make informed guesses about what was on the chopping block by poring over individual departments’ budgets and piecing that information together with city memos and news reports. They used those hard-won insights to begin outreach to officials ahead of the mayor’s official unveiling of the budget, because Lurie’s deadline for doing so was June 1 — and that would have left them only about a month to make their case to their elected representatives and potentially limit the damage.

While the small group talked with Mahmood, a different cohort of Tenderloin advocates made unscheduled visits to supervisors representing other districts. For the most part, they spoke with the supervisors’ staff members. Their message: If you let cuts to the Tenderloin go through, the problems will show up on your doorstep. And if you pare back spending on community-based services that prevent crises from escalating, you’ll spend more in the long run when those people need much more expensive interventions. 

David Elliott Lewis, who chairs a resident group called the Tenderloin People’s Congress, summed up the proposed cuts as “penny-wise and ton-foolish.”

In order to restore funds, supervisors must propose a different place to take them from. Lewis said the first option is to tap into the city’s reserves. Lewis also pointed to a proposed 14% salary hike for police officers in the mayor’s budget. 

“I don’t begrudge the police their salaries, but when other critical services are being cut, that just seems unjust,” he said.

“We don’t really have a lot of leverage,” Lewis told me after the meetings, “but we have hope, and we have aspiration, and we have perseverance, and community, and we’re gonna keep on trying.”