On a grey Thursday morning last week, Antonio Robinson watched as a coterie of cops, workers from the city Department of Public Works, and a pair of outreach specialists descended on his tent. The 38-year-old had chosen to set up camp near Palou Ave. and Griffith St. in Hunters Point, on a dead-end road surrounded by industrial buildings.
Robinson’s last encampment was swept about a month ago, and “nearly everything” was taken, including his state ID card, he said. Despite Public Works’ policy and procedure for documenting, bagging, and tagging most belongings, Robinson said he was unable to find any of his property at the city’s mandated storage facility at 2323 Cesar Chavez St.
Between December 2022 and June of this year, a federal injunction prevented the city from penalizing people for sleeping on public property without an alternative offer for shelter. But in June, the Supreme Court green-lit such penalties, prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom to order California city officials to “move urgently” to clear illegal encampments around the state.
San Francisco has since ramped up sweeps and arrests of people living on the street. According to Mayor London Breed, the intention is to clean up sidewalks and force unhoused people into the city’s labyrinthine network of shelter and supportive housing programs. But as multiple crackdowns on Thursday showed, the new enforcement brings old problems with it, including actions inconsistent with stated policy and questions of whether it actually gets people off the streets.
A federal survey released in May counted more than 8,000 unhoused people in the city, which has fewer than 4,000 shelter beds to offer. According to Public Works policy, staff are supposed to provide the resident of an encampment a “reasonable amount of time (approximately 30 minutes)” to sort through and collect their belongings before the camp is torn down.
But observation of Thursday’s sweeps by Gazetteer SF proved how chaotic and traumatic these so-called “resolutions” can be — and how quickly they can shunt an unhoused person back to square one, deprived of vital belongings, and left with no help beyond a suggestion to move to a temporary shelter.
On Thursday morning, as the laughter of department workers and police swirled around him, Robinson packed his things into a jumble of luggage, awkwardly piled up on a too-small wagon. He was neither detained nor cited for illegal lodging, and told Gazetteer he had spoken to a member of the “Encampment Resolution Team,” who offered temporary shelter. Robinson did not accept it.
“All they do is tell me to go back to the Hunters Point Navigation Center. And I don’t want to do that. I had bad experiences,” he said.
Robinson may have dodged a citation, but his neighbor wasn’t so lucky. Joey O’Brien, 46, tried to explain to police officers that he was camping on the sidewalk in Hunters Point while investigating a homicide that occurred while he was in jail. After listening for about two minutes, an officer told him that he was being detained for illegal lodging, then put O’Brien in cuffs and led him to a patrol vehicle away from his camp.
“I don’t understand,” O’Brien kept repeating.
As it turned out, O’Brien had a warrant for failing to appear for a previous court date. O’Brien was polite and contrite, admitting that he had broken several windows in the past while suffering a mental breakdown. More than anything, however, he begged for officers to bring over his two neat backpacks, which had his best clothes, documents, and “bits of silver.”
Public Works employees began examining and collecting O’Brien’s possessions as soon as he was detained, without giving him the sorting time required by policy. Eventually, an officer brought a black backpack to O’Brien, but gestured to the truck, now indiscriminately piled high with his property.
“The other stuff is under all that over there,” the officer said with a shrug. “You’re going to have to pick it up later.”
Despite promises from law enforcement and city officials that this property will be preserved, there is plenty of evidence that the city’s hasty process of clearing encampments has left people without immediate access to essential supplies and equipment; as a recent batch of public records secured by City Hall watchdog Hazel Williams shows, Public Works has bagged medications, wheelchairs, and even a mobility walker from unhoused people, taking them to the city’s storage facility on Cesar Chavez St.
Many unhoused people, including Robinson, say it can be challenging to identify and retrieve their belongings at the facility. When they succeed, they often find important pieces missing from their stash — a problem that has persisted over years of sweeps.
In a response to Gazetteer's questions about potential breaches in protocol, Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon only noted that "the policy clearly spells out how soiled items can be handled and our crews follow the policy and consistently apply its terms." Gordon said claims for lost property can be filed with the City Attorney's office. Mayor Breed's office did not respond to requests for comment.
In order to bring public attention to the moral question of sweeps, the Coalition on Homelessness and other unhoused advocates planned to crash an encampment sweep in SoMa last Thursday, which had been scheduled for 12:30 p.m. The group planned live performances, speeches, and outreach, to take place at the same time as SFPD and Department of Public Works enforcement.
Instead, the city swooped down on the encampments at Sixth and Jessie streets earlier than scheduled, said Julian Highsmith, communications and policy director for the Coalition on Homelessness.
“Typically, with city sweeps, they give 72 hours of notice with location and time, and we were following that, but they didn’t follow that usual rule,” Highsmith said.
Instead, a small group of protesters regrouped at City Hall for a series of chants and short speeches, holding a symbolic police citation for Breed that accused her of violating human rights. Highsmith told Gazetteer he believes the city may have gotten wind of the group’s planned sweep disruption and undercut it in order to prevent unhoused people from organizing with their advocates during an enforcement.
“I personally think it’s a little suspicious to do the sweep earlier. It doesn’t seem like the city wants attention on the encampment sweeps, and I don’t think they want people to see what happens during that process,” he said.
A visit to Jessie and Sixth streets in SoMa after the rally showed how futile these sweeps can be: Dozens of people lined the sidewalks that had been swept just hours prior, fussing with their belongings, setting up new tents, and discreetly selling wares to one another.
It was a similar story for Robinson in Hunters Point. When asked where he would move next, he shrugged and noted in his characteristic whisper that he was staying in the neighborhood.
“It’s quiet here,” he said.
Then he piled one last bag on his already overloaded wagon, pulled it across the street from his old camp, and sat down on the sidewalk to figure it out.
There were 178 people on the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s online waitlist for shelter on Monday afternoon.
