Homelessness:
Cleanup of homeless camp raises tensions between city departments
Sweep of San Francisco encampment raises tensions among city departments.
For the first time in years, Ricky Walker had hopes he could get off the streets. After 16 years of homelessness, he doesn’t believe most of what officials say — but when a city tent-clearance counseling team showed up April 6, they seemed to have solid offers of help.
The counselors promised Walker and about 30 others living in a camp at the northeast corner of San Francisco’s Mission District that they could stay until the end of the month, while the city tried to find shelter or housing for all of them. Then came Thursday morning. Public Works crews rolled in just after 6 a.m., and by late morning the camp at 15th Street and San Bruno Avenue had been swept away and replaced with metal barriers — angering not just the tent dwellers, but the street counselors who had promised them they’d be left alone.
The sweep apparently violated the agreement the city’s homeless department has with Public Works to cooper-
“I thought we could have an open dialogue, but now I’m not sure what those outreach guys can do for me.” Ricky Walker, homeless for 16 years
ate on handling tent camps, and though nobody in either department wants to publicly point fingers, tensions are hot.
“This really pissed people off, and totally disrupted what the tent encampment team was trying to do,” said one city homelessness official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “For most purposes, the departments have been working together, but when someone breaks ranks like this, it’s very disruptive.”
Jeff Kositsky, director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, declined to comment on the sweep. He said only that he and the other department officials who deal with homeless camps “work hard to work together.”
The director of the homelessness agency’s Encampment Resolution Team, Jason Albertson, said he didn’t want to get in a fight with other departments, but offered this carefully phrased assessment: “Whenever our clients, for whatever reason, are dislocated or relocated, it makes the challenge that much more difficult.”
Public Works officials say the last thing they want to do is damage relations between counselors and street dwellers, but that the camp conditions constituted a health emergency that needed to be dealt with immediately.
For Walker, 44, the roust boils down to distrust and discouragement. After the sweep, he and his friends did what most campers do when they have to move — they just set up a new tent city about a block away, on Vermont Street. Their arrival swelled an already sizable camp to more than 50 people.
The encampment team counselors “were pretty upset when those DPW trucks showed up,” Walker said. “They had an agreement with us that we didn’t have to leave until April 27. Instead, that sweep was miserable Thursday morning, in the rain, no warning.”
Albertson said his team is still working with the moved campers, with the aim of clearing them off the street — now Vermont — on April 27 into housing or shelter. But now Walker says he is more wary.
“I thought we could have an open dialogue, but now I’m not sure what those outreach guys can do for me,” he said.
Public Works spokeswoman Rachel Gordon said the Thursday operation was not planned as a sweep. But she said an intensive cleanup was necessary because “this encampment wasn’t just on the sidewalk. It had spilled over into the traffic lane and become a real public safety hazard.
“We did not go to clear it,” she said. “Our crews told them (the campers) we just needed to come out and clean it. There was a lot of trash that was disposed of.”
Gordon said Kositsky’s department was notified in advance of the cleaning. Officials there say that’s true, but that Public Works didn’t make clear the extent of the operation.
“We look at the job of addressing tent camps as a partnership with the homeless outreach team,” Gordon said. “We don’t want to disrupt what they are doing. We’re all working to the same goal of getting the homeless off the streets and into a safer situation.”
Kelley Cutler, outreach counselor for the Coalition on Homelessness advocacy group, called Thursday’s clean-out “off the hook.”
“This was like DPW going rogue, and everyone was ticked,” said Cutler, who has been counseling those who were moved. “For them to come in and do that was just cruel and pointless. There’s nowhere for people to go. It just undermines the encampment team’s work in general.”
Meanwhile, the manager of the rug shop across the street from the newly enlarged camp on Vermont said he is deeply unhappy. The site is on the radar of city crews, but Kositsky’s agency has no immediate plans to work with anyone other than those who just migrated there.
“That camp has been a giant problem for me, I’ve been complaining to City Hall for weeks, and now it’s worse,” Farid Yadegar said. “I have to wash feces, used needles and pee off my property. Seven times in the past year they stole my recycle bin, and they bother my customers.
“I’ve just about had it.”