Homelessness advocates concerned about San Francisco’s encampment sweeps

Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the coalition on homelessness, said San Francisco officials haven’t wasted any time sweeping homeless encampments across the city, and she’s not happy about it.

“What we have seen is much more aggressive treatment of homeless people. We’ve seen arrests, we’ve seen illegal confiscation of their property,” said Friedenbach.

On July 25, the governor announced his executive order requiring state agencies to clear encampments on state land.

That order also encouraged cities to do the same. On Monday, almost 72 hours later, the amount of time required to give notice of the sweeps, sweeps in San Francisco started happening.

“They’ve done the Haight, around the DMV, they’ve done an area south of Market, they did an area here in the mission near Folsom and 16th-ish,” said Friedenbach.

KPIX went down to the DMV to check it out, and the encampment that had been there for months, if not years was gone. All that was left was the notice warning of the sweep stapled to a nearby tree.

Friedenbach said she’s worried the people being kicked out have nowhere to go.

“It’s just kind of this forced march from place to place to place and because it’s being done in such a harsh manner you know people get really upset and they’re further destabilized. They lose all their survival gear. They’re of course very devastated by that,” said Friedenbach.

The city claims it has no other choice. They said over 2/3rds of the homeless refuse shelter or services.

Under these new rules, the city is still offering shelter to those being swept but if people refuse, the city doesn’t have to re-offer shelter the next time that person is kicked out of an encampment.

Friedenbach said she doesn’t believe that approach will solve anything.

“None of those actions have decreased homelessness. In fact study show that these kind of operations exacerbate homelessness and make it worse,” said Friedenbach.

For now though, the city is sticking to the approach. They’ve scheduled about three encampment sweeps each day this week and plan to also target smaller encampments on a daily basis.