Mayor London Breed: This is not just about cleaning and clearing because these are people and they got to 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.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Homeless advocates have been bracing for the impact of the Supreme Court decision on encampments across the bay today. What’s changed on the ground in San Francisco and what hasn’t?
Sara Hossaini: Mayor London Breed had come out in July and basically promised that she was going to get aggressive.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Sara Hossaini is a reporter for KQED.
Sara Hossaini: I think she had a quote that was like she was going to make it so uncomfortable that people would have to either move or accept the city’s offer of shelter. And this kind of comes hand in hand with the Supreme Court case ruling, the grants pass ruling, which basically overturned a precedent that had been if you’re clearing an encampment, you can’t fine or jail people if you don’t have adequate shelter available.
Sara Hossaini: If someone’s only option is sleeping on the street and you’re saying you can’t. It’s cruel and unusual punishment. But what happened with the Supreme Court ruling in June is that they decided that actually fines and jail time are not cruel. Cities and counties can decide their own policies. But if you if you want to do those things, you can do them. You can find in jail, folks.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I know in anticipation of these sweeps and these changes, you actually went out to some homeless encampments in San Francisco first. Where did you go and and how were folks feeling where you went?
Sara Hossaini: So I went out to one in the city’s design district, which is around Division and Potrero Streets. It’s several blocks large. It’s under an underpass that goes to the 1 to 1, and it’s actually really close to KQED station. So I just headed out there a couple of days before August 1st, which is kind of when Mayor London Breed had suggested that things were going to heat up.
Sara Hossaini: The scene was already pretty sparse. A notice from the city had gone up, and I think it was a mix of this is familiar, but also people on the street were aware of the rhetoric kind of shift, and so they weren’t really sure what it was going to mean for them, but they were preparing to move as as they do often there.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So who’d you meet while you were out there?
Sara Hossaini: So one of the people that I spent a lot of time with was this young man, 32 year old named C.J.. C.J., I sort of caught out of the corner of my eye as he was taking this black bucket to a fire hydrant, opening it up with a wrench and filling it with water to take back to his tent as he was preparing to leave. Cleaning up around your area?
CJ: Yeah, Keeping it sanitized. Yeah. People are dirty.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah. And tell me a little bit more about C.J. and what he told you about why he’s living on the streets.
Sara Hossaini: So C.J. told me that he had been there for about a year, and he talked about his brother having died a few years prior. He himself since then has survived a fentanyl overdose.
CJ: I passed away from overdose, but they brought me back to the Narcan. Spitting.
Sara Hossaini: He still does meth. He says he knows he should quit, but he will when the time is right. He is HIV positive. He seems to be a little bit of a loner. He says that in the year he’s been out, folks from the city have come and asked him if he wants shelter three times. He said that he told them, I’m not going to a shelter. I don’t like shelters. At the same time, he says, I know I should go there and see about this.
CJ: They said, Do I want housing right now? I said, No, I don’t know why I said that. So I’m still trying. I need to. It’s just hard. I never thought I would have said, this is comfortable for me. For some reason. I got comfortable and got comfortable like this.
Sara Hossaini: How did you end up living?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, it sounds like he is the exact kind of person who people like London Breed would like to see in shelters, but who they sort of have a hard time getting to accept offers for shelters.
Sara Hossaini: Absolutely. And I think that if you talk to C.J., you realize that he has reasons and his reasons are varied.
CJ: I don’t like people stellar for me and. I don’t like arguing when he will let you know that.
Sara Hossaini: He has this prized possession. It’s his cart. It’s a kind of like a mail cart with four shelves and he’s attached some milk crates to it and it has wheels. And this is something he uses to basically pack up and leave and come back to wherever he’s going in 45 minutes. It’s kind of a nomadic existence, and he depends on this.
CJ: They’re not going to take this weight either. The only reason why they think the only way they’re going to take it away if I go inside.
Sara Hossaini: Etc.. So, yeah, the idea of going to a temporary shelter, a congregate shelter maybe for a day or two, which is often the case, I mean, we have a bad track record of moving people from these temporary shelters into actual permanent housing. So the idea of giving this thing up and then not being clear on what happens afterwards is not appealing to many people.
Sara Hossaini: There’s also just not enough shelters. San Francisco has about 8000 unhoused people and 4000 shelter beds, and those are full. So what does that mean? We’re asking them potentially to give up everything they have on the street. So it’s kind of a catch 22.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: You mentioned homeless advocates. What was your sense of how these advocates were gearing up for these sweeps?
Sara Hossaini: Advocates like Lukas Illa of the Coalition on Homelessness were feeling watchful.
Lukas Illa: We’re kind of bracing for impact in that way, right where the mayor is taking this big game.
Sara Hossaini: It’s on the one hand, Lukas was saying, yes, they sweep this encampments very regularly. And as far as they’re concerned, the aggressive sweeps have been in play. But on the other hand, this rhetoric that we’re going to get aggressive and make it so uncomfortable for people that they have to do what we’re asking them is something that they’re keeping an eye on.
Lukas Illa: It’s an election year. Homeless folks know it. They’ve been well rehearsed and practiced in knowing that they’re in the direct focus of her ire and how she scores political points, that they’re going to be facing a lot more scrutiny.
Sara Hossaini: But and so they were out there trying to see if they could keep an eye on the situation and prepare people that they met.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, what Sarah saw when she went back to the encampment on the day of the sweep. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So you went back to this same encampment on the day that the city actually did promise to sweep it August 1st. What did you see? Sarah?
Sara Hossaini: So when I got there on August 1st, the first thing I noticed is it seemed pretty desolate. People that were there with the city team, which was a handful of Department of Public Works workers who were, you know, dressed in their white and their bright vests. So busily trying to clean the streets with power washers and discarding unattended tents, as well as police and social workers who kind of just had nothing to do.
Sara Hossaini: They were standing idly by. There was an observer from the city’s attorney’s office taking notes. There was an Office of Emergency services spokesman there kind of on the scene. I didn’t see any unhoused people in the area when the teams arrived. Everyone had left. I think people at this particular spot are used to sweeps.
Sara Hossaini: It’s nothing new in that sense, but it does seem like almost everyone has left. Now, if you walk 4 or 5 blocks down the road, that’s where you found many of them. They were just kind of right outside the perimeter until the coast is clear. And then many of them said they they would try to return. What’s your name?
Lt. Wayman Young: Lt. Wayman Young.
Sara Hossaini: And how do you spell your first name?
Lt. Wayman Young: W a y m…
Sara Hossaini: And so when I was on scene, I spoke with the San Francisco Police Department’s police representative on scene for the Healthy Streets Operation Center. His name was Lieutenant Waymon Young. And I was just sort of asking him how he thought things were going. You know, what do you think about all this? Do you do you consider this futile? And he said he didn’t.
Lt. Wayman Young: Well, our plan has always been the same. I mean, we clean it. And that’s what’s been happening all these years. We clean it, they come back to clean it. They come back and. If we come back more often. That’s how you prevent the encampment.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Did the lieutenant that you spoke with, Sara, tell you about whether his job feels different now since the grants pass ruling? Does he have more authority now than he did maybe a couple months ago?
Sara Hossaini: I think with grants pass and with Governor Gavin Newsom’s embracing of that, as well as Mayor Breed’s pledge to get rid of encampments. I think that Lieutenant Young felt that he had more tools available to him.
Lt. Wayman Young: The only difference was during the injunction, we have to verify that what that was, there was actually shelter beds available. So what we had to do was call verify.
Sara Hossaini: He did say that he’s intends to still offer people shelter when he meets them. Even ones who return to the encampments, which is something the city has said they no longer have to do. But he also said that he feels a duty to people like, you know, the grandma who’s just trying to get across the sidewalk.
Lt. Wayman Young: You have the other side, the citizens that deserve to have a place I want. I have mothers with baby stroller, people that are wheelchair elderly that have to walk in the street. Well, how do you what do you say to those folks?
Sara Hossaini: He just feels that he’s enforcing the law and the law is there for a reason.
Lt. Wayman Young: And it’s very easy for us. We enforce the law. If I think that if people are upset at us or. Were happy with us. Change the law.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, I’m curious, too, if you saw C.J. again, Sarah, the homeless man that you had met the day before the sweeps.
Sara Hossaini: I did see C.J. again on the day of the sweep. I saw him riding a pink child’s bike that said, Chase your dreams. Holding in one hand a stack of flattened cardboard. And then the other hand, a broom. And he was biking five blocks down to the spot where his neighbors from the encampment had moved.
Sara Hossaini: And I asked him, what are you going to do? And he said, you know, I might go to my auntie’s for a night, but I’ll come back here. And I said, Why? And he said, he said, he’s comfortable here. He’s lived here for a year. And. And these sorts of sweeps aren’t new to him. So that was his plan.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Sarah, you asked earlier, like, what is different as a result of Gran’s pass? And I guess that really is like the question of this episode, right? Is like, was this sweep, I guess, different from the kind of sweeps that we’ve seen before in San Francisco?
Sara Hossaini: I don’t think that people on the ground, the unhoused folks, the advocates, even many of the the workers on these cleanup teams would consider this too different from what we’ve had already. This particular site has been swept more an average of more than once a week for the past six months. And people still return.
Sara Hossaini: They still consider themselves residents of this area. Really, the only thing that I think changes is the possibility that some of these people will end up in the justice system into this cycle of being fined or even going to jail. And does that encourage people to get into shelter? Maybe, maybe not.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And what about across the city? Are things basically the same when it comes to sweeps or are they really shifting? Because we have seen some news reports about the city getting more aggressive.
Sara Hossaini: You know, a lot kind of happened on Thursday. So it was the first day of the sweep. There was this press release from the mayor’s office that they were going to start using this existing program called the Journey Home Program to start issuing people bus tickets out of town before they would offer them services. There was also reports of encampments being swept without notice.
Sara Hossaini: There was also a scheduled meeting of the Homelessness Oversight Commission where the vice chair warned that unhoused people were being stripped of essential items like IDs and medication, which just makes their job harder when it comes to getting people into the system and getting them out and off the streets. While it seems like for some encampments like the one I visited, this is old hat.
Sara Hossaini: There’s this sort of shift in tone towards less tolerance. And how that actually will play out remains to be seen. Mayor Breed is running for reelection. And there are people on her heels and people on her heels about the issue of the homelessness crisis. So I think that that is something to keep in mind. The timing is important here. And I think that people on the street know that to.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Sara, thank you so much.
Sara Hossaini: Thank you.
