Skip to footer

Tent city evictions highlight San Francisco's homelessness problem

City officials set a Friday deadline to clear out a tent city due to health concerns. San Francisco's streets are home to thousands of homeless people.

|
Eric Risberg/AP
Angela Flax packs up her tent at an encampment along Division Street Friday, in San Francisco. Homeless people have until the end of Friday to vacate a rambling tent city along a busy San Francisco street declared a health hazard by city officials earlier this week. The mayor's office says about 40 tents remain, down from a high of 140 tents this winter. The tents have lined both sides of a street under a freeway overpass for months, drawing complaints from residents and businesses.

Residents of a homeless encampment in San Francisco have until the end of the day on Friday to vacate the tent city where they have been living.

The city decided to evict the residents of the tent city, located under a highway overpass, after health officials deemed the encampment a health hazard, citing accumulation of feces, urine, and hypodermic needles. Local residents have also expressed concerns about crime and harassment.

San Francisco legislator Malia Cohen told The New York Times that the city’s homeless problem has reached extremes. “I’ve seen feces thrown, panhandlers yelling,” Cohen says, “I’ve seen homeless people rejecting food, and saying, ‘No, I only take money.’  ”

Homelessness is a systemic problem in San Francisco, where the supply of affordable housing can’t keep up with the demand. A 2015 report on homelessness in San Francisco found a total of 6,059 homeless people in the city, 58 percent of whom were unsheltered at the time of the count.

The city has recently ramped up efforts to confront the problem. The mayor of San Francisco has increased spending the homelessness issue to $242 million this year, according to The New York Times.

The city recently made headlines when it cleared homeless people out of tent cities in the busy Embarcadero shopping district prior to the Super Bowl. At that time, the city constructed new homeless shelters, including a Navigation Center intended to help solve the underlying issues of homelessness rather than merely supplying a place to stay.

The city has also attempted to make homeless shelters more attractive to residents, The Times reports.

Still, some of the city's inhabitants say the do not want to leave the encampment for a public shelter. “I kind of want to stay put and fight it out,” tent city inhabitant Elizabeth Stromer, a former nurse, told The Times.

The encampment's residents were given 72 hours to leave in an order posed on Tuesday night.

City officials have made previous attempts to convince people to leave, rather than order them out. The encampment has shrunk from 140 tents to just 40 over the course of the winter. Still, neighbors have continued to voice concerns about safety, and available data supports residents fears, car break-ins are in fact on the rise.

Many San Franciscans believe the city has mishandled the situation. 

Some say that the city should be spending more on care for mentally ill homeless people. Between 15 and 20 percent of the city's homeless are mentally ill, Joshua Bamberger, who regularly provides care to homeless people, told the Times.

“To watch mentally ill, medically frail seniors walk out of my office, knowing that they are going to be sleeping in the rain in San Francisco is heartbreaking,” said Bamberger. “It’s completely unacceptable in an advanced society.”

This report contains material from The Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Tent city evictions highlight San Francisco's homelessness problem
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2016/0226/Tent-city-evictions-highlight-San-Francisco-s-homelessness-problem
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe