‘Wherever the mayor went, the cleaning happened’

Mayor London Breed arrived at Glide Memorial Church one day in August 2018 to find an alternate reality. The heart of the Tenderloin sparkled, and homelessness didn’t exist.

She was there to tour and tout the mockup of a safe injection site for drug users. The facility inside was calm, clean and sterile — just like, strangely, the typically dirty, raucous sidewalks outside. That’s because Public Works crews and police had arrived before the mayor to clear the area of homeless people and debris and install metal barricades to prevent them from entering the park across the street.

Jim CruzYoull, a Castro resident who works in tech, was passing by and thought the scene looked unusual. He took photos and videos of the total turnaround of the block and posted them on Twitter after last week’s corruption charges against longtime Public Works director Mohammed Nuru.

“Where you see the street is empty in those photos, there had been lots of people there previously,” he told me of the shiny images of Ellis Street. “I asked, ‘What’s going on?’ They said, ‘Oh, the mayor’s coming! We’re cleaning this up.’ But they weren’t cleaning. They were moving people out of sight.”

It was, temporarily, like another universe.

Nuru seemed to operate regularly in a strange alternate reality, which could help explain why San Francisco residents’ actual reality of filthy streets is so dire.

As I told you last week, the mayor and supervisors could get any problem area cleaned immediately by Nuru. And, a former employee of Public Works told me, Nuru ensured any stop on a string of mayors’ calendars was clean and shiny.

“It was 100% true that wherever the mayor went, the cleaning happened before,” said the former staffer who declined to be named for fear of retribution. “It gives mayors the wrong picture. Mayors have not been able to experience what the rest of us see on the city streets.”

Rachel Gordon, spokeswoman for Public Works, said Nuru didn’t look at Breed’s daily calendar, and that the mayor didn’t ask him to do so.

“But the department does clean before many civic and special events because the department cares about its mission to make the city look good,” she wrote in an email.

Nuru’s Twitter handle is @MrCleanSF even though, according to the FBI, he was downright dirty. Federal authorities charged him Jan. 28 with fraud following a public corruption probe, and he faces 20 years in prison.

He cared a lot about the public image of his department, spending $1 million annually on at least 10 public relations staff members, according to records provided by the controller’s office. The department spent a year — yes, a year — rebranding itself from the Department of Public Works to San Francisco Public Works, making the switch in 2014.

(And you wonder why it’s taken them years to deliberate over a better city trash can.)

The department under Nuru created Public Works TV with scores of episodes posted to its YouTube channel with titles including “Celebrating Public Works Week” and “Public Works Trivia.”

It also created “core values” for the department, with a section of its website dedicated to those values: respect, integrity and responsiveness. Department staff were required to take training sessions about them, and following the values was part of each employee’s annual review.

Incredibly, the integrity portion of the website shows a photo of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education advocate who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban and became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“We behave with integrity,” the Public Works website reads next to Malala’s image. “We are accountable to ourselves, to each other and to the public.” Like I said, alternate reality. To be clear, I’m sure there are many people in the department working hard to make our city better and living up to those values every day. But it doesn’t seem like their boss was one of them.

Regarding Nuru’s PR efforts, Gordon wrote, “As a department head, Mohammed was in charge of numerous initiatives, and one of them was to make sure the department educates the public about the work the department performs and to highlight that work.”

The alternate reality seemed to pervade Nuru’s reaction to sweeping homeless tent encampments, too — even though he and the mayor say no sweeps take place. They prefer the word “resolving.”

Nuru has said homeless people are offered a shelter bed before being moved, although the fact that there’s a nightly waiting list for shelter of around 1,000 people makes that claim dubious. Monday’s waiting list, for example, includes 949 homeless people hoping for a cot.

No. 23 on the list was 80 years old.

Nuru has also repeatedly disputed activists’ claims that Public Works crews discard homeless people’s belongings. A Chronicle reporter wrote in December of watching crews clear Willow Alley of tents, and homeless people saying they’d been given little warning and no options of where to go. Some homeless people said their belongings were tossed. They mostly just moved to another street before returning to Willow Alley.

“Everyone knows it’s a facade they have going with the sweeps,” said Kelley Cutler, an organizer with the Coalition on Homelessness. “They do a sweep, but people don’t just disappear. They move to the next block.”

Gordon said Public Works stores people’s belongings for 90 days except for food, perishable items, soiled clothing or bedding, abandoned items or items homeless people say they no longer want.

Maybe because the don’t-call them sweeps weren’t working, Nuru had his department install boulders in Potrero Hill under the web of freeways known as “The Hairball” and unattractive metal barriers throughout many neighborhoods. They’re supposed to keep homeless people away, but like so many of Nuru’s promises, they often don’t.

Perhaps most maddening for city residents is the alternate reality that exists between Nuru’s claims — like his July tweet, “We will continue working hard to make sure our city is clean and green all the way down to the weeds in the cracks” — and the filth that covers so many areas of San Francisco. Yes, even all the way down to the weeds in the cracks.

Of Nuru’s $384 million annual budget — up from $260 million in just four years — $94 million is spent on cleaning streets and sidewalks. That’s nearly $260,000 a day. And we all know the results.

Perhaps he spent so much time pleasing his bosses that he failed to develop a real, longterm strategy to please the taxpayers.

Most of us can only call 311 to report a mess. We don’t have Nuru on speed dial, let alone him cleaning everywhere we’ll go the next day. The most we typically get is a promise to clear the problem within a set number of hours or days depending on whether it’s of the poop, needle or general trash variety.

The department’s goal is to respond to 95% of requests for cleaning (from regular people, not the mayor and supervisors) within 48 hours. According to the controller’s office, it failed to reach that goal every month between April 2016 and February 2019. It reached its goal throughout most of 2019 before dropping to 86% in October 2019, the most recent data available.

Gordon said Public Works has been “up front about the challenges” of keeping the city’s streets clean.

Marc Salomon, a software engineer and resident of the Mission, said he’s sympathetic to homeless people with too few places to sleep or relieve themselves. But he’s been frustrated when homeless people poop up against his house or on his garage door and Public Works crews won’t clean it because it’s technically on his property.

But on Nov. 14, 2018, they were out spraying down his garage door unbidden.

“I walked out and said, ‘I guess the mayor’s coming today.’ The guy said, ‘How’d you know?’ ” Salomon recalled. “They create this world that makes them feel good about what they’re doing and denies the realities they refuse to face.”

It was a groundbreaking for an affordable housing project. Soon, the mayor left. And soon, the mess was back.