Living in Tenderloin, San Francisco

More than 400 buildings in the Tenderloin's Uptown Historic District date to the rebuilding that followed the 1906 earthquake, when the neighborhood's dense grid filled with single-room-occupancy hotels built for workers who needed a bed and little else. The Black Hawk, a jazz club that once stood at Hyde and Turk Streets, hosted live recordings by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk in the late 1950s, part of a nightlife scene that made the Tenderloin a genuine entertainment district for decades. That same dense SRO stock still makes up much of the neighborhood's housing today, a few blocks from Union Square's department stores and the dome of City Hall at Civic Center. Civic Center's BART and Muni Metro station sits at the neighborhood's southern edge, giving the Tenderloin some of downtown's best rail access.

The neighborhood's safety rating sits well below the rest of downtown, and open drug use and street-level disorder are a visible, daily presence on many blocks, a serious factor to weigh, not an incidental one, for anyone considering a move here.

Rents here run lower than almost anywhere else this close to downtown, and that gap is the trade residents make for a location that puts Union Square, Civic Center, and a well-connected transit station all within a few minutes of the front door.