At Jones and Eddy in San Francisco, it’s as if there’s an incandescent light inviting street use. In the permissible shadow of SFPD’s Tenderloin station, men and women, and their pets, spend their high time and lay to rest on it’s sidewalk when they come down.
San Francisco’s main metropolitan artery is Market Street. From ninth street down, is a string of point services between which these men and women rove, or amble, in circles and cross patterns to and fro.
It’s a part of the City in surveilled decay, circulating the drug addled like water through plumbing. A sustainment unreciprocated by respect for property, communal (or self) care, or cleanliness.
Within and on the periphery of this stretch of Market and the Tenderloin, alongside the services, are many small businesses, founded and operated by the energies of entrepreneurship carried forth from generations before them. A number of them stay open, within and without their licensed hours, to capitalize on the demand for shop goods — Packaged snacks, beer, smokes, fruit, et. al…from the reliable routines of the rovers — provisioning for nightly gathering, where assemblies huddle for camaraderie, safety, and warmth.
Other local businesses are buildings in which people live. Many of their residents (also citizens) demand, and appreciate, the urban elements their building inhabits. Take the corner shop, the watering hole, and the music venue away and the neighborhood loses it’s purpose as an all-in-one any-time third place — Or just quick and convenient any-time access to freeze dried noodles.
In that urban vigor is a conflict, where the supply of goods draws vagrant patrons, and in their wake dereliction, the insanitary, vandalism and at times unpredictable eruptions of violence. The fallout being borne by the business owners, managers, and operators; in the morning, every morning, when the vagrants disperse from their slumber, to pass the day collecting funds and charity and bartering goods, to once again gather at the corner marts to re-supply their next revelry. The homeless and drug addicted spend the day gathering funds to go spend at the store and huddle together to pass the night, until they are inebriated enough to find sleep for its last hours, in a business doorway. To get up in the morning, relieve themselves, and carry on — to traverse these streets collecting food, service, and cash again, ducking into curbside public works staging pens to use and leave refuse, before trucking on, in stupor or belligerence.
Troubling circumstances that beget a hopeless vagrancy zone, is the more storefronts go unoccupied, where no business owner can exercise their right to a clear its doorways, the less grounds we all have to help them exercise that right. Businesses die and vacate, the problem worsens.
Mapping these patterns of circulation and the homeless economy it feeds (Using this term now) is a task of high step count, but easy data point picking. People like J Conr Ortega do it very well. (Looking forward to seeing the data accumulate in his pending web archive.
The stretch of Market St. emphasized above delineates District 3 from District 6, supervisory responsibility over it shared by both Supervisors Dorsey or Peskin — one often abrogating it by pointing to the other. Dean Preston is Supervisor of District 5, overseeing much of the Tenderloin.
Key to disrupting this loitering cycle rotting blocks of San Francisco, is movement. Movement disrupts all. Weather systems, cardiovascular system, ducks. Stationary initiatives do not. Moving is a mode vagrants are already in. Movement can be compelled, in day and night time.
Break up loitering.
Disrupt drug use.
Disrupt pitching a tent.
Disrupt bathroom breaks in the street.
This type of disruption of permanent vagrancy has legal clearance from the Supreme Court of the United States. And has already dropped nightly counts — Courtesy of Tenderloin Community Benefit District)
But the circulation spurred by tent disruption leads to congregation in other areas, a problem for which larger scale overnight canvassing by street level aids and enforcers is the solve. Continuity of service.
“You have got to move.” Once they go one block away, someone else is there telling them they “have to move” and so on…
Not without a recourse postcard, clearly indicating precisely where the cots and care and hot water are for them, indiscriminately drawing outlets from their plight. The “triage center(s)” our leading mayoral candidates all propose some variation of. Anyone with a grooming habit will be first in line to washrooms. Anyone with a bad habit will have intensive care treatment to get to kicking it.
El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele’s TikTok as aggrandized inspiration:
Total and ongoing disruption of this cycle requires personnel, and empowerment of it.
Here is a list of the 200 plus groups and associations or serving the aims of eight departments that has its forces (or coordinating them) on SF’s ground zero promenades and adjoining blocks (Interactive link in the caption).
Here are some of the groups I saw represented on a most recent walkabout. Oft valiant agents of safety, and ultimately change, for the most dire dwellers of the City, and the City itself, including city construction workers ensuring safe passage through its streets.
Coordination is critical to delivering the best of each of these groups in a coherent and consistent fashion. Anecdotally, one apartment building manager described that their Market St. storefront suffered from long waits to assistance and cleaning because SFPD relinquishes non-violent people problems to the Department of Public Health, or because one cleaning crew does not have the equipment required to sanitarily clean up their doorway. While the Department of Public Works stages material on their curb which creates a cloister for drug use, defecation, and waste disposal, but is not to guard them.
Give dozens more people the job of the agents who staff the groups listed, and pay them double to work between 12am and 6am, and see what happens to the numbers of vagrants at their morning rituals.
There will be a day, maybe 30, maybe 500, where the buyers will be so fewer, the sellers’ market so paltry, that street cleaning will not be backlogged with requests to pick up the vagrants droppings. It can then proudly make the glass and granite glint.
If the problems of a city are most demonstrable in the quality level of the environment it’s most wanting citizens inhabit, we have the benefit of knowing our problem well. Its volume is measurable to the naked eye, and volume of our efforts is the foundation of its solution.