by Randy Shaw on April 13, 2026 (BeyondChron.org)
Op-ed said SF sidewalks were now clear
Visitor’s Misleading Account of SF
Last week the NY Times featured an op-ed titled, “San Francisco Sobers Up.” The piece credited Mayor Daniel Lurie with transforming the city’s culture. Former President Bill Clinton tweeted the op-ed, calling it “A great in-depth look at the real progress being made in the fight against overdoses and addiction in San Francisco.”
But was German Lopez’s op-ed really an “in-depth look?” Not by an historian or reporter’s standards. In fact, I would describe the op-ed as a powerful work of fiction. Or a highly-skilled example of gaslighting.
For example, the premise of the op-ed is that Lopez found San Francisco much improved from his prior visit. That visit was in 2023, when San Francisco had far more sidewalk drug activities and encampments than when Daniel Lurie took office.
“When I visited San Francisco in 2023, parts of the city looked like open-air drug dens. Users made homes in tents that lined block after block. They bought, sold and smoked fentanyl, crack and meth in public. They used drugs in front of a police station, visibly undeterred by the threat of the law. I once saw four people hunched over, in what’s called the fentanyl fold, along a sidewalk in sight of City Hall. It was a startling vision of what had gone wrong with West Coast progressivism.”
In contrast, during his recent visit Lopez “spotted public drug use much less frequently. Officials didn’t ignore the remaining addicts. Community ambassadors made sure that people didn’t treat sidewalks as campgrounds. I could move through the city without having to walk in the road—something most of American mercifully takes for granted.”
Lopez never identified what neighborhoods he recently visited. He clearly did not walk in the Tenderloin. The Tenderloin has multiple sidewalks where drug activities require people to walk in the street (see above photo from last week). And the city’s most drug-filled intersection is only a block from Tenderloin Police Station.
Lopez could easily have asked members of the Tenderloin Business Coalition whether they thought San Francisco has sobered up. He did not do so. In fact, his portrait of San Francisco ignores the Tenderloin entirely.
Lopez’s op-ed came out the same day as my story on the Lurie Administration’s backing nonprofits handing out drug paraphernalia in the Tenderloin. Does that sound to you like the city is “sobering up?”
Lopez could have argued that the city’s ongoing support for drug handouts to street addicts proves the city has not sobered up. But he ignored the city’s official legal position entirely.
Instead, Lopez claims that “San Francisco still has harm reduction services, such as needle exchanges, but they’re treated as a bridge to treatment, not the end game.”
How does handing out drug paraphernalia to street addicts become a “bridge to treatment”? Lopez neither acknowledges this contradiction nor provides evidence to support his claim. Facts can’t get in the way of his San Francisco is sobering up thesis.
Lopez’s op-ed came soon after Emily Hoeven of the SF Chronicle wrote about ongoing drug activities in SOMA. She offered a very different picture of San Francisco from the New Yorker who visited the city for a few days. Unlike Lopez, Hoeven talked to members of the SOMA West Neighborhood Association who have long complained about sidewalk behavior that contradicts Lopez’s thesis. SOMA West is backing a state complaint about conditions in the neighborhood. Its members do not see SOMA as “sobering up.”
Lopez also apparently ignored the videos of sidewalk drug activities in the Mission that JJ Smith regularly posts on social media. I don’t think those living or working around Mission and 16th would say the area has “sobered up.”
Lopez also ignored Beyond Chron’s ongoing coverage of drug activities on Van Ness near Cathedral Hill. As Sebastian Luke wrote in January 2026, “Many mentally ill and drug users still roam around the Van Ness corridor, leaving residents and businesses to deal with them alone.”
Given his before and after thesis, knowing precisely where the improvement he claims to have witnessed has taken place matters. Last week I sent multiple tweets to Lopez asking where he went in San Francisco. I got no response.
Lopez’s piece came only days after former FOX News host and serial sex harasser Bill O’Reilly did a scathing story on San Francisco. O’Reilly found a city overwhelmed by sidewalk drug activities, not one that sobered up.
I know what O’Reilly reported because people told me. I did not watch his episode because I don’t believe he has any credibility. He and Lopez parachuted into San Francisco and then felt confident promoting broader conclusions about what they saw.
Let’s stop claiming these op-ed and television claims have any substantive rigor. Those who live or work in San Francisco know the realities of city streets.
San Francisco Has Improved
Most agree that San Francisco has improved under Lurie. He’s made people feel better about the city’s direction. But Lurie has yet to meaningfully reduce drug activities in the neighborhoods most beset with these problems when he took office. Most neighborhoods that never suffered from open air drug markets prior to Covid are doing great. But they were also on the rise prior to Lurie taking office.
What Lopez should have reported is that affluent neighborhoods are thriving but that San Francisco still has the most visible open air drug activities of any other major city. The mayor’s commitment to treatment has not changed this.
Lopez states in his bio that “My goal with every story is to uncover the truth, which requires hearing from multiple sides of a major event or issue.” He failed to hear from multiple sides in this op-ed.
Randy Shaw
Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.
