[ethomson]

You did not get unlucky. The Tenderloin is (rightly) considered the worst part of San Francisco, but this spills out quickly into Union Square and Downtown. I've witnessed homeless guys beating each other with brooms in front of a nice restaurant downtown. I've witnessed the sous chef from a Union Square restaurant getting into a fistfight with a guy on the street who was trying to lift some produce that was getting loaded into his kitchen. You have to be careful not to step on needles in Yerba Buena gardens.

The only reedeming quality about the Tenderloin is that you expect it to be sketchy and disgusting. When one pays out the nose to be at a giant tech conference at Moscone, or spends hundreds of dollars a night on a hotel room in Union Square, one is very surprised how disgusting that part of the city is.