★ San Francisco’s Tenderloin “gets trendy”

SFGate:

The Tenderloin and environs have been called many things, including dangerous, dirty and unmanageable. But lately locals are rolling out an unlikely new term – trendy.

The anecdotal evidence is the number of young hipster types roaming the streets with snap brim fedoras, Chrome-brand messenger bags and fixie bikes. But the real barometer of change can be found in the storefronts.

Cult coffee shops, quirky eating places and designer cocktail bars have not only set up shop, they’re thriving. Kinani Ahmed opened Jebena, his coffee and tea place on Polk, a year ago. Doubters looked at his menu – featuring more than 60 types of loose-leaf tea – and asked him if he knew what neighborhood he was in.

I was warned. I moved into a $1600 a month apartment on the edge of “union square” and “tenderloin” but I clearly thought of it as Tenderloin. I shopped at the local grocers and the local butchers. I parked my bike on the side-walk and rode to work (5 minutes away) each morning. I went to the places that my GF didn’t want to go. I went to the dirty places, well “dirty” is not really that the food and drinks were bad. It’s that the place wasn’t clean but I still ate there anyway. I’ll eat anywhere really even if the guy next to me has shit running down his pants leg. I’ll still enjoy that burrito. I was white and that’s why I didn’t belong in the Tenderloin.

I didn’t care though. I wasn’t there because it was cheap, I was there because it was convenient and I would donate my time to local churches, give money and clothes to those who couldn’t afford it and, I admit that at one point, I was 2 weeks away from living on the streets outside of my apartment because I couldn’t find work. I almost lived that homeless life that so many people in that area live.

That’s why I’m upset. When I started AdamsBlock, the goal was to save the people who lived in the Tenderloin and were abused, killed and robbed by people who also lived there. It’s a dense area and there’s a lot of crime. I want to stop someone from being attacked. That was the goal. However, the same residents I was trying to save pleaded to me to take the camera down. The reason was that a reduction in crime meant a raise in rent prices and that more white people would move in. My efforts to save lives meant those lives would be pushed out of their homes and to areas like Bayview. It was the reality that saving the world meant there were causalities of the people you tried so hard to save.

I don’t take credit for the Tenderloin getting trendy. I think this was inevitable eventually. However, I really wish it didn’t end this way and that people weren’t dealing with trendy coffee shops and restaurants because, at some point, the residents of the Tenderloin won’t have affordable places to eat and will be forced to go elsewhere or starve. It’s sad.

What makes it worse is Nevius was forced to write a follow up blog post to this article:

When it came time to identify the young group I went out of my way not to use the term “hipster.” Instead I substituted the term “twenty-something.”

For starters, a young member of my family nails me every time I say the h-word — “What, exactly, do you think a hipster is?” she asks.

And second, I knew that it has become such a loaded term that it would send the discussion off in unexpected and unproductive directions, far from the original premise of the column.

The good news is I was right. It was a bad idea to use the word.

So, hipsters are pissed off that you called them the H word? This makes me so angry that I could scream.

You move into cheap housing, force unemployed and underpaid families out of their homes, force restaurants to close for fancier ones and make the Tenderloin yours for the fun of it because “the mission is too trendy” and you get offended when you’re called hipsters?!?! You’re idiots. Accept the fact that is what you are and deal with it. If you weren’t, you’d be actually giving back to the community like I did and, when you were too tired and too exhausted to give back anymore, you’d do what I did and move to forest hill or Sunset district. You’d do that because you would realize that you can’t save the Tenderloin and you’re better off just to leave it alone.

Oh man though, that new loose leaf tea place does sound really good!

Sigh.