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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nKevin Fagan interviews Alex \u201cShorty\u201d Piersen at a homeless encampment near the Ferry Building. In his four decades covering homelessness, Fagan has yet to see a system that enduringly shelters and counsels every person on our streets and keeps them housed.Jessica Christian\/The Chronicle 2019<\/em><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The first homeless camp sweep I covered was in winter 1981, after the grape harvests concluded in the San Joaquin Valley. As a police reporter, I watched cops roust a farmworkers\u2019 spread of lean-tos and tarps outside Lodi. The pickers weren\u2019t needed anymore \u2014 they knew it, the cops knew it. No arguments. They just left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ll be back next season,\u201d I remember one of the farmworkers \u2014 most of them were up from Mexico \u2014 casually saying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe know,\u201d one of the officers replied with a laugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fast forward to Oakland and Contra Costa County in the late 1980s and the 1990s, when I went with homeless activists to cover encampment sweeps in streets and fields. This time there were arguments. But the laws were clear. Move or be cited, maybe arrested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same dynamic held in 2003 when I spent six months on the streets of San Francisco with Chronicle photographer Brant Ward. The five-day series we produced, \u201cShame of the City,\u201d <\/em>concluded that radically improving street counseling and wraparound supportive housing could make a huge dent in the homelessness crisis (that\u2019s still true). <\/p>\n\n\n\n But we also found the same ol,\u2019 same ol,\u2019 when it came to kicking sidewalk eyesores down the road. Whenever street cleaning trucks showed up, sometimes with a cop or a street counselor, whatever camp we were in had no choice \u2014 everyone scattered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Scattering homeless people was the norm pretty much everywhere in California until 2018. That\u2019s when the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a\u00a0decade-old lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0challenging anti-camping laws in Boise, Idaho, saying sweeps couldn\u2019t be done unless campers were offered shelter. Until that ruling, there was little to constrain governments from chasing homeless people away using anti-camping and loitering laws. The only efforts to move campers into shelters were voluntary. And even after 2018, most places found workarounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Boise decision<\/a> on June 28, ruling that cities again have a freer hand in clearing homeless settlements, it mostly reset everyone back to what used to be normal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Homeless camps can be genuinely disruptive to businesses and residential neighborhoods, which then pressure cities to clear them out. And most homeless people don\u2019t really want <\/em>to sleep in the dirt. The problems that put them there and keep them there are dizzyingly complex, and the best thing is to bring them inside. But despite some terrific efforts throughout the country, including those in San Francisco, nobody has yet created a system to enduringly shelter and counsel every person on our streets and keep them housed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s been like this for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For most of my four decades covering homelessness, there weren\u2019t big tent clusters like today. Homeless folks called sweeps \u201cping-ponging.\u201d I remember Peg, a guy with a titanium leg in a little camp near San Francisco City Hall, shrugging in 2003 when I asked him about being rousted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe cops ping-pong us from block to block every few days or, if we\u2019re lucky, weeks,\u201d Peg said. \u201cAs long as you don\u2019t fight and just move on, it\u2019s all right. The cops don\u2019t really want to hassle you, but they have to move things around or the people who live here start complaining a lot. Who the hell wants to move, but what can you do?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n His answer back then wouldn\u2019t be that much different today, with the caveat that now sweeps are accompanied by teams that offer services \u2014 which most campers refuse, because they\u2019re either too stuck in street life or unhappy with congregate shelters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And actually, \u201cping-ponging\u201d was the tactic of choice even before the term \u201chomeless\u201d sprang into use in the early \u201980s. People were called winos, bums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I know because I lived it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve been on my own since I was very young, and for the first year or so that I was at San Jose State University in the mid-1970s, I lived in my car during semester breaks. The neighborhood was rough, and cops didn\u2019t take kindly to a skinny youngster curled up in a Volkswagen bug. I\u2019d get a rap on the window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMove on, bum,\u201d they\u2019d say. I had no choice. I\u2019d drive a few blocks away and go back to sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Columbia University professor Dale Maharidge has written about sweeps since 1980, when he drove to California from Cleveland and slept in his truck until he got a Sacramento Bee reporting job. He\u2019s traveled across America many times to chronicle the homeless and working poor, winning a Pulitzer Prize along the way. After decades of watching camps crop up and get batted down, he tells me he hasn\u2019t seen \u201cany real curb on sweeps\u201d except for a brief pause during the pandemic because it was safer to not disrupt people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He and I marveled that the problem really hasn\u2019t changed since we were youngsters sleeping in our vehicles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe need some kind of national policy to really fix this,\u201d Dale said. \u201cBut there is no policy. We\u2019re not a society. I don\u2019t know what we are, but not a society.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thankfully, cities and counties, especially in the Bay Area, are not as hardball with sweeps as they were even 20 years ago. And though homelessness has mushroomed, along with public exasperation over the street scene, so have resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2002, San Francisco officials counted 8,600 homeless people on its streets in a one-night tally, and it spent about $150 million a year on homeless services. This year, the one-night count was 8,323<\/a>, and the city spends around $680 million addressing homelessness. San Francisco today has around 4,000 shelter beds; in 2002 it had only 1,300.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it\u2019s still not enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Four people are hitting the streets for each one who gets housed. Most homelessness workers I talk to say San Francisco needs to create at least 2,000 more shelter beds to get ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the meantime, city leaders say they\u2019ll continue to offer shelter and housing when they do sweeps. What will that mean in practice? Almost certainly more of the same: pushing people from neighborhood to neighborhood. Yes, often trying to help them \u2014 but pushing. With no quick end in sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin Fagan is a Chronicle reporter. His book, \u201cThe Lost and The Found,\u201d<\/em> about two homeless people rescued from the streets with the help of his reporting, is due out Feb. 11.<\/p>\n\n\n\n July 20, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Kevin Fagan<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n REPORTER<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin Fagan is a longtime, award-winning reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle, specializing in homelessness, enterprise news-feature writing, breaking news and crime. He has ridden with the rails with modern-day hobos, witnessed seven prison executions, written extensively about serial killers including the Unabomber, Doodler and Zodiac, and covered disasters ranging from the Sept. 11 terror attacks at Ground Zero to California\u2019s devastating wildfires. Homelessness remains a core focus of his, close to his heart as a journalist who cares passionately about the human condition.<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018Ping-ponging\u2019 was the tactic of choice to deal with the homeless even before the term \u2018homeless\u2019 sprang into use in the early 1980s. It never went away. By\u00a0Kevin Fagan,ReporterJuly 20, 2024 (SFChronicle.com) Kevin Fagan interviews Alex \u201cShorty\u201d Piersen at a homeless encampment near the Ferry Building. In his four decades… Continue reading More Reading<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Mayor Breed says \u2018very aggressive\u2019 sweep of S.F. homeless encampments will launch in August<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n