From headlines to help (Kevin Frazier)
We should all have pride of ownership when it comes to our communities. A sign that you’re neglecting your duties to your neighbors is if there's a spot you’ve seen more in headlines then in person.
Where do you take a friend when they visit? Do you only go to the touristy spots— knowing that they, like so many others, are bound to enjoy the sights and smells catered to appeal to out-of-towners? Do you show them your secret spots and local haunts—hoping that the unique slice of the city you call home will enchant them as well? Perhaps most importantly, where don’t you go?
That last question stuck with me last weekend when a friend from back home in Oregon came to visit my spot in San Francisco. In particular, I wondered if it’d be a good idea to walk through the Tenderloin District to get to the Market Street corridor. I also debated whether walking down Market would be a net positive or a lasting memory that left a negative impression of San Francisco.
My buddy is no stranger to rough patches, though, having lived in less than stellar parts of Eugene and Portland. He’s the kind of guy who has never shied away from a part of town, knowing that the folks in the toughest situations have often been dealt the worst cards. He’s also the kind of guy who reads plenty of news, so he knew all the stats: a tripling of the number of deaths among homeless individuals in San Francisco, a total of 8,000 individuals experiencing homelessness, and 710 deaths from overdoses in 2020 alone.
So, with his experience and knowledge in mind, we opted to plot our path through areas where San Franciscans are dying on the streets, struggling to find any semblance of housing security, and doing their best to avoid the fatal spread of a fentanyl epidemic. Even my friend was surprised by what he saw.
The scope and scale of hurt here in San Francisco is shocking even to those who’ve seen human struggles spread in urban cores throughout the U.S. It’s as if you leave the city when you walk through these areas. Services seem unavailable. Upkeep seems impossible. And only the lowest levels of Maslow’s hierarchy seem attainable.
It was my first time back through the Tenderloin since March 8, 2020—the last time I took the BART subway to get across the Bay. The scenes caught me off guard as well. A year of being inside and reading headlines about humans hurting around the world shifted my attention away from the hurt down the street.
As we open in fits and starts, I suspect that thousands of San Franciscans and others who were fortunate enough to stay inside and turn human hurt into headlines—rather than neighbors that deserve to be seen and supported—will go through a similar shock as I did.
This shock should also be a stimulant—a motivator to take a close look at every part of your city and see the parts for which “recovery” is still a ways off. Those are the parts that cannot continue to be neglected nor avoided.
Back to normal cannot be the mentality for our urban cores. Before the pandemic, places from Portland to San Francisco saw their downtowns become the subject of headlines rather than the subject of intentional human-to-human support.
We should all have pride of ownership of our cities, downtowns, and town centers. A good sign that you’re neglecting your duties to your neighbors and community is if there's a spot you’ve seen more in headlines, then in person. Go find a way to get involved. Find a community organization that’s serving that area. Refuse to accept the existence of any place that’s off limits.
Admittedly, these are steps that I need to follow as well. At college in Eugene, I flipped pancakes every Sunday morning for neighbors in need of a big meal. It was a community that celebrated helping one another and got beyond lamenting the slow pace of larger changes. We can and must make those big changes a reality, but, for now, we simply must do better than just reading about the pain in our communities.
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Kevin Frazier started The Oregon Way between classes at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He looks forward to returning home to Oregon.