San Francisco continues ramped-up encampment sweeps
San Francisco's renewed efforts to remove homeless encampments commenced on Monday, and has made headlines all week.
Despite all the attention, the city insists crews are not doing anything that hasn't done in recent years.
San Francisco's Healthy Streets operation landed in the South of Market's side streets. For one man, that meant having his RV towed. The city says it will pay the recovery costs, and they found him a tiny home, but they were going to clear the street, no exceptions.
"They say they want to put us in the shelter, but a lot of us have mental health issues," said Caleb, who was staying on Merlin Street. "Like, I just got out of max. So it's hard being in a dorm setting."
With that in mind, it's not surprising that many unhoused people are simply opting to move elsewhere.
"Probably to the next block that just got cleaned out," Caleb said when asked where he was headed next. " Or just to the next one that's open that hasn't seen DPW recently."
One real change with city enforcement right now, is the fact that the streets that have been cleared are getting second, third, and even fourth looks. Willow Street in the Tenderloin saw two large-scale operations on Wednesday. A smaller team was back later in the week to follow up again, and at least one person took up a conversation about shelter.
"So the key is continuing to engage," explained David Nakanishi with the city's Healthy Streets Operation Center. "Continuing to get to know who is out here, what they need. Try to engage them to get them into help, behavioral health, shelter, and ultimately housing. So they're no longer so they're no longer having to be on the street."
But not everyone in these alleyways has nowhere to go. Many of them are already sheltered, and in one case, the team was racing to get someone back to their room before their residency expired - there are often rules about checking in. And that is another part of the city's objective, breaking up the activity that surrounds encampments, and that means keeping everyone on the move.
"This is not just about cleaning and clearing," Mayor London Breed said last week. "Because these are people and they gotta go somewhere, but we are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer. That really is the goal of what we're trying to accomplish."
The new rhetoric hasn't convinced Caleb of anything.
"For me, it's like single room occupancy," Caleb said. "I have seen it time and time again, they throw a guy or a couple into an SRO. It just depends on who they pick and choose, you know?"
So what's the biggest change with the new policy? What is the biggest difference? The answer to that might be all of the attention that is being paid to this. That will no doubt come with added expectations, or at least some curiosity about what the results might look like.