I was a child, maybe nine or 10, when I saw someone shoot up in front of me for the first time.
I was walking with my father, who was born and raised in the Mission District, down Julian Avenue towards 16th Street when I noticed a middle-aged, disheveled white woman sitting on the sidewalk. She wasn’t menacing. She wasn’t vermin, the way many today would have you believe. She was simply there—her leg exposed, tied off, needle in hand. Moments later, whatever was in that syringe entered her vein.
By then, I was already familiar with stories like hers. In the late 1090s and early 2000s, I had spent countless nights in Narcotics Anonymous meetings across San Francisco and Oakland with my dad, who had decades of “clean time” under his belt. In these rooms, I had heard “using stories” from people battling addiction. That day, as we walked past the woman, my father turned to me and said: “That used to be your father.”
But if you were to believe San Francisco’s new mayor—or read the latest headline from a certain San Francisco news start-up—you’d think that addiction and housing insecurity in the Mission were the unwanted hand-me-downs from the Tenderloin.
They aren’t.
The Mission and TL have long faced these struggles, not because they are inherently troubled, but because these neighborhoods have been ignored. They are neighborhoods that have long been homes to migrant and refugee communities, yet the city has tolerated their suffering—as long as it stayed within their borders and out of wealthier areas.
I didn’t write this to say that we should accept the pain and desperation we see every day in these neighborhoods. But we must acknowledge a hard truth: this suffering has existed for a long time. The only difference now is who it affects.
For years, it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter when it was the children of immigrants growing up alongside addiction. It didn’t matter when entire families were crammed into SROs, struggling to stay afloat. It didn’t matter when generations of Black and brown San Franciscans were pushed into poverty.
But it matters now.
It matters now because the recently opened yoga studio is losing business. It matters now because gentrifiers believe the exorbitant rent they pay should shield them from the reality of struggle many in the city face daily. It matters now because the national narrative is that the city is lost.
And that’s the real admission.
When people say that the Mission has become the Tenderloin, they aren’t just describing a shift — they’re revealing something deeper. They’re admitting that suffering in the TL was always seen as acceptable, so long as it stayed there.
The Mission is the Mission. A neighborhood named after a genocidal project. A neighborhood that was home to various waves of migration and redlining — now a battleground of gentrification.
Last Saturday, I walked down Julian toward 16th with my wife and kid — the way my dad and I used to decades ago. We saw pain, yes. We saw people struggling. And every time I walk past a person who still suffers from addiction or housing insecurity, I think of my father’s words. I try to tap into the empathy I felt in that moment.
I hope others try to do the same. Because scapegoating society’s most vulnerable has never solved anything — it only deepens and prolongs the suffering.
Alexis Terrazas is an award-winning journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. From 2014 to 2024, he served as Editor-in-Chief of El Tecolote Newspaper. This piece first appeared in El Tecolote.
