The city of San Francisco has created a plan to promote tourism in the Tenderloin District, one of the grittiest most dangerous neighborhoods in the city. Advocates of the plan aim to bring in plaques, walking tours and a possible nieghborhood museum with the intention of enticing tourists off the beaten path and into the center of the historic but decaying area. The Tenderloin was just added to the National Register of Historic Places, which should help this plan come to fruition.
The Tenderloin neighborhood is located between Union Square and City Hall and has been over run with drugs, prostitution and crime for decades. A few of the most common sites in the area are ethnic restaurants, residency hotels and a large homeless population. Historically residents and tourists alike have been hesistant to walk through the rough neighborhood, even by day, but advocates of this new tourism plan hope to change the neighborhood's reputation one tour at a time. City officials agree that tourism dollars could turn the neighborhood into a more desirable area by promoting the historic significance of the neighborhood, which can be used to leverage tourism and hopefully alleviate poverty.
