On Tuesday morning, Tiffany “TT” Tannahill arrived at the homelessness encampment under the Central Freeway to watch over the belongings of three of her friends who she had met while living on the street at the intersection of Duboce and Woodward.
Her friends owned a large tent, big enough to fit another tent inside, which they used as a “shared lounge space and respite.” They would often invite guests over to listen to music and hang out, said Tannahill, who currently lives in the Mission Cabins, the tiny homes village near the 16th Street BART station, but remains connected to the homeless community under the Central Freeway.
But after Tuesday morning, the lounge would be a respite no longer. Around 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, police and Public Works arrived for a sweep that seemed to catch the street dwellers unawares, clearing out several encampments on 13th Street under the highway.
The sweep came after Mayor London Breed announced on July 18 that the city would start being “very aggressive” in moving encampments, following a June U.S. Supreme Court ruling that enables cities to fine, incarcerate and remove homeless people from the streets without offering shelter or housing in return.
City law still requires offers of shelter, and the mayor’s office has said it will continue providing those offers alongside enforcement. But at a Thursday press conference in Alamo Square last week, Breed made the goals of the sweeps clear: “We are going to make them so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer.”
A city spokesperson told the media that everyone was offered shelter placement on Tuesday, countering the claims of homeless people on site. The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Tannahill quickly began packing up the tent yesterday morning, hurried along by the Public Works officials. She recalled one of the officers at the sweep screaming in her face, telling her he was going to take all of the groups’ stuff, “like the Grinch who stole camp,” Tannahill said.
“Please stop talking about me as if I’m not here or not human,” Tannahill recalled responding. “As if I’m a piece of shit, just like all the shit that you’re talking about taking, which is all of my comfort, all of my entertainment, all of my community.”
City workers dismantled and confiscated the group’s tent during the sweep, but Tannahill managed to save several bags of belongings — some hers, some her friends’.
By 1 p.m., Public Works was gone and had wiped almost all traces of street living off of 13th Street, which had previously hosted five encampments, according to Tannahill. On the stretch of 13th between Mission and Bryant streets yesterday afternoon, only a single tent was visible, and a handful of homeless people remained, Tannahill among them.
She had planned to learn about a free laundry offering at a South Van Ness Avenue laundromat, but instead spent her afternoon surrounded by the boxes and bags she’d filled.
Keisha, a young woman who had been living in the encampment, kept Tannahill company, sitting in a wheelchair with a teal fleece blanket draped over the back of the chair; she occasionally wandered up and down 13th Street on foot.
Homeless people in the encampments under the freeway had found community there, Tannahill explained, particularly people who had been living there since they were adolescents. “There are people that the younger folks look up to and depend on,” she said. “Those people raised them. They helped keep them alive.” Sweeps can devastate those relationships.
Tannahill said that this sort of community can be hard to replicate in places like Mission Cabins or homeless shelters. Many shelters don’t allow guests, Tannahill explained, and also don’t have any communal spaces.
“We’re used to shooting the shit, maybe around a little campfire or something, you know?” she said. But in shelters, many of which have curfews and other restrictions, “there’s no real hub for people to meet at, there’s no encouragement of that,” she said.
Tannahill finds curfews particularly difficult to live with. At night, she’s often anxious and likes to go ride her bike, a prized possession she says was gifted to her by an old couple that was clearing out their storage unit. It has a white frame, worn leather seat and handles, and a string of yellow butterflies wound around the handlebars.
On those night bike rides, “I do treasure hunting,” Tannahill said. She’ll find clothes and other abandoned items, and “resurrect” them by cleaning them and modifying them — she has plans to sew a patch over a burn hole on the back shoulder of Levi’s bomber jacket and to cut a pair of jeans into shorts for Keisha.
Tannahill’s outfit yesterday was partially a result of those efforts. She found her sun hat in an alley and her pants “up the street.”
Tannahill says her outfits, in which she likes to have a balance of feminine and masculine elements, attract notice: “I have even been called a fashion icon in the Tenderloin,” she said.
But most of the stuff she finds, she gives away. Some go to friends. Some she puts in “free piles” for people to take. She’s started one today at 13th and Folsom, leaving a kid’s spiderman hoodie, a few sweaters and jackets, a book, and a figurine of a minion on a floaty.
“My free piles, usually they’re absorbed pretty quickly,” she said with a touch of pride.
At one point, a man dropped by to ask if she had an “incense burner” he could borrow. “I mean, I can make one,” she replied, and started looking around in her bags, showing him other little things she owned while she searched.
“We lose people, and we lose our things, and we lose our dignity,” Tannahill had said earlier about becoming homeless, her eyes welling up. “We lose our status as even being human.”
She paused, and then added, with a tiny tremble in her voice: “I am somebody. And so is Keisha. And so is everyone who lost their items and or was made to feel unimportant or even arrested for wanting to be a part of their community in the way that they know best.”
Additional reporting by Joe Rivano Barros.
“We’re used to shooting the shit, maybe around a little campfire or something, you know?”
Yeah. We know. Fires are one of many reasons encampments are unacceptable
Personally, I would never start a campfire on a city sidewalk. Because I don’t have to. Because I have an apartment with heat and a little space for guests.
And that’s all folks like Tiffany want, too: the same very basic things we all want, and that most of us are fortunate enough to take for granted.
It’s too bad they are so lost to drug addiction that their drug addled brains can’t put all those basic things like heat and shelter before their desire to engage in anti-social junkie behavior
I empathize with the idea that tent dwellers can only care for their immediate needs and have no obligation to cater to a society that turns their back on them. But lets stop pretending that they’re just benign community members who just need to be left alone in their tents.
The issue isn’t their need for community – the issue is that their needs are causing sidewalks (and therefore the city) to be unwalkable. “We’re used to shooting the shit, maybe around a little campfire or something, you know?” No one is entitled to a campfire in the middle of the city – this is one of the big reasons there’s fires in the mission. Entire buildings (and therefore blocks and neighborhoods) destroyed because they feel entitled to trash the city.
Guess the chaos and lawlessness since 2019 are coming to an end.
Thank you, Gavin Newsom!
I used to bicycle to work past this homeless encampment. Three different times while I was stopped at a light some homeless person harassed or threatened me. I changed my route and it took me longer but I did not feel safe on that street.
This piece reads like the Onion for anyone who regularly travels through the swept area. Thank you Gavin. Thank you London.
TT looks like she’s ready to move past encampments and tiny homes and so is the rest of the city.
The only thing that we can count on is that homeless people will be maintained in San Francisco, because each and every interaction between the city or a nonprofit and a homeless person makes a ka-ching laundering money. The conservatives will never give up political gold that is homelessness, gold that’s helped them consolidate power over the past 25 yrt.
So the plan is apparently to play whack-a-mole—moving the encampments from one location to another around the city. The city has built no shelter beds, focusing instead on “affordable” housing at the cost of $1M per unit.
If the city is going to get serious about turning the situation around, it needs to require people to accept shelter and treatment, not shovel them into other neighborhoods. It needs to require the able-bodied homeless to work and learn some skills so that they can help themselves.
There is no plan; these “sweeps” are performative only. If you want another four years of this nonsense, vote for London Breed.
Campers,
You make this sound like an adventure out of Mary Poppins.
I clean around the encampment on Stevenson adjoining the one you’re describing and they cleared it too yesterday and today it is back with a big sign wrapped around a telephone pole announcing a Block Party for the Woodward Homeless Community on August 10th.
How about holding their next party at one of their new City Campgrounds on Treasure Island or on half of Lincoln or Harding Golf Courses where they’d be able to go all Tina Turner Mad Max and bother no one ?
A nice lady from DPW (Daneeka ?) phoned this morning as Skippy and I were cleaning toilet paper and other trash out of the big permanent urine pool behind the bus stop in front of the Armory to tell me that it would take an act from “Upper Management” to move the virtually unused Pit Stop from around the corner on 14th Street to a spot around corner to the Front of the Armory.
She suggested I phone 311 which I have dozens of times.
Here are the latest 311 numbers from 9am two days ago …
Request to Power Wash front of Armory and Cite Owner … 311 #452791
Request to return Trash Can to area next to Bus Stop in Front of Armory … 311 #452817
Request to move Pit Stop from 14th Street to Front of Armory … 311 #452834
Frankly, I don’t know how the woman knew to phone me if she weren’t sitting there looking at these complaints and now she wants to to fill out new 311 #’s ?
OK, I’ll do it now …
I reached ‘Todd’ first and for Power Wash in Front of 1800 Mission for feces he gave me a 311 number of #101000464497
When I asked to have the Trash Can at the bus stop in Front of 1800 Mission returned he said it was a duplicate request and they don’t do duplicates and transferred me to another operator.
Operator ‘Mel’ took request to move Pit Stop from 14th Street to the Front of the Armory and that number is 311 #101000464584
Maybe if I went a testified in front of their commission ?
Go Niners !!
h.
brevity is the essence of wit
A day earlier (Monday) from the Panhandle/Haight/West NOPA @ 11AM, a neighbor filmed and posted about a sweep. The footage showed 7 DPW trucks overflowing with items and articles, 3 police cars and vans, 3 Dept. of Emergency Sheriff’s vans and approximately 31 SFPD, DPW and Sheriffs all present to remove a single individual from a single sidewalk tent. A neighbor whose living room window directly overlooked the tent said the SFPD and city workers did not offer the camper a place to go; the cop gave the camper “20 minutes to disappear.” In the footage, the city workers are standing around with their arms crossed and hands on hips while a single officer engages the unhoused person. Imagine the cost to the city (and taxpayers) of operations like this. The optics of here, like a law and order cop show, are TERRIBLE for Newsom and Breed and for any candidate or elected leader who supports this kind of wasteful, pointless and cruel use of city funds. Are they trying to break people so that they can never function in society again? Neighbors who live in the multi unit building where the person was camped were working with them to try to stabilize them and get them off the street. For +10 years, millions of dollars wasted on performative crap like this sweep and starting with Newsom’s “care not cash” and then moving to Breed’s secret and illegal sweeps and “bag and tag” operations, the sweeps have failed. Shame on all of us. Here is full blown cruelty in one of the the wealthiest cities in all the world.
Actually the optics are not horrible. This is what people have been asking for for years. How well did the neighbors “stabilization” work? I agree that there will always be some percent of the population that “just cant make it”. What are we supposed to do when everyone (homeless and housed) decide its just totally OK to be out there pitching tents and piling garbage on the streets? Live and let live.. but THIS IS RIDICULOUS.
We will never know about our efforts to help stabilize the tent camper who was removed by +30 city employees on Monday. It is cruel and insane to continue expensive and ineffective sweeps and bagging & tagging. SF has been doing so for +30 years and the problem is worse than ever.
To be fair those encampments around the Panhandle and DMV have been on the city’s list for over a year now. I know that HOT teams and HSOC have offered them shelter at least once a month, more likely on a weekly basis, for the last year. No one in the encampment is willing to go indoors.
Sure, that’s one (tired) way of looking at it. Read the room. After years of seeing the city getting trashed, there’s no shortage of ppl who think otherwise. As for the money part, it looks like there are plenty of funds to move from the enablers and corrupt non-profit profiteers to put to work elsewhere.
Imagine if the SFPD, the Sheriff’s Dept of Emergency Services and the DPW workers were all trained (and had the tools) to get human beings to leave the street and come inside to a safe, clean spot with a roof over their heads. The city could buy up the abandoned motels across the city at bargain basement prices; here is existing deeply affordable housing!!! Why is the city pissing away precious taxpayer dollars on these performative sweeps that actually solve and accomplish nothing?
What blissful ignorance Greeny.
And you dear Brandon are a fool if you believe chronic sweeping and bagging and tagging and rearranging unhoused people from neighborhood to neighborhood will resolve ir solve anything. You might as well douse barrels full of cash with gasoline and light them on fire. Feel safer or better now? I don’t.
Thanks for the humanizing reporting, ML. No one loves the current housing situation but it’s very good to remember that our city’s unhoused are fellow human beings. (Realizing that even many of our minimally housed neighbors, like those in SROs, have no *personal* equivalent to my living room, was really helpful to me in contextualizing some of the behavior I see in the city’s public spaces.)
ML, do you know what the situation is with regards to actual shelter beds? In other words, can you drill down into whether it is even possible for the city to make genuine shelter offers right now?
So now the goalposts are shifting from housing is a human right to living rooms are a human right?
Thank you for this beautiful reporting. It’s a needed reminder that folks living on our streets want the same basic things that we all want: A heated living room in which to gather with friends, what a concept! Everyone deserves housing with dignity.