Tenderloin turning into new Latino neighborhood

From today's Chronicle, "The changing face of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood can be seen at St. Boniface Catholic Church, where 500 families typically flock to the Spanish-language Mass each Sunday morning."

"The Latino presence in the parish is a reflection of the growing number of Latinos in the neighborhood, which is estimated at between 16 percent and 20 percent of Tenderloin residents, or close to 5,000 people, a jump of 80 percent from 1990 to 2000, according to census data."

"For more than a century, the gritty neighborhood has been a gateway for newly arrived immigrants in San Francisco. At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the Tenderloin's German immigrants built St. Boniface. Over the course of the 20th century, the neighborhood was an entry point for Greeks, Indians, Koreans, Filipinos and Italians."

"In the 1960s, the area's studio apartments and residential hotels also became home to thousands of older single men, who had retired from jobs on the city's waterfront and were displaced when Third Street's skid row was bulldozed for redevelopment. And the Tenderloin has long been known as a crash pad for the homeless and for people with mental illness and drug abuse problems."

"In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Southeast Asian refugees, especially from Vietnam, began moving into the neighborhood, with help from refugee resettlement agencies."

"The newest arrivals, many of them Mayan Indians from the southern Mexican state of Yucatan, would previously have gravitated toward the Mission District, with its multitude of Latino markets and Spanish-speaking community organizations. But many have been priced out, as rents in the Mission have risen. In the Tenderloin, "you pay less than in the Mission, but you get less space, and the space is in worse condition," said Brad Paul, a senior program officer with the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, who advocated for many years to improve Tenderloin housing conditions."