🌊 America's Favorite Mayor

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By Max Towey

San Francisco

“I’m surprised you guys are here. You’re white.” 

That’s what our Uber driver first told us when we got in her car outside of a parking garage in downtown San Francisco. Laughing, she continued, “I was like, that must be Max!” 

We rarely pay for parking on our road trips, and the idea of Ubering from a parking garage during the daytime felt silly, but everyone – from the Hertz rental attendant to all of our Bay Area readers – told us to avoid street parking in San Francisco. Especially in the Tenderloin.

I can’t remember when I first learned about the Tenderloin. Maybe it was around 2019 when clips of its dystopian drug scene started to go viral on social media and made the storied neighborhood a national spectacle. Those clips created the Fox News caricature of San Francisco as a hellscape covered with feces, needles, and homeless hippies. 

In the Tenderloin, at least, that image was accurate.  

But that was six years ago. Is it still true? We went to find out. 

The scale of open drug use in the neighborhood – right downtown – is staggering. Staggering. We’ve traveled all over the country, and only in Philadelphia’s Kensington did we see such throngs of hunched-over bodies on every street corner. We saw feces and needles – everywhere. 

Like Kensington, the Tenderloin is a center of drug tourism. “The people on these streets aren’t from here,” Del Seymour, a local leader known as the “Mayor of the Tenderloin,” told us. He says they flock here for the cheap drugs, good weather, and fellowship of other fentanyl addicts. “You can spend $2 and get high for four hours.” 

Del knew from experience. 

Once a successful business owner, Del tried crack cocaine and was sucked into a vortex of addiction. He spent 18 years living on the streets of the Tenderloin before getting clean and devoting his life to saving it. Del showed us around the neighborhood, introducing us to locals along the way. Some were drug users; others were business owners who spend every morning clearing out the areas in front of their businesses. 

“The city won’t do it, so we have to,” one hotel owner told us. 

We asked the locals about efforts to clean up the Tenderloin. Most lamented the lack of policing (cops were present but focused on parking violations), the shortage of low-income housing, moronic City Hall inventions like curved benches and potted plants (both of which homeless drug addicts abuse), and the failure to stop the flood of drugs in their streets. But there was one note of optimism: Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s new mayor.

Upon our return, our interest was piqued even more by a shock poll in the San Francisco Chronicle. It showed that Lurie has a 73% approval rating, making him one of America’s most popular mayors. Is he saving the city? And if so, how? 

That’s the subject of today’s deep-dive. 

Editor’s Note

Many Roca readers wrote in, offering tips and advice for our trip to the Bay Area. Thank you all – it proved invaluable. We’re curious to hear from you again: Readers in SF, is the situation improving? What do you think of Lurie? We’re curious to know. Send in your thoughts here. 

And find our past five stories below if you haven’t read them yet:

• Tucker Carlson's CIA Ties

• Is the US Getting Ripped Off?

• Brigitte Macron and the Trans Theory

• What Kamala Harris and Sydney Sweeney Have in Common

• Israel’s Endgame in Syria

Thank you for reading, and we’ll be back tomorrow.
–Max and Max