Arabic Speakers in the Tenderloin Say City Forms Still Leave Them Out. The Law's Threshold Is 6,000 People.

In a community room at the Tenderloin Family Housing apartment building at 201 Turk St., four women in a free English-as-a-second-language course were struggling to fill out library-card applications, Mission Local reported.

The women speak Arabic. The San Francisco Public Library offers Arabic-language books, DVDs and audiobooks, but the application, like many city forms, is only in English, Spanish and Chinese, the three most prevalent languages in San Francisco. Through an interpreter, the women described how even taking Muni can be a challenge: of the four languages displayed on bus stops, none is Arabic. State law requires courts and clinics or hospitals that serve Medi-Cal or Medicare patients to offer interpretation for people with limited English proficiency, but other services, such as affordable housing or food assistance, come with no such guarantee, Mission Local reported.

Soha Abdou, a resident services director at 201 Turk, one of the Tenderloin's largest family-housing complexes, estimated that nearly half of the building's 500 tenants are Arabic speakers, many with limited or little ability to understand English. Of the roughly 825,000 people living in San Francisco, about 4,000 speak Arabic, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau numbers, and just over a thousand of them have what the bureau describes as limited English proficiency. The city's Language Access Ordinance sets the threshold for mandating translation of a specific language across all city departments at 6,000 residents who speak a shared language and have limited English proficiency. Arabic — as well as Slavic languages, Korean and Haitian Creole — does not make the cut.

Abdou and Batool Alawadi, a community organizer with the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, said those census numbers feel like an undercount. Alawadi said the nonprofit alone helps an average of 1,000 monolingual clients a year and is one of many organizations working with Arabic-speaking clients. The last census happened early in the pandemic, and the next will not happen until 2030. In 2024, the city lowered the threshold from 10,000 limited-English-proficient speakers to 6,000, which resulted in Vietnamese, at 6,349, being added to the list. Lowering the threshold again so that all services would be translated into Arabic would require a legislative amendment, Mission Local reported. The city's Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, which oversees language access, says it relies on the census for the most accurate data but is open to other surveying methods, and also uses the annual American Community Survey.