Lawsuit: Residents in SF’s Tenderloin District Demand City Address Rampant Drug Use, Violence, and Homelessness

Residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district have taken legal action to remedy the extremely troubling problems facing their neighborhood.

On Thursday, two hotels and a group of neighbors sued the city, claiming officials were using the area as a containment zone for illegal drug use, violence, and homelessness, the Associated Press (AP) reported Thursday.

The problems have caused neighbors to fear venturing outside their homes. Businesses in the area find it difficult to hire workers.

It is important to note that in 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a “state of emergency” in the crime-ridden Tenderloin district, Breitbart News reported at the time:

Mayor Breed was among the first mayors in the U.S. to commit to “defund the police” in 2020 in response to Black Lives Matter protests, pledging to redistribute $120 million from the law enforcement budget to organizations in the black community.

But the city was hit by a crime wave, particularly in the retail sector. Shoplifting, rarely prosecuted since the passage of Proposition 47 in 2014, making theft of less than $950 a misdemeanor, prompted several large retail chains to leave the city. And in the week before November, mass looting of high-end stores in Union Square prompted nationwide shock and outrage.

RELATED: Brazen Shoplifting Activity in San Fran Continues…

Lyanne Melendez

Per the AP article, the complaint said the plaintiffs in the case do not want monetary damages. What they do want is illegal drug use, violence, and tent encampments to be swept off the sidewalks.

An attorney in the case, Matt Davis, said:

They demand an end to the rampant illegal street vending, and from the squalor and misery that exists throughout their neighborhood because the city has decided that people in the throes of addiction can live and die on the Tenderloin’s streets.

Two of the anonymous plaintiffs in the case are a mother with two children who cannot afford to move and who never lets her children outside unsupervised, and an elderly woman who has difficulty navigating the sidewalk because she uses a walker and must move around excrement, syringes, vomit, and trash.

The AP article noted that Breed is preparing for a reelection contest in November.

As Breitbart News reported on August 3, 2022:

Democrats in the California State Legislature passed a bill Tuesday to allow the expansion of “safe” drug use sites in major cities, despite the well-publicized failure of one such site in San Francisco’s notorious Tenderloin district in recent months.

San Francisco voters passed ballot measures in March that expanded law enforcement powers, required drug screening for people on welfare, and cut back on restrictions regarding commercial real estate development, according to Breitbart News.