Lee pitches in as team cleans Tenderloin’s dirty sidewalks
Many San Franciscans don’t understand why the city we adore is so dirty these days, so full of tent camps and so rife with open-air injection drug use and the needles left behind.
They also aren’t clear what Mayor Ed Lee — the man paid $326,527 a year to run San Francisco — is doing about all of that.
I tagged along with him on a recent morning to get some answers. We walked the sidewalks of the Tenderloin, me wielding a reporter’s notebook and pen, the mayor a metal grabber and plastic bag. I was there to get the dirt. He was there to clean it.
Every few weeks, Lee dons a neon yellow vest and joins his Fix-It Team. Created in May 2016, the team addresses quality-of-life issues that irritate city residents in 25 different neighborhoods. Overflowing trash cans? Dirty sidewalks? Unbearable smells? The Fix-It Team is on the case.
“We care about it, that’s why we’re out here,” Lee said. “People want things fixed. Things people care about are getting done.”
Repeatedly hunching over to reach under parked cars with his grabber, Lee looked like a fisherman pulling up a string of unsavory catches: candy wrappers, a toilet paper roll, a miniature bottle of alcohol — empty, of course. And cigarette butts, lots of cigarette butts.
So why is this incredibly wealthy city that’s so gorgeous from afar so filthy up close?
“People. Habits,” Lee said. “We need basic
education. I’ve seen trash cans right next to Muni stops and yet the entire bus stop is full of eaten food, trash, containers. And the trash can is empty.”
He said people simply need to show more respect for one another. True, but clearly the dirty streets are also linked to the city’s more complicated problems, which go far deeper than just bad manners.
A one-night count in January found 7,499 homeless people living in San Francisco, a number that never budges much despite increasingly large pots of money directed at it. (Currently, the city spends $305 million a year on homelessness, eviction prevention and supportive housing.)
Also disturbing are the injection drug users who shoot up in broad daylight, many in view of Lee’s City Hall office.
I get complaints nearly every day from San Franciscans who are irate when these issues turn up on their front doorsteps and say they get nowhere when they gripe to the mayor’s office, their supervisor’s office or the police.
Jeff Kilmer, the recently retired dean of students for UCSF’s nursing school, owns a Mid-Market condo and said he’s often offered bags of white powder in the middle of the day and regularly sees “people with needles in their necks” within view of police. The stench of urine and feces can be overwhelming.
“My heart goes out to them, but I don’t think it’s right that this should be normalized,” he said. “Contrary to what Mayor Ed Lee states publicly, what I see is that the problem is getting worse.”
Barbara Alessi, owner of Sutter Station Tavern, a bar on Market Street, said that every morning, she has to clean feces, needles and garbage from the bar’s entryway. She said homeless people regularly upturn full garbage cans to use them as barricades, behind which they inject drugs. They drop their pants and defecate right in front of bar patrons.
She calls 311 and the police all the time. She emails the mayor. Nothing changes.
“I pay a lot of money, tremendous amounts, for rent, and I’m losing business,” she said. “It’s awful. It’s a disgrace.”
Yes, the city is compassionate. Yes, housing in this city costs a fortune and there isn’t enough of it. Yes, people need to relieve themselves somewhere, and it’s going to be the sidewalk if they have no homes or accessible public bathrooms. Yes, mental illness and substance abuse are not easy to treat.
Yes, homelessness and injection drug use are national crises, and we’re getting little help from the state or federal government. Yes, other cities are doing even worse at managing these problems.
But still, would you be happy with those answers if you were Alessi?
As for the mayor, he does seem to grasp the severity of these issues and he does seem to care. But never one for eloquence or grand visions, the longtime bureaucrat is not very good at explaining his mission or ensuring San Franciscans that he understands their frustration. You get the feeling he much prefers picking up cigarette butts to orchestrating big plans.
His administration can point to many efforts to ease these quality-of-life problems. He has opened Pit Stop toilets, the staffed public bathrooms in eight neighborhoods. He has placed 17 syringe disposal kiosks around the city. He upped money for street cleaning by 12 percent.
His 16-month-old Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has cleared 21 tent encampments and just five have sprung back up, said Jeff Kositsky, the department’s director. He said 787 people lived in the camps, and 526 accepted offers of shelter beds, Navigation Center slots or other help.
“This problem was 40 years in the making,” Kositsky said. “It’s going to take a couple of years before we see really significant progress that’s visible.”
Lee has directed Kositsky’s department to get 1,000 homeless people off the streets during the winter months. They’ll do this in part by pushing to open three new Navigation Centers. Lee opened a Navigation Center at San Francisco General Hospital for mentally ill people and is opening 40 more psych beds at St. Mary’s Hospital.
But increased law enforcement has not been on the table. “If you criminalize them, that’s not going to help,” the mayor said.
During the cleanup, Anthony McBride, a maintenance man in Mid-Market, shouted at the mayor, who was picking up numerous cigarette butts, as he walked past.
“You gotta pick up something bigger than that, man!” McBride said, motioning toward the sidewalk dotted with feces. “Ain’t no bathrooms down here!”
The mayor’s staff said it would send a steam cleaner out shortly and pointed out that there’s a Pit Stop toilet around the corner. The mayor kept walking, grabbing more cigarette butts.
A woman wearing a blue knit hat called out, “Thank you, Ed Lee! You get those cigarette butts!”
“I’m good at it!” he answered. “That’s what I’m good at!”
During his first four-year term, Lee focused almost entirely on improving the city’s economy and was remarkably successful, some would say too successful considering the sky-high cost of living. He said his second term would center on tackling homelessness and other concerns of the street. He’s got two years left to fulfill that promise.
“When the end comes and that’s it, I’m going to feel OK — that I did everything I could to help the city,” he said.