Homelessness

San Francisco's APEC Cleanup Hasn't 'Fixed' Its Homelessness Problem

No amount of encampment sweeps and pressure-washing sidewalks is going to solve the problem of thousands of people living on the streets.

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San Francisco police wait outside a building | Michael Ho Wai Lee / SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Newscom
(Michael Ho Wai Lee / SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Newscom)

World leaders are descending on San Francisco this week for a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Most of the coverage of APEC thus far has focused less on trade deals and geopolitics and more on the city of San Franciso's efforts to clean up the streets ahead of the conference.

Headlines in publications both local and international noted the city's energetic efforts to clear homeless encampments, clean streets, and crack down on drug activity in the downtown conference area. The Daily Mail helpfully published some before and after pictures of newly sparkling streets.

California politicians have been pretty open about the fact that the street cleanup efforts are to spruce up the city for APEC.

"I know folks say, 'Oh, they're just cleaning up this place because all these fancy leaders are coming into town.' It's true, because it's true," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom to reporters yesterday. Still, Newsom stressed that the pre-APEC cleanup is part of a new, more proactive approach of the city and the state to crack down on public vagrancy.

This transformation of a few San Francisco streets has sparked two contradicting criticisms.

Some local homeless advocates complain that the city's rush to clear encampments before APEC is disrupting the lives of the now-displaced downtown homeless people and straining shelters elsewhere in the city.

On the other hand, you have some mostly online, mostly conservative detractors who are asking why it took a communist dictator coming to town before San Francisco "fixed" its homelessness problem.

"The speed at which the downtown area has been cleared up shows that when there is impetus, it can be done. It is a shame, then, to see that politicians like Newsom only seem to act when it is politically expedient to do so," wrote Soledad Ursúa at Unherd.

In short, some people are complaining that the city has made its homelessness problem worse, while others are complaining that it could have easily been solved sooner.

This disconnect is partially the product of these two groups talking about different sides of what Matt Yglesias recently dubbed "America's two homelessness problems."

To summarize, there's the one homelessness problem experienced by the homeless themselves through a lack of housing. Then there's the other homelessness problem experienced by the public generally through exposure to a bunch of vagrancy and disorderly behavior spilling out into streets because of that lack of homes.

San Francisco's APEC cleanup did nothing to address the first homelessness problem, which is what the local homeless advocates are complaining about. The city simply moved some homeless people from one area of the city to another. Some have plausibly ended up inside homeless shelters or less visible spots on the street. But, the number of homeless people in the city remains as high as ever.

San Francisco did make some progress on the second homelessness problem by dismantling tent encampments, replacing people on the streets with flower boxes, and creating a heavily policed security cordon covering a few city blocks.

Even still, the city hardly "fixed" its second homelessness problem. It just shifted encampments and vagrant behavior away from the downtown.

In his homelessness essay, Yglesias argues that it's fine to clear a tent encampment even if it doesn't make a dent in the unsheltered homeless population because improving urban quality of life is a worthy goal by itself.

I agree with that idea to a point. In a libertarian world, there obviously wouldn't be public parks. If the park shouldn't ideally exist, it follows that there's also no inherent right to sleep in it. Likewise, there's no fundamental right to pitch a tent on a public sidewalk and create nuisances for adjacent property owners and passersby.

Nevertheless, dismantling a homeless encampment isn't free. It requires tax dollars and the exercise of actual state force. In the process of enforcing camping ordinances and responding to public nuisances, police also have a habit of violating people's well-established rights.

Indeed, routine police abuse of the homeless has produced a long string of court decisions that place limits on cities' abilities to sweep homeless encampments and arrest people for being poor in public.

It also costs the general public in the form of more taxes, more surveillance, and more interactions with law enforcement.

There's a difficult balancing act to be struck then between making streets and parks a nice and safe place to be for the general public and protecting the rights of people who would bear the brunt of quality-of-life-focused law enforcement.

That balancing act is made no easier if you're a city like San Francisco, which boasts one of the highest rates of homelessness in the entire country. The more homeless people a city has, the more force the police will have to use to maintain a given amount of public order and cleanliness.

The city's APEC cleanup measures should make that clear enough. Right now, whole blocks of downtown San Francisco are effectively a miniature police state, with security fencing, pedestrian and vehicle checkpoints, and whole areas closed off to the general public.

Those measures have worked at temporarily walling off the downtown from the city's persistent homelessness problem. They're not measures that can or should be made a permanent citywide effort—at least not if one places any value on not living in a police state.

Indeed, some of the people attacking Newsom and the San Francisco city government for only cleaning up the streets for Xi Jinping's visit seem to be flirting (sometimes explicitly) with the idea perhaps Chinese Communist Party–style public order wouldn't be such a bad thing.

That's a bad attitude for sure, but it comes from some very justified frustration.

San Francisco is one of the richest cities in the free world. Its residents shouldn't have to choose between a degraded quality of life that comes with thousands of people living on the streets and an aggressive police state that keeps those thousands of homeless out of sight and out of mind.

Escaping that unhappy tradeoff would require the city, and the surrounding region, to radically liberalize housing construction.

That would bring housing prices down and bring a lot more people inside. That wouldn't solve everyone's problems, but it would mean a lot of dysfunctional behavior playing out in public will instead move behind closed doors.

A less overwhelmed San Francisco city government (and voluntary philanthropic actors) could also more judiciously deal with those remaining people that insist on pitching a tent in the park or smoking meth on the street.