A San Francisco city official has been forced to resign after offering a 'Doom Loop Walking Tour' to show the city’s seedier side.
The canceled tour and the resignation have kicked off a firestorm of controversy from the mayor's office to the streets of the tenderloin.
For $30, the commissioner for the Office of Committee Investment and Infrastructure, Alex Ludlum, offered customers a chance to, “get close and personal to the doom and squalor of downtown San Francisco.”
The sold out weekend tour was canceled and on Monday Ludlum resigned, saying it was all satire and, “the causes of the conditions we witness daily are not individual actors, but wide ranging policies that permit an organized, malicious element to thrive in San Francisco. The unchecked drug dealing is plainly the root of our current problems.”
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Mayor Breed was quick to respond saying, “the decision to organize and publicize the tour was a mistake and a deep error in judgment. We are working every day to address the city’s challenges and our focus remains on doing the work to move this city forward.”
Recovery advocate Tom Wolf has given dozens of free tours of the Tenderloin, downtown and the Market Street open-air drug markets to everyone from congressional reps to local officials.
“This is about raising awareness to change our cities policies, and to change the direction of San Francisco to help recover because we love San Francisco,” he said. “But charging for the tour? It sounds like a bit of a grift.”
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Del Seymour owns a company called Tenderloin Walking Tours, and says satire does not work in the current situation.
“We are in a serious epidemic, in a serious crisis and don’t need political footballs going back-and-forth across the field while Tyrone and Sheila are laying on the damn ground,” said Seymour.
The tour may have been more for local consumption because the tourists NBC Bay Area spoke to at the Powell Street cable car turnaround, were not interested.
“It seems there are happier things we could be doing with our time. We came to see the city and its light, not its darkness,” said Rick Orcutt of Nashville.
“I would have sympathy for them, but I don’t think I’d take a tour of that,” said Sachin Khedekar of Mumbai.
