CHILDREN WHO MARCH in flocks by the dozen like scenes from Madeline to their schools and daycare centers through the Tenderloin’s urine soaked, excrement-laced, trash-strewn sidewalks develop a necessary toughness that comes with growing up in one of the city’s most neglected collection of blocks.
Now San Francisco’s Tenderloin District will soon get its first local program aimed at preventing young people from getting involved in the violence and illicit drug activity the neighborhood is notorious for.
The program was announced by District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood and Mayor Daniel Lurie at press conference at a community center at Turk and Mason streets on Wednesday. It will feature a range of services provided in partnership with the SoMA-based violence prevention nonprofit organization United Playaz.
The Tenderloin-based initiative will be run at a location on Ellis Street as a pilot to determine its effectiveness and assess what it needs to scale up. It will serve an initial group of up to 20 young people, according to Mahmood, who has championed the project.
Its creation comes less than a month after Mahmood introduced a resolution to the Board of Supervisors calling for such support, noting that 57 teenagers aged 13-17 had been arrested in the city since 2023 for allegedly selling drugs, with many of those arrests coming out of the Tenderloin.
His resolution pointed to the success of other similar services in the Mission District, Bayview-Hunters Point and Visitacion Valley.
The one-year pilot was funded by a $200,000 donation from the crypto platform builder Chris Larsen, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jeremy Liew, and Michael Seibel, a partner in the startup funder Y Combinator, and other contributors, and Mahmood said he plans to seek further funding during the budget cycle next year.
Mahmood said the trial period will assess which services are most successful and that the ultimate size of the program would depend on the results of the pilot, which will help determine the needed staff and budget to keep it running long-term.
The pilot period will employ four part-time staff members and will serve young people between the ages of 12-24, who are considered by the city as transitional-aged youths.
Its courses and support will be designed by local young people. It will feature after-school activities and space to gather, individualized support services, and outreach designed to help at-risk youth make good choices, which are called “empathy and perspective-building programs.”
United Playaz operates such mentorships and will share its expertise with the Tenderloin initiative. Counselors and coaches have lived experience and use trauma-informed teaching methods, and many have been incarcerated.
While open-air drug markets and the highest per capita rates of violent crime in the city have long plagued the neighborhood, locals who have lived and grown up in the Tenderloin continually highlight another side of the one of the city’s historic arts and performance districts, one that is the home to more than 3,500 young people, more than any other district in San Francisco.
But the neighborhood lacks public open space and has never had a program dedicated to youth violence prevention that featured mentoring, coaching and other life services provided by people with lived experience in the area, according to Mahmood and Tenderloin Community Benefit District executive director Kate Robinson, who also spoke at the press conference.
Mahmood told the assembled press that he often repeats the number of young people who call the Tenderloin home, but that “it still feels like a part of our community is invisible in the conversations about this neighborhood. Because if we don’t repeat it, we don’t keep seeing them, then nothing will change for those 35-hundred young people, and they’ll continue to face the same daily realities: unsafe streets, drug activity, overdoses, and violence.”
Mahmood cited the recent deaths of two young men in the Tenderloin, one from a shooting and another from an overdose. But he brushed off a question about making Narcan more readily accessible by placing vending machines in public spaces, as jurisdictions such as Sonoma County have done. The health-based vending machines provide a range of essential products, including Narcan, which can be used in an emergency to reverse an overdose.
It still feels like a part of our community is invisible… If we don’t repeat it, we don’t keep seeing them, then nothing will change for those 3,500 young people, and they’ll continue to face the same daily realities: unsafe streets, drug activity, overdoses, and violence.
Supervisor Bilal mahmood
He said families and children shouldn’t have to witness such overdoses, which was one of the goals of the new pilot program, which will start sometime in early 2026.
He similarly dismissed a question about increasing the street and sidewalk cleaning budget for the perpetually grimy neighborhood, saying that those conversations were constantly ongoing.
The Tenderloin Community Benefit District’s own street cleaning budget was down about $2 million from 2023 to 2024, according to its annual audit.
United Playaz founder Rudy Valintino praised those who had worked in the Tenderloin for years without support or recognition, including two men who grew up in the neighborhood and will run the pilot program, David Mark and V. Chea, who Valintino called “frontline soldiers that’s willing to put they life on the line for the kids and the people here.” /ima
“Y’all know the T.L. Ain’t nothing Tender about the Loin, yo,” United Playaz founder Rudy Valintino said.
Mark said his connections to local parents and young people will help make a meaningful impact.
“This is my neighborhood, so I know what the kids need, and they know me, they’re comfortable with me, so I feel very comfortable running it,” he said.
“And one thing about my life: my goal is to make them sure I don’t want them to be in the street no more. They can hang out with us and they won’t need to be drug dealers, you know, we can help them find jobs, find a case manager, help them with anything they need,” Mark said.
Robinson, from the Community Benefit District, said the program was badly needed and said she was grateful that the Tenderloin was getting the resources she said it had been denied for too long because of the city’s indifference.
“This neighborhood deserves so much better — the children in this neighborhood deserve so much better,” Robinson said. “This has been a long fight. This has been just screaming from the mountaintops of, like, ‘please care, please care about these young people,’” she said.
Robinson and others pointed to the efforts of Yossef Azim, the mayor’s assistant chief of public safety, in making clear the need for more support services for youth in the Tenderloin.
“We need to do better for the people who live here in these buildings to create opportunities where they don’t exist. And we are finally doing that. This is really a huge moment,” Robinson said.