> You simply can't walk down the Mission or anywhere near the Tenderloin and not see open drug use, drug dealing, homelessness and crime.
The Tenderloin was like that in the 1990s. Same with SOMA, the Lower Haight, 6th and Market, and other parts of the city as well but those were places I frequented often enough to have seen it myself.
I lived in SOMA in the summer of '94, and it was pretty clean. The Tenderloin was bad, and the Lower Haight wasn't great, but neither of those places had tent cities and human poop.
I worked in central SOMA from 1995-2002. In the 90s, the most prominent neighborhood fixture was the homeless shelter at 6th and Bryant, and there most certainly were homeless around there and human poop in the alleys along 6th, it was notoriously stanky. The northeast end of SOMA wasn't as ripe, though.
Things changed after the first DotCom boom and the advent of Pac Bell Park.
The Tenderloin was like that in the 1990s. Same with SOMA, the Lower Haight, 6th and Market, and other parts of the city as well but those were places I frequented often enough to have seen it myself.