(Bloomberg) -- Work crews swept through the streets of San Francisco early Thursday, tearing down makeshift tents and clearing encampments in a forceful new push to confront the city’s homeless crisis.
A handful of people living below Highway 101 hauled away bicycles and filled wagons with their possessions as the city’s public works department moved in. A week earlier, California Governor Gavin Newsom urged a get-tough approach following a US Supreme Court ruling in June that allows cities to enforce bans on people sleeping in public areas.
Wayman Young, a police officer overseeing the sweep in San Francisco, said the court ruling paved the way for more stringent enforcement. He said he no longer has to give unhoused people a city-mandated 15-minute grace period to respond to questions and has fewer other bureaucratic hurdles to navigate.
“We’re reverting to enforcement,” he said. “Now we don’t have to offer shelter, even though we still do.”
The city, long criticized for its highly visible homeless population and rampant drug use in public areas, is acting on Mayor London Breed’s vow to mount a “very aggressive” campaign to force people off the streets. With shelter beds scarce, Breed emphasized another option for homeless people this week: leaving San Francisco. She ordered city workers to offer unhoused residents trips out of town before offering them shelter.
“While we will always lead with compassion and we have made significant expansions in housing and shelter, we cannot solve everyone’s individual housing and behavioral health needs,” Breed said in a statement.
Behind her emphasis on buying bus tickets or even airplane seats for homeless people to leave is an argument that many of the city’s 8,300 homeless people have come from elsewhere. The percentage of unhoused people in San Francisco who are from other California counties or different states has increased to 40%, up from 28% in 2019, according to data provided by the mayor’s office.
The city’s clampdown is unfolding amid a mayoral race in which homelessness has become a lightning rod for broader voter complaints about urban decay. The issue has also taken on national importance in the US presidential campaign, with Republicans blaming liberal policies for California’s large unhoused population and struggles with street crime.
The state’s homeless population has soared 20% during Newsom’s tenure to more than 180,000, the nation’s largest by far, fueled by such causes as exorbitant housing costs, drug addiction and mental illness. Against that backdrop, the Supreme Court decision has spurred a political move to the right even by Democratic stalwarts such as Newsom and Breed.
But the court ruling, which overturned an appeals court’s 2019 decision saying people had a right to sleep on public property if no other shelter was available, is also exposing deep divisions among Democrats over how to respond.
In Southern California, Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors has defied the governor’s exhortation, instead adopting what it calls a “care first” approach. The county, home to 75,000 unhoused people, said it wouldn’t threaten people with arrest for living on the streets.
Even in San Francisco, leaders are divided over the mayor’s aggressive stance. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who is running against Breed in a November mayoral election, said the crackdown is a rehash of “failed policies from the past that simply sweep our homeless problem from one neighborhood to another, without any long-term solutions.”
Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, donated to a political action committee supporting Breed’s reelection.
It’s too soon to gauge the impact of the crackdown, but some homeless people shrugged it off as just another obstacle. Earlier this year, Breed promoted two ballot measures that were approved by voters: One tied welfare payments to mandatory drug tests and the other expanded police powers.
Minutes before the cleanup team arrived under Highway 101, a 58-year-old named Juan, who didn’t give his last name, took off with nothing but a children’s tricycle and his dog Santi in tow. When asked where he was going, he pointed south toward the Mission District and said he was used to moving around the city from one neighborhood to another.
“Sometimes it’s three weeks” before he’s forced to relocate, he said. “Sometimes it’s a month.”
At a separate encampment, Khnah Nguyen said he lived in a tent because the “rent is so expensive.” He said he liked being outdoors instead of working and spending all his income on rent.
“They just want to clean up and throw you away,” he said.
At one removal site, city workers hauled mattresses and shopping carts full of household items and debris into a large truck. Lukas Illa, an organizer with San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness who was monitoring the sweep, said the city was pushing people further away from housing.
“Everyone is scattering,” Illa said, adding that people are losing touch with their social-service managers as they sought new shelter. “The city dispossesses people from their property. This property includes their mother’s ashes, their identification.”
Illa argued that the shelter the city is providing — which many choose not to accept because of mental illness, fear for their safety, rules against pets, and forced separation from partners — is a short-term solution that doesn’t provide transitional pathways to long-term stability.
San Francisco has increased shelter beds by 60% to 3,900 since 2018. Currently, 94% of them are occupied.
Norma Maya, who lives in an RV, watched as her friends’ tents were swept up by city workers. Nearby, a man was cited for illegal lodging.
“This is all because it’s an election year, that’s what it is,” Maya said. “Once the election is over, they will leave us alone.”
Breed’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment about the electoral impact, but many San Franciscans have called on the city to crack down. Mario Zuloaga, who works at a storage facility next to an encampment, said he had been filing near daily complaints about the masses of tents and garbage around his business.
“I feel sorry for these people,” he said. But Zuloaga said he’d seen violence and erratic behavior as many living in the encampment struggle with drug use. “They start to destroy, we have vandalism, stealing, electrical wiring and fires.”
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