Push to get homeless inside clears most tents off sidewalks in the Tenderloin.
City removes majority of camps on sidewalks
The Tenderloin looks better than it has in months, now that the city has removed 65% of the hundreds of tents that had covered the troubled neighborhood since the coronavirus pandemic clamped down on San Francisco in March.
The first phase of reducing the appalling crush of tent camps and moving their homeless occupants indoors ends Friday, city officials reported. It’s been one of the most intensive streetcamp cleanups in city history.
The allout campaign by the city’s Healthy Streets Operations Center and city emergency workers began June 10, and resulted in 497 homeless people being placed in hotels, shelters or safe sleeping sites, sanctioned camps with counselors and restrooms, city statistics show. A total of 431 went to hotels leased by the city to protect vulnerable homeless people from the coronavirus.
“Our goal was to assist as many vulnerable individuals as possible while improving conditions in the neighborhood and we have made significant progress,” said Jeff Kositsky, who as manager of the healthy streets center spearheaded the campaign.
He said clearance efforts will now continue on a lessintensive scale, with the goal of reaching a 70% reduction in tents by July 20, the date mandated by an outofcourt settlement the city reached last month in a federal lawsuit filed by area businesses and residents frustrated with the mess in the Tenderloin.
He cautioned that although he and other homelessness workers will continue to try to help every
“I am ecstatic . ... I’ve been afraid of catching the virus the whole time I’ve been here. I wore a mask, but social distancing is impossible out here.”
Raymond Gilliam, 47, who lived in a big orange tent there for four months, but now has a hotel room.
one on the street, “coming to the Tenderloin and setting up a tent will not lead to people getting hotel rooms.” Street counselors, police and “ambassadors” from nonprofits including Code Tenderloin will be discouraging new tent masses.
Camp overcrowding in the 49squareblock Tenderloin hit a crisis point in the spring. The number of tents had mushroomed by at least 285% by early May while the pandemic wreaked havoc on the homeless population as city shelters thinned their populations to allow for safe distancing inside. Kositsky estimated there were more than 500 tents at the peak.
The need to draw down the big camps was driven not just by the desire to make life better for residents and businesses, but also because having that many people in tents jammed next to one another is not safe, as people should be distancing during the pandemic.
Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district includes the Tenderloin, said he appreciated the recent urgency in addressing the problem.
“This is what me and others in the neighborhood have been demanding for months during the pandemic, and years before it,” he said. “It shouldn’t take a lawsuit for the city to do its job and do what is right.”
Haney and others, including the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, have been pushing the city to put most of the population of 8,000 homeless people into cityleased hotels during the pandemic, but only about 2,000 have gotten rooms.
City officials say the logistics of arranging counseling and other services for that many rooms right now is insurmountable and the cost — about $3 million a month — is prohibitive. The city faces a nearly $2 billion deficit from the pandemicinduced economic crash.
One thing was clear, though, throughout the threeweek Tenderloin operation: Most people, from campers to residents, were satisfied with the newly cleared streets.
A case in point came Wednesday with the emptying out of a sprawling settlement on Eddy Street between Mason and Taylor. Police officers and street cleaners descended with an army of street counselors and medical staff at around 7 a.m., and by shortly after lunchtime the dozens of tents that have bedeviled residents of the gritty block for several months were gone.
Residents irritated at latenight noise and afraid of the coronavirus multiplying in crowds were relieved. Campers unhappy at being so jammed together were relieved. Business owners who’d lost customers because of the mess were relieved.
“I am ecstatic,” said Raymond Gilliam, 47, who’d lived in a big orange tent there for four months. He was placed into a hotel room that day.
“I’m a barber and I know how to fix bikes, but I haven’t had a job in a long time because it’s hard to find one when you’re living outside,” he said. “I’ve been afraid of catching the virus the whole time I’ve been here. I wore a mask, but social distancing is impossible out here.
“Thank God I didn’t get the disease,” Gilliam said. “Getting this hotel is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time.”
The camp’s disappearance was also the best thing that’s happened in a while for Daldas grocery store.
“I feel bad for those people, and I’m happy that they will be in a safer place,” said owner Bill Multani. “But it’s been hard for everyone else, too. We’ve been losing business because some people, especially those who are disabled or elderly, can’t get out of their houses for fear of the virus in the crowds.
“This gives me hope that those customers might come back.”
Kositsky and Abigail StewartKahn, interim director of San Francisco’s homelessness department, said if there were enough resources they would like to house or shelter everyone, not just in the Tenderloin. They noted that the effort in that one neighborhood has required the coordination of 10 different city departments, community members and several nonprofit agencies.
“We’ve never moved this kind of volume of people this fast like this before,” Kositsky said. “And in an ideal world, we’d know where everyone vulnerable in the city is, rank them and address them right now. But we’re in the middle of a crisis, and we’re doing what we can with the resources we have.”
StewartKahn said 90% of those who were offered hotel or shelter took it, “and that’s an important message for people who might think homeless people resist services and housing.”
Christy Shirilla lives in the neighborhood and said she’s had to walk down the middle of the street whenever she goes out to avoid threading through tent clusters.
“I know it’s rougher for the people on the street, but it’s been hard to get around,” she said. “I hope this kind of coordinated effort to help becomes the norm. Otherwise it’s going to hard for residents and businesses to stay here.”
San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Trisha Thadani contributed
to this report.
Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron
“This others is in what the neigh me and borhood have been demanding for months . ... It shouldn’t take a lawsuit for the city to do its job and do what is right.”
Supervisor Matt Haney