Will San Francisco’s Encampment Sweeps Help Reduce Homelessness, or Is It Election Year Political Theater?

SAN FRANCISCO — “Where do you go from here?” I ask a group of homeless persons clutching their straws and belongings on one side of Willow Street as San Francisco Public Works employees in neon-green vests pressure-wash the sidewalk as part of Mayor Breed’s new directive to clear encampments.It’s Monday in the Tenderloin, the epicenter of the city’s twin homelessness and drug crises.“Usually just around the corner until we can put our stuff back,” a 40-year-old self-described fentanyl addict named Trish tells me. Another homeless woman crouched on the sidewalk next to her jokes that the city’s efforts are as futile as a game of “Whack-a-Mole.”This is at least the third time in a week that city workers or the police have come to remove tents and clear debris from Willow Street, a favorite for homeless drug addicts because it’s a narrow alley with little through traffic and is located next to a building with a soup kitchen and a harm reduction center. The week before, police and city workers cleared around 25 tents here, arrested 12 persons with outstanding warrants, and found a dead body in one of the tents.Empowered by a recent Supreme Court decision, San Francisco’s Democratic mayor, London Breed, ordered police this month to step up homeless encampment sweeps. She sent a memo to police authorizing them to issue citations for repeated violations of anti-camping ordinances, with jail time on the table. She also issued an executive order for city workers to offer bus tickets to homeless persons from out of town before offering city services like shelter.Is this all election year political theater or will clearing tents help reduce homelessness?The night before I visited Willow Street, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, Ms. Breed, and Nancy Pelosi attended a fundraiser for Vice President Harris at the Fairmont Hotel just up the hill. They raised $12 million dollars for Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign.Republicans are trying to paint Ms. Harris as a “San Francisco liberal.” Her running mate, Governor Walz, though, is the more liberal one when it comes to funding harm reduction, approving safe injection sites for Minnesota, and doling out large grants to the homeless services industrial complex.The recent policy shift in famously liberal San Francisco comes after Mr. Newsom issued an executive order three weeks ago imploring California cities and counties to follow the state’s lead to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces.” The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision in June untied the hands of cities and counties to enforce anti-camping laws even if they don’t have an adequate number of shelter beds to offer.The court’s decision, which both Mr. Newsom and Ms. Breed celebrated, is a gamechanger for west coast cities reeling from homelessness and a drug crisis that kills more than 108,000 Americans each year. Mr. Newsom made a show of helping to clear a homeless encampment under an Interstate-5 overpass last week in Los Angeles County.“I want to see results,” he told reporters witnessing the spectacle.Facing a tough reelection campaign, Ms. Breed has also shifted rightward in her approach to the homelessness and drug crises, welcoming the California National Guard to help the city crack down on drug dealing and declaring last spring, “Compassion is killing people.” “Our goal with enforcement is not to punish people; it’s to make clear that when we offer help — whether by our encampment teams in the moment or by another outreach worker making their daily rounds — that these offers are not an option. They are the option,” Ms. Breed wrote in an op-ed in the San Francisco Standard published Saturday. The problem of homelessness is seemingly as intractable as addiction. California has spent $24 billion across multiple agencies in the last five years to tackle homelessness, but the number of homeless persons increased in that same period by 20 percent. The sight of encampments under highway overpasses and tents and open air drug use on the sidewalks of the state’s celebrated metropolises are stains on Mr. Newsom’s record as governor and hamper his prospects for a 2028 or 2032 presidential run.“What we’re facing in San Francisco is the worst of progressive ideology being put into place,” a recovering fentanyl addict who was homeless on the streets of the Tenderloin, Tom Wolf, tells the Sun. “Californians are fed up.”There are more than 8,000 homeless persons in San Francisco, according to annual point-in-time data released Thursday — a slight uptick from last year. The percentage of homeless from out of town and of those who say they became homeless because of drugs or alcohol also increased in the last two years.Those who support Ms. Breed’s more aggressive approach to clearing encampments cite these figures and say that the city’s permissive drug and shoplifting laws, its plethora of harm reduction and homeless services, cheap and easy to find drugs, and its mild weather are partly to blame for attracting addicts and wandering souls to the city. “Almost all of them are struggling with substance use disorder, untreated mental illness, or both,” Mr. Wolf says. “People need to be made to feel sick and tired of being sick and tired, and doing outreach and handing them free straws and needles and a free tent and saying here’s a Hondo right over there that will sell you fentanyl for five bucks, is never going to achieve that goal. You need to do something a little tougher.” Hondo is slang for a Honduran drug dealer.“There’s a subset of people on the street that require intervention. I was one of those people,” he says, describing how he was arrested and offered treatment in lieu of incarceration six years ago. He’s been clean and sober ever since.Yet to those who view homelessness in the City by the Bay as a housing problem, Ms. Breed’s directives are cruel and misguided. “Just because the court says we can be hard and cruel doesn’t mean that we have to be hard and cruel,” the executive director of Hospitality House, Joe Wilson, whose organization operates homeless drop-in centers in the city, tells the Sun.“This is fundamentally an economic problem,” Mr. Wilson says of homelessness, though he concedes fentanyl is exacerbating it. “Unless and until housing is a public good rather than a business enterprise then we will continue to see these kinds of problems, particularly in our urban areas.” Mr. Wolf agrees that the homeless need housing, but he argues, “the waiting room can’t be the street.” He notes that more than two persons died per day in San Francisco last year of an overdose, and that of these, half of all deaths occurred behind closed doors, a majority of which were in government-subsidized SROs or supportive housing. Mr. Wolf says the state needs to abandon its “housing first” model and also to start funding recovery-based programs and treatment on demand. These issues — and a repeal of Prop 47, which made shoplifting under $950 a misdemeanor — are on the ballot in November. Homeless sweeps in other parts of the city may be working to improve the quality of life of neighborhood residents, but on Willow Street, they do seem futile — at least for now. No one I spoke to said they’d been cited or offered shelter or treatment. I walk around the corner to Polk Street and see the shopping carts and tarps have simply moved there until the green vests leave. Bodies are hunched over the curb and spilling into the bike lane. Butane torch lighters turning on and off are the soundtrack of despair.“We’re not all bad people,” a 29-year-old homeless woman with a blond bun and sores on her chin, Jessica Flathers, tells me. She says she uses fentanyl and meth and has been homeless and addicted on and off for 10 years. She says she’s not interested in treatment, but she seems tired. She starts tearing up as she tells me the difficulties she faces on the street.“You get raped. You get beaten — all just for drugs or whatever you have on you that’s worth anything,” she says.A Hispanic man in his early 30s tells me, “I’m scared I’m going to end up like the people talking to themselves.” He says he racked up some clean time in jail but got out two weeks ago.Next to him is a baby-faced, gaunt blond man I presume is in his early 20s, who looks like he could have been the hot skater boy in my high school, though he’s got open sores all over his face, blackened fingertips, and a harshness that likely comes from the street. “I’ll only talk to you for money,” he snaps.

Will San Francisco’s Encampment Sweeps Help Reduce Homelessness, or Is It Election Year Political Theater?

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