U.S. Tries to Push Homeless Crisis Out of Sight

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — On a frosty December morning, Victoria Solomon recounted how San Francisco police had rousted her awake hours earlier, and threatened to take her to jail if she didn’t clear out within 10 minutes.
They tried to force her out of a public area without offering a shelter bed as required by law, Solomon said. At least this time city workers didn’t trash her belongings, she said. This would have forced her to find a new tent, bedding and clothes — not to mention new identification and Social Security cards, as well as a cell phone.
“You can be as tough as you want on people, that’s not going to magically create a house for them. And they don’t have disappearing powers,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco.
Solomon is among an estimated 7,800 people without a home in San Francisco, a city that has come to be seen as an emblem of California’s staggering inability to counter the homeless crisis. Homeowners, businesses and local leaders in San Francisco are frustrated with visible signs of homelessness — which includes public streets blocked by sprawling tents and trash.
Solomon is frustrated too. “Who says I’m not part of the community just because I’m homeless?” she said.
The 34-year-old has been homeless for about a decade. Solomon said she is bipolar and struggles with drug addiction, as well as grief from the deaths of her son and mother a year apart.
Amid rising rents and a national shortage of affordable housing, more than 100,000 people are living on California’s streets. Hawaii, Oregon, and Arizona are among other western states where more homeless people live outside in cars and tents than indoors in shelters, despite billions spent to curb homelessness, including San Francisco’s $672 million annual budget.
Across the country, frustration over the crisis has unified Democratic and Republican leaders in embracing tough-on-homelessness tactics, much to the dismay of homeless advocates and even Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, which has warned against hastily executed encampment closures.
This year Tennessee made outdoor camping on public land a felony and in Portland, Oregon, the

city council voted to create at least three large campsites and to ban all other tent encampments.

From June 2020 to September 2022, San Francisco carried out 1,200 formal encampment cleanups and outreach workers encountered more than 10,000 people, according to the emergency management department.

There are also informal requests for homeless people to move, like the one Solomon encountered, so it’s not possible to know the full scale of enforcement actions taken, or threatened to be taken, against people who are homeless.

Business owners are fed up, not necessarily with people who are unhoused but the city that ignores them, said Ryen Motzek, president of the Mission Merchants Association. “It’s a general issue of cleanliness and safety, that’s the No. 1 problem the city faces,” he said.

But Toro Castaño, one of the seven individual plaintiffs, said that without affordable housing, people who are unhoused like him are forced to move from place to place. “We’ll literally move across the street — in the other direction,” he said. “In a week we might move 14 times. Just from corner to corner to corner.”

In a court declaration, he said that in August 2020, he was given two hours to leave his tent, but the incident commander declared everything a fire hazard so city workers tossed all of his belongings into a dump truck. He lost his deceased mother’s wedding kimono, MacBook Pro laptop, a battery-powered heater and a bike worth $1,400.

Nobody is happy with the status quo response, Friedenbach said. She hopes the lawsuit will catalyze a “serious transformation” in how the city treats people who are unhoused.

“This is really connected to a bigger struggle for dignity,” she said. “And a bigger struggle for just a recognition of the humanity of folks who are too poor to afford rents.”

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U.S. Tries to Push Homeless Crisis Out of Sight