Putting homeless strategy to work
Crews dismantle sprawling encampment near creek, provide residents supportive housing and counseling
Finding a place to sleep at night in San Francisco has been a lifelong chess match for Dexter Green, who said he was born at a bus stop to homeless parents and grew up on the city’s gritty streets.
After decades of drifting from place to place, getting bounced by police or avoiding sketchy people on the street, the 36-year-old finally found decent enough digs at one of the city’s most entrenched homeless encampments on the north bank of Islais Creek Channel in eastern San Francisco.
But that all ended Monday when city crews made good on a promise to dismantle the sprawling urban tent city, where mountains of trash and human waste had accumulated along the promenade near Cesar Chavez Street, just south of the Dogpatch neighborhood.
“I guess I’ll have to go the same place I always go — nowhere,” Green said Monday morning as police, city homeless-outreach workers, and crews from the city Department of Public Works put the kibosh on the growing encampment.
The latest San Francisco homeless sweep came as no surprise to the few dozen people still set up on the promenade at the southern terminus of Indiana Street.
For weeks, workers from the newly created city Encampment Resolution Team have been working with the 50 or so campers, breaking the news that staying was no longer an option, while reserving beds for folks willing to go to shelters. At the same time, they brought counseling and substance-abuse treatment resources directly to the residents.
“These folks are vulnerable,” said Jason Albertson, a psychiatric social worker trained in crisis counseling, who leads the team. “Many of them have significant disease and significant mental illness. They need help to get care, and bringing the care to them is the ethical thing and the clinical thing to do.”
The approach was the latest in an evolution of tactics used by the city to transition homeless people into permanent housing and clean out encampments that are often overrun with trash, feces and remnants of intravenous drug use.
Once the zero-hour hit Monday morning, several folks had already moved on while the holdouts slowly packed up under the supervision of a handful of police and teams of public works crews. All told, at least 28 had opted for shelter beds of some kind, two signed up for residential drug rehabilitation beds — and some of the rest were still considering options under roofs.
“Leading up to this, we brought in debris bins, washing stations and portable toilets,” said Sam Dodge, director of the mayor’s Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement office. “We’ve tried to give time, so it’s not a one-day affair.”
On Monday morning, Dodge watched over the scene while campers slowly wheeled away their belongings, which included piles of bike parts, generators, barbecues, camp stoves, tarps and large tents.
The long-standing encampment had ballooned in size in recent months after an influx of campers, many of whom set up after getting rousted from Division Street when the city cleared a camp there in March.
“Neighbors more and more are concerned, concerned about the conditions that we can’t turn a blind eye to,” Dodge said as public works crews set about cleaning up the sea of trash — including a small boat — littering the walkway.
Despite the city’s more delicate approach to purging the streets of troublesome homeless encampments, many of the holdouts were feeling a mix of sorrow and anger when reality hit Monday.
“How do you get kicked out of being homeless?” 36-year-old camper Katherine McClain said as she fought back tears while pushing her clothes, purse and coat on a rolling desk chair. “It’s more like they’re against us than helping us.”
McClain was on her way to one of the city’s Navigation Centers, where, along with other city-run shelters, beds were set aside for the campers.
“It’s not great, but I guess it’s better than nothing,” she said.
A few of the campers, though, felt that “nothing” was still better.
“If you go to one of the shelters they send you to, it’s filled with crazy people,” said 47-yearold Elizabeth Soule, who receives Supplemental Security Income for medical problems and had been at the camp for two weeks. “You can’t be in your own space and be by yourself.”
And while some of those getting swept out will have beds available, others sit on long waiting lists for shelters and housing.
“We need more resources,” Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said at the scene Monday. “This creates a lot of stress because there isn’t a clear pathway between homelessness and housing. We don’t have places for people to go.”
It remains to be seen if the city’s latest approach to addressing this one group of chronically homeless will have any effect on the perpetual crisis. But on Monday, no one was arrested, and interactions between campers and law enforcement in general were positive, said Albertson, the social worker.
“This is potentially effective,” he said. “This is a somewhat new method here in San Francisco, and we’re still waiting for numbers and impact results.”
Like so many others getting uprooted, Green said he will start scouting out a new spot to set up camp, which will probably do for a while, until other folks get word of it, join the party and the whole thing starts again.
“I’ll have to scout out a place, set up there and hope nothing happens,” he said. “I just don’t know where that is yet.” Chronicle staff writer Kevin Fagan
contributed to this report.