In Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s journey from living in the streets to fighting homelessness in San Francisco, journalist Alison Owings slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism surrounding San Francisco’s Tenderloin to reveal a harrowing and life-affirming account of Del Seymour–whose addiction led him into eighteen years of homelessness, pimping and drug dealing. Once sober, he started Tenderloin Walking Tours and later Code Tenderloin, an organization teaching homeless, recovering addicts, sex workers, dealers, ex-felons and other marginalized people how to get and keep a job.

Owings traces Del’s story and those in his orbit: from his daughters, sobriety buddy and ex-girlfriend, to a police captain and a psychiatric social worker, housing activists and corporate philanthropists, and Del’s Code Tenderloin students. In the Tenderloin, in a city known for its beauty and currently infamous for its divide between haves and have-nots, Owings highlights how Del gives back to people struggling with the same daunting setbacks–including a criminal record–he once faced.

Honest and compelling, Mayor of the Tenderloin follows homelessness in one of America’s toughest neighborhoods as it was lived–in the words of someone who lived it and is now fighting to solve it.