At a rally last August on the steps of a federal courthouse, Mayor London Breed decried that her hands were tied when it came to clearing out homeless encampments. Many joined her that day in calling for more aggressive sweeps of the city’s unhoused. Perhaps, in the abstract, such sweeps seemed like a reasonable solution; after all, everyone agrees that the streets aren’t a healthy place for anyone to sleep.
Last week, however, as the public witnessed the rollout of Breed and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new policies to push those experiencing homelessness out of view, many didn’t like what they saw.
“Inhumane” was the word used by one small-business owner, Adam Mesnick, who has been a vocal advocate of sweeps, describing one scene captured on video by the San Francisco Standard. The clip shows a man having his tent pulled from his hands while a police officer tells him that the mayor and governor said homeless encampments are “no more.” The man, visibly in distress, seems to be trying to retrieve belongings that had been thrown like trash into the back of a Department of Public Works truck. Another story, in the San Francisco Chronicle, depicts a man placed in handcuffs while his belongings, including tent, blankets and clothing, are tossed in the back of a truck.
Last year, Newsom and Breed filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court, asking for more latitude and a freer hand in using police to clear tent encampments. Upon the court’s Grants Pass ruling in late June, the governor and mayor praised the majority opinion and dismissed the minority dissent authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In her opinion, Sotomayor wrote: “The Eighth Amendment prohibits punishing homelessness by criminalizing sleeping outside when an individual has nowhere else to go. It is cruel and unusual.”
Cruel. Yes, what we have seen over the lastweek is undeniably cruel.
In back-to-back announcements last month, Newsom and Breed issued executive orders that unleashed police to cite and arrest people sleeping on city sidewalks. Intensive efforts to sweep away tents and other visible signs of homelessness (including blankets, pillows and sleeping bags) began July 30 and have continued since. Advocates in the Haight, NoPa, the Tenderloin and the Mission have witnessed scenes of homeless individuals having everything from IDs to medication seized during sweeps.
One woman described to me having her wallet — containing her ID,debit and EBT cards — pulled from her hand as a police officer proceeded to “taunt” her with possible arrest. Why? Because she declined to accept a bed at a crowded shelter where she would be separated from her husband. A day later, police officers arrived at the site where the couple had relocated a few blocks away and issued a citation for illegal lodging. Now, the couple have a court date to address a “crime” that is punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
Even casual observers can see how counterproductive this approach is to addressing homelessness. The sweeps are traumatic by design; they deprive people of basic means to stay warm and dry in San Francisco’s foggy weather. Identification cards and those for food and medical benefits have to be replaced. In the case of the couple mentioned above, they lost the very paperwork that is required for them to access housing; that too ended up in the trash.
What would have been a better approach? Turns out, this couple are already on the path to housing and qualified as “priority status.” They are in a queue, waiting their turn to be processed into one of the 794 permanent supportive housing units that are currently vacant, as counted by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Some units are offline awaiting repairs or havepending referrals, but morethan 160 are available right now. If the city-run system were working, this couple would have already been housed.
The city is short several thousands of beds to provide emergency shelter or transitional housing to the 4,300-plus people counted as homeless in the latest point-in-time survey. In fact, with an inadequate amount of affordable housing, the city is overtaxed with an inflow of the unhoused. The point-in-time count showed a double-digit increase in people living in RVs, vans and other vehicles. It also showed increases in the number of families with minor-age children, as a result of “job loss for families living in San Francisco, and (migrant) families in the city who arrive without access to housing.”
According to Compass Family Services, the waiting list for emergency shelter beds for families with school-age or younger children has exploded to 511 from 87 in June 2023, in part because eligibility requirements expanded in December.
One of the fastest-growing categories of unhoused people, according to the state’s Homeless Data Integration System, is seniors on fixed income whose Social Security doesn’t cover rent and who are homeless for the first time.
Sweeps won’t help the majority of these people. And they certainly won’t end homelessness. All they will do is spread misery and brutality.
The only way out of this cycle is the most obvious solution: providing the homeless with shelter and housing. The city must immediately move people into the 794 vacant permanent supportive housing units. It must also fund treatment beds on demand so there is no longer a wait to access residential treatment for people suffering from mental health and addiction disorders.
In the long term, we must speed the time it takes to transition people from emergency shelter into permanent supportive housing, reducing stays among people who’ve spent years in shelters to a few months. That means passing bonds to create affordable housing.
Only those investments — and not the inhumane sweeps of homeless people and seizure of their possessions — will begin to improve the situation on our streets.
Christin Evans is a San Francisco resident and owner of Booksmith and the Alembic, a bookstore and bar in the Haight. She serves as vice chair on the city’s newly formed Homeless Oversight Commission.
