Lumps on the sidewalks: San Francisco residents decide to fight the homeless in their own way

A group of neighbors from San Francisco came together, placing about two dozen boulders along the sidewalk to try to restrain the homeless due to the ongoing crisis in the city.

Photo: video screenshot

Clinton Park’s neighbors in the Mission Dolores urban area said the stones were designed to keep drug addicts out of camp.

“We all spent several hundred dollars to solve this problem,” David Smith-Tan, a city resident, told KTVU.

San Francisco for a long time struggled with the problems of human waste and needles in the streets of the Tenderloin district, where there are usually many drug addicts and homeless people. Public toilets were created in the city, and last year it announced the creation of a special group of six people that is engaged in “patrolling feces” for the collection of human waste.

Similar beautification activities were carried out in other parts of the city.

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While the city’s homelessness crisis has focused mainly around the Tenderloin area, other areas of San Francisco have also seen an alarming increase in the number of homeless people in recent years.

This year, according to preliminary estimates, the number of homeless people in the city since 2017 has increased by 17%. However, San Francisco uses the federal definition of homelessness in this calculation. In accordance with the same measurements of past years, indicators increase from 7 400 to 9 784 - or 30% - in the 2019 year.

About a month ago, due to dissatisfaction with the city authorities, the neighbors at Clinton Park solved the problem themselves.

Photo: video screenshot

“Boulders help,” neighbor Kernel Ernesto Jerez told KTVU.

“This is already something. We have to do something. I feel like nothing is being done,” he added.

But homeless advocates call boulders a cruel answer, not a solution to a problem.

“This is called architecture against the homeless,” said KTVU Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Homelessness Coalition.

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A spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department of Public Works told KTVU that the city did not participate in the placement of boulders here, and since they do not block the sidewalk, there are no plans to remove them.

The San Francisco homelessness crisis prompted President Trump to send environmental warnings to the city last week for allowing huge amounts of waste, including needles, to pass through stormwater into the ocean.

In a statement, the mayor of London Brid called Trump’s remarks “ridiculous” and said that garbage from storm sewers is filtered out at the city’s sewage treatment plant, so none of them end up “in the bay or the ocean.”

Breed added that the city is struggling with homelessness by adding 1000 shelter beds and wants to transfer 600 million worth of bonds to build affordable housing and expand services for people with addiction and mental illness.

On Monday, homeless advocates said the lack of housing was an immediate problem.

“We have 1200 people in line for housing. This is for today, ”Friedenbach told KTVU. "People have nowhere to go."

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