On March 3, 1980, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic opened its doors in a one-room office in Glide Church. We paid $70 in monthly rent, which left us with $50 each month to cover the rest of our expenses. Our main funder was the Associated Students of Hastings Law School, which was ironic since our plan to open a legal clinic in the Tenderloin was prompted by Hastings Administration refusal to provide a public interest clinic in the community. Upon my graduation in 1982, I got a $12,000 grant from the Berkeley Law Foundation to become the Clinic’s Executive Director, first full-time staff, and first attorney. Many of the students who founded THC have spent their legal careers working for social justice, and one remains on our Board. None of us imagined that THC would one day have 240 full-time staff, a $24 million annual budget, and would publish an online daily called Beyond Chron.

Leroy Looper’s Encouragement

I still remember the day in the fall of 1979 when I and a couple others went to the Cadillac Hotel to meet with the man we were told would let us know whether the community wanted law students to open a legal clinic in the community. I have not forgotten my first encounter with Leroy Looper because had he not been supportive of our plans the Tenderloin Housing Clinic would never have existed and I would have had a very different life.

Looper could not have been more enthusiastic about what we hoped to do for Tenderloin residents. We left our meeting excited to get the project going, having overcome concerns that as outsiders we had no right to simply set up shop in a low-income neighborhood.

I later learned that Looper inspired many projects, never feeling threatened over new groups and potential leaders coming on to his turf. I have never forgotten that nothing THC has accomplished could have occurred without Looper’s initial support, and have remained close with Leroy and his wife Kathy for the past thirty years.

THC’s Founders

Most of those starting THC were first year students at Hastings. The exception was second-year student David Borgen, who knew how to get student funds and initially promoted the idea of students opening a legal clinic after the Administration broke its promise to do so. Borgen is a longtime workers rights advocate who is a partner in the Oakland law firm of Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen and Dadarian.

Another founder, Guy Campisano, is a longtime Bay Area criminal defense attorney who, when THC was looking to hire an attorney in 1987, said he knew just the guy. Guy’s wife, Karen Gruneisen, who has long headed the Board at St.Anthony’s Foundation, went to law school with Steve Collier, and Guy insisted that Steve would be a “heckuva litigator.” Guy’s assessment proved correct, and Collier has been litigating for tenants at THC ever since.

Other founders include Chris Tiedemann, who litigates land use cases at the state Attorney General’s Office, and serves on the THC Board.

1980: Tenderloin Turning Point

Soon after THC’s opening we learned that three high-rise luxury hotels were planned for the border of the neighborhood. This prompted the biggest organizing campaign in the Tenderloin’s history, with one of the major goals to convince the public that the Tenderloin was in fact a “neighborhood” rather than simply an amalgam of buildings between Union Square and Civic Center.

The campaign by the Luxury Hotel Task Force brought an historic victory, and my involvement gave me a deep connection to the neighborhood and its residents that likely would not have been duplicated if THC had opened its doors after 1985. Not only did our community force the developers to provide affordable housing (the Dalt, Ritz, William Penn, and Hamlin are now all in nonprofit hands), but the campaign spurred a rezoning effort that was signed into law by Mayor Feinstein in 1985.

Prior to the new zoning, the Tenderloin had the same zoning as downtown, and was effectively a downtown commercial high-rise district. The new law barred commercial development above the second floor, and limited much of the district’s heights to eighty feet, with no more than 130 feet allowed anywhere.

Despite winning a land use victory that would come to set a national precedent for developer mitigations, our Tenderloin victory remained little known outside those involved. To this day I believe my account of the campaign in The Activist’s Handbook stands alone, even while less significant grassroots victories in other places become subjects of entire books.

As a result, many do not understand why the Tenderloin avoided the gentrification impacting most San Francisco neighborhoods. It was because of smart strategies and organizing, not luck or circumstance.

Developing City Homeless Programs

The chief reason for THC’s growth over the years has been our development of programs that the city wanted to fund, but that no other group wanted to operate.

When I approached the Agnos Administration in 1988 about replacing the hotline hotel system with a “Modified Payments Program” that would get welfare and SSI recipients permanent housing at below market rents, they said “Great idea. But you need to operate it, not us.” We were only a law office at the time, but wanted to get permanent residents back in SRO’s and agreed to run the program, which fully replaced the hotline by the end of 1989.

When the dot com boom raised rents above what welfare recipients could afford, I urged the city to start a hotel leasing program so that low-income tenants could avoid homelessness. We did not want to become landlords, and had no intention of leasing hotels. But after months passed and the city could not get any nonprofit interested in leasing, we agreed to do it.

So unlike the vast majority of nonprofit groups, THC expanded serendipitously, without any 5-year plan or vision document. We do virtually no fundraising because we develop programs that the city wants to fund.

Core Mission Unchanged

When I sought funds from the Berkeley Law Foundation in 1981, I said our mission was to improve living conditions for Tenderloin residents, prevent the loss of affordable housing through conversion or demolition, and to enhance the quality of life for neighborhood residents. This remains our mission today, and underlies all of our programs and advocacy.

Many great people have passed through the neighborhood over the years, and even those who work here only briefly feel a sense of community hard to find elsewhere. I still believe that what we now know by the historically correct name of the Uptown Tenderloin is on route to becoming the only desirable central city community in the United States that poor and working people will always be able to afford to live.

Randy Shaw is Director of Tenderloin Housing Clinic and Editor of Beyond Chron. THC will host a public event at the Cadillac Hotel in September to mark this 30-year milestone, and readers can learn more of THC’s history here.