Sam McCormick and his neighbors are fed up.
For months they’ve been trying to get San Francisco City Hall to focus on the Hub, an often forgotten part of the city bordered by SoMa, the Tenderloin and the Mission where they say street conditions have deteriorated over the last year.
On a recent evening, McCormick joined six other men — residents, business owners and a nonprofit worker — on an informal monthly community patrol walk through the neighborhood, an area centered around the intersection of Market Street, Van Ness Avenue and South Van Ness Avenue.
They spent an hour rousing drug users and documented street conditions in photos they sent to the city’s 311 problem-solving system. They ambled along sidewalks littered with needles, crumpled foil and trash. They traipsed past a car with a smashed-in window, its lights blinking…