In a community room in the Tenderloin Family Housing apartment building at 201 Turk St., four women enrolled in a free ESL (English as a Second Language) course are struggling to fill out library-card applications.
The women speak Arabic. The San Francisco Public Library offers Arabic-language books, DVDs and audiobooks. But the application, like many forms used by the city, is only in English, Spanish, and Chinese, the three most prevalent languages in San Francisco.
Arabic speakers say they often confront such barriers to services.
Through an interpreter, they describe how even taking Muni can be a challenge: Of the four languages displayed on bus stops, none is Arabic.
While state law requires the courts and any clinics or hospitals that serve MediCal or Medicare patients to offer interpretation for anyone with limited English proficiency, accessing other services, like affordable housing or food assistance, comes with no such guarantee.
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 of them with limited or little ability to understand English.
Of the 825,000 or so 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 Census Bureau describes as “limited English proficiency.”
According to the city’s Language Access Ordinance, the threshold for mandating translation of a specific language across all city departments is the presence, in the city, of at least 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.
To Adbou, those census numbers feel like an undercount. Batool Alawadi, a community organizer with the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, agrees.
“About 1,000? It’s a laughable number,” said Alawadi. The nonprofit alone helps an average of 1,000 monolingual clients a year, she says, and is just one of many organizations in the city working with Arabic-speaking clients.
Until recently, Alawadi worked for the Arab Resource and Organizing Center as a social services associate, helping Arabic speakers navigate city services and immigration support, and during the last three years saw a steady stream of newcomers requesting help with translation.
In the past year, in particular, more and more Arabic-speaking families have been coming in, looking for help with immigration paperwork, Alwadi said.
The last U.S. census happened early in the pandemic and left many concerned that the city’s immigrant, low-income, and non-English speaking residents, who are typically under-counted, were even more so that year. The next census won’t happen until 2030.
Census data on ethnicity and race even make it hard to quantify how many residents are from Arabic-speaking cultures — for many years, for example, there was no option to identify separately as Middle Eastern or Arab. In 2024, the government finally added “Middle Eastern or North African” as a combined category.
The city’s Office of Community Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, which oversees language access, says it relies on the census for the most accurate data, but that it is open to other surveying methods. It also uses the annual American Community Survey to update language counts.
Lowering the threshold for all services to be translated into Arabic would require a legislative amendment — something that has happened before. In 2024, the city lowered thresholds from 10,000 limited English proficient speakers to 6,000, which resulted in Tagalog (8,180 LEP speakers) being added to the list. Earlier this year, Vietnamese (6,349) was added as well.
Struggle and support for Arab families in the Tenderloin
The low-income, densely populated Tenderloin has historically been the first stop for the city’s newcomers. Little Saigon, a corridor on Larkin Street, was born when Vietnamese immigrants flooded the area in the 1970s after the Vietnam War.
In the early 2000s, more Latino families moved in. And, in the past decade, community leaders say the Tenderloin, long home to Arab residents, has seen a new influx of immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries.
“The neighborhood gives you a feeling of back home,” Adbou said. “Everything is close by. The shops with your country’s food, mosques, and people from your country.”
A 19-year-old Tenderloin woman, who did not want to be identified for fear of immigration enforcement, came to San Francisco nine months ago from Algeria to live with her sister’s family in the neighborhood. She plans to go to San Francisco City College and eventually become a flight attendant, but first she must master English.
While she slowly works on her English proficiency in the ESL class at 201 Turk St., the woman is living with her sister, her sister’s husband and their three children in a one-bedroom apartment.
Living in close quarters is common among families in the Tenderloin, in part because finding resources to help with housing is particularly challenging for Arabic-speaking families with little English proficiency.
“I have clients with very big families — parents, three kids, four kids, and they’re renting a studio,” said Soumia Laktebi, the founder of Maram Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on translating applications for city services for the Arabic community.
Laktebi used to work for the nonprofit Bill Sorro Housing Program but was laid off in 2025 due to cuts in its funding.
Since Maram opened in July 2025, Laktebi said she has met with more than 120 clients who are monolingual Arabic speakers, helping them apply for affordable housing, food stamps and in-home medical support services. She estimated that 90% of her clients live in the Tenderloin.
“The problem is they keep facing challenges with the high rent and will keep living in [crowded] conditions,” Laktebi said. “They are not aware of affordable housing and that is because there are no flyers for affordable housing in Arabic. There are no Arabic workshops.”
Language barrier pervades school system
Navigating the school system is also complicated. Arabic is the fifth most commonly spoken language among San Francisco students, after Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese.
The district offers ESL classes for all students, regardless of the language they speak, but it is difficult for monolingual parents to be involved in their children’s education.
That’s a challenge, said Radwa Hussein, who is the Arabic-speaking family liaison at Tenderloin Community School, the neighborhood’s only public elementary school.
She said the city’s public education system is hard even for the community’s English-speaking parents to understand. Hussein works with about 50 students and their families on a regular basis, and most do not speak English.
While Hussein’s role is to help Arab families engage with school communities and access the resources the district has to offer, she often finds herself translating in novel settings: Parent-teacher conferences, student testing, even alongside teachers in classes.
“I’m not an instructional paraeducator, but I do that when teachers are having a hard time delivering the content to students,” Hussein said. “Especially for state testing when they are in third grade. It’s hard for them to read the instructions, and so most of them fail these tests.”
About 30% of the 3,000 students at nearby Redding Elementary are Arabic speakers, Anna Wayne, the principal estimates. Last school year, the school had two Arabic-speaking teachers. But those teachers are now gone, following sweeping San Francisco Unified School District budget cuts.
According to district data, there are 337 students across the district who are classified as English Learners whose first language is Arabic, and another 200 students with Arabic as their first language who are classified as Fluent English Proficient students.
Sultanah Alfieq, 45, lives in the Tenderloin and sent all six of her children to Tenderloin Community School.
Those children are now grown, Alfieq said through a translator. When they were in school, she did not know what resources were available. One of her children, with severe disabilities, could not walk, and getting to school was such an effort that Alfieq would often keep the child at home.
Had Alfieq known how to ask the district for help, she could have qualified for specialized transportation. But Hussein said that the special-education system remains notoriously difficult for non-English-speaking parents to navigate.
“Most of the families don’t get their children in special needs because they don’t know it exists,” she said. “Having your child on an IEP (Individualized Education Program) costs a lot of money for the district office, and the district office doesn’t share a lot of resources with Arabic families. I have to tell them, ‘Here’s how you ask for them.’”
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, whose district includes the Tenderloin, acknowledged the need for more Arabic translation services.
“The census, and the restrictive binary they force us in, doesn’t reflect the cities that exist today,” Mahmood said.
But, he added, Arabic speakers are far from the only ones who need support. There are other languages spoken in the Tenderloin, and many are not automatically translated.
“How we track different demographics is making many different communities feel invalidated,” Mahmood said. “There’s definitely a lot more work to do.”
