San Francisco Mayor London Breeds December emergency declaration in the Tenderloin has led to a slew of initiatives to tackle drug use, homelessness and other neighborhood concerns. Among them is a weekly report series that includes summaries of progress made on big initiatives, along with data on conditions on specific blocks in the neighborhood.

While the initiative has received support from many advocates in the community, they expressed doubts that the metrics currently being collected could comprehensively track neighborhood conditions and the initiatives impact.

The reports cover a lot of quantitative ground, tracking the number of overdose deaths, shelter referrals and 911 calls made from the neighborhood, among many other metrics. They also include a section on priority locations, for which city workers visit several neighborhood blocks at least five mornings per week and collect data on that block over the span of two hours.

That data includes the number of tents, instances of drug use and of problem behaviors a term for behaviors associated with poverty, mental illness and drug use, such as no attempt at hygiene or reacting to internal stimuli in a way that is causing public consternation.

Francis Zamora, a spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Management, said that collecting daily metrics allows the incident management team to make adjustment(s) to our plans and operations. He added that the metrics are collected in the morning so that the team can use the data to target its operations for that day.

The counts of problem behavior and drug activity are estimates based on crowd size, according to Zamora, so they arent exact. But the rules for estimation dont appear to be applied consistently, which can be problematic when trying to compare relatively small numbers. For example: In the report for the week of Jan. 3, the 300 block of Hyde Street has all of its counts of problem behaviors and drug activity rounded to the nearest five. But for the 300 block of Ellis Street in the same report, numbers do not appear to be rounded.

Additionally, the priority blocks change from week to week depending on where city workers and neighborhood residents observe a high volume of key problems. Since the priority blocks are not always consistent from week to week, in many cases, it will not be possible to use these reports to track issues over time.

Tenderloin neighborhood advocates overall expressed support for the emergency initiative and efforts to measure its progress. But they expressed concern about some of the metrics being collected, as well as those excluded from the data.

For example, Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said he appreciates the emergency initiative and the data being collected on drug overdoses, but would like to see the daily block reports zero in on drug sales instead of drug use.

The overdoses (are) obviously a big problem, but the statistics need to take into account the impact of drug dealers on a neighborhood, Shaw said. Overdoses can be counted, but the number of people whose lives are worsened because they dont feel safe walking down their block we cant measure that.

Shaw said that city workers should be attempting to count drug dealers at the block level instead of measuring things like problem behaviors and drug activity, a catch-all term for drug use and sales.

The drug user issue has been vastly overplayed. Its the drug dealers the families are upset about and feel unsafe in regard to, Shaw said. If youre not talking about stopping people from selling drugs, youre not helping the neighborhood.

Shaw said he believes that to curb drug dealing in the neighborhood, the city needs to increase law enforcement presence and even more importantly, provide more funding for Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit group that works in the Tenderloin during the daytime and whose workers mostly consist of formerly incarcerated people who interface directly with unhoused Tenderloin residents.

If we could have Urban Alchemy everywhere, we wouldnt need police as much, Shaw said. The problem is, theres not the funding for that.

Urban Alchemy received approximately $5 million from the city through the Mid-Market Foundation for the fiscal year beginning July 2021, including an additional $500,000 in the last 30 days that was unrelated to the emergency declaration, according to foundation director Steve Gibson, as well as $3 million last May from UC Hastings.

The latest draft of the emergency initiative plan lists funding and support for community-based projects as a possible solution to pursue, but does not explicitly call for more funding to Urban Alchemy.

In addition to Shaws call for more data on the number of drug dealers, Del Seymour, a longtime neighborhood advocate and founder of the workforce-training nonprofit Code Tenderloin, told The Chronicle he would like to see the report include daily counts of unhoused people by block.

The Tenderloin is a small enough place where we could recruit a monitor on every block to give us daily statistics (on the number of unhoused residents), Seymour said. We could recruit people to do that and be that interpreter. To say, this person isnt homeless; theyre out here for fresh air, and (provide) that classification.

Collecting such intimate details of neighborhood residents, Seymour said, would help city workers better track their efforts to help unhoused residents specifically.

While the weekly reports track the number of shelter referrals made to residents, Seymour said he doesnt believe this kind of data point is meaningful without a corresponding estimate of how many Tenderloin residents dont have shelter. (San Francisco hasnt completed a full point-in-time count its annual count of all unhoused people in the city since 2019, citing safety concerns because of the pandemic.)

Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: susie.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson

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Here's how San Francisco is measuring progress in the Tenderloin and why some advocates thinks it's misguided - San Francisco Chronicle