Temple of Zagan

Certain areas of downtown San Francisco has long been plagued with drug addicts and homeless people, as well as the makeshift tent cities they live in.  Recently, they miraculously disappeared.

A deeper look revealed that this is due to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which went from Nov. 15 to Nov. 17, where leaders from the 21 member-states of the APEC forum will meet in San Francisco with the goal of promoting trade and investment.  Among the leaders attending will be President Joe Biden, who will meet with the Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The quick disappearance of the problems long plaguing downtown San Francisco has some long time residents perturbed.  One user, Mike Solana, posts on twitter:

I’m downtown sf and there are heavily armed policement everywhere – underground, drug stores, street corners.  “How you doing?” one asked, super friendly, hand on his gun.  All in advance of Xi’s visit I guess, but crime has evaporated.

It could be like this every day.

Do you know how radicalizing it is to finally know for sure the government is capable of ending crime overnight, it just… chooses not to?

 

Some residents share a similar view, but is even less optimistic about the government’s actual ability to end the crimes.

A resident of the South of Market area (SoMa for short) and community activist Ricci Lee Wynne, elaborates:

They started clearing the tents earlier this week and there is definitely a lot more police presence…

They’ve cleared out the tents that were near the Moscone Center on Howard Street, which tells me the city had the capability to do this all along — instead they just do the bare minimum.

Once APEC is gone, police presence will start to simmer down again, the tents will return. And it will slowly flare up again. What we need is a permanent solution…

SoMa resident and business owner, Adam Mesnick, mentions that he has seen temporary housing pop up in hotels for some of the homeless over the past week.  He’s not too impressed by the apparent disappearance of the addicts in the places that have been cleaned up, since the addicts/homeless are just being moved elsewhere:

They are just essentially herding the problem around but offering no long-term solutions… I’m just outside what they consider the ‘containment zone’ for APEC, so the problem is getting pushed into my area, which is already pretty saturated with drug activity.

I don’t know if these tents will be in physical view during APEC, but it will be virtually impossible to eliminate all of that…

…They are very good at creating an illusion and they are very good at performance art.

It’s a Band-Aid and indicative of a poor administration. And you know, really at this point, the frustration couldn’t be any louder.

…I’ve likened this period of time in the Tenderloin like the Gold Rush, but here it’s the Fentanyl Rush. We have the cheapest fentanyl on the planet and it’s pretty much easy to be highly successful from the bottom.

For additional illustration, here is another picture of a homeless camp in the Tenderloin area:

Here is the same area after the recent temporary cleanup:

Long ago I had very obnoxious and noisy neighbors who frequently continued their loud shenanigans even as late as 2 or 3 am into the morning.  The rare occasions when they would be quiet for an entire day did not feel like a break to me.  They inspired both a sense of terrible anticipation as I waited for the noise to start again, as well as a sense of frustration, since it appeared that the horrible neighbors can indeed be quiet if they wanted to.  I suppose the temporary improvement in crime in the downtown San Francisco area feels much the same way to the residents of the area, who have long been plagued by the drug addicts and homeless there.

The future does not look too good for this area, overall.  As one of the above quoted residents mentioned, the addicts and homeless are simply there, and if one removed them from the area, they still have to end up somewhere, usually just the neighborhood a couple of streets over.

The city of San Francisco is doing the equivalent of shoving trash and dust under a carpet before important guests visit one’s home, except in this case, the “trash” is actual people.

 

 

 

Original screencap from twitter:

More detailed reporting on this issue: https://archive.li/KxZ5P