How San Francisco is trying to halt its ‘doom-loop’ of drug deaths, crime and homelessness
SAN FRANCISCO – The mayor of San Francisco is a woman on a mission. The city has gained a reputation for soaring rates of homelessness, drug addiction and crime. But the mayor says you shouldn’t believe everything you’ve heard.
London Breed, the Democrat Mayor, is currently basking in the success of last week’s Apec (Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation) summit – the most important global event to be held in San Francisco since 1945, when the city served as the backdrop for the signing of the charter that created the United Nations.
But for San Francisco, now comes the hard part.
Thirty thousand Apec delegates from more than 20 countries have departed. The fortified barriers around the Moscone Centre have come down. The sniffer dogs are resting and thousands of police and Secret Service personnel drafted in for the event have been withdrawn.
Residents are left asking themselves one central question: will San Francisco’s clean-up, exhibited in the city’s central area during the summit, now take permanent hold? Or will things drift back to the doom and squalor with which the mayor fears most outsiders associate her city?
“We are a major city and we are not without our challenges”, Ms Breed, 49, conceded in an interview with i. “In some cases, the challenges that exist in San Francisco get unfairly painted”.
Those challenges include record levels of homelessness, record numbers of drug deaths ignited by the tsunami of fentanyl sweeping America’s cities, and an economic collapse that has seen retailers flee San Francisco, leaving 1.85 million square feet of office space abandoned in the city.
Things are so bad that in August, one local official planned to offer a “doom loop tour” of homeless encampments, open-air drug markets and deserted department stores. Tickets sold out, but the event was scrapped amid public fury and the city commissioner responsible for it then resigned.
Ms Breed, who faces enormous political pressure to turn the city’s fortunes around before she faces a potentially bruising re-election battle next November, is determined to meet the moment.
First, she pushes back on the facts. Violent crime, for example, is 20 per cent below the average of 21 major American cities, and fully one third lower than it was in the mid-1980s. The gloves, she says, are now off in the battle against homelessness after the city won a legal case giving her sweeping new powers to clear the encampments that have become a hallmark of San Francisco’s downtown.
Ms Breed told i that the lawsuit, brought by advocates for the homeless “made it difficult to move people off the streets”. She hails a ruling in the city’s favour by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that means “if someone is offered shelter, they are no longer ‘involuntarily homeless’. That has given us the ability to move more people into shelter and into housing”, she said.
Put another way, if a homeless San Franciscan declines the city’s offer to be housed, the mayor can unleash police to force them off the streets.
The clean-up ahead of Apec was so sweeping, that many residents barely recognised how well San Francisco scrubbed up. “I walked down Powell Street and only saw two homeless people,” one long-term resident enthused, before immediately wondering whether everything would “slide back to normal” after the summit’s conclusion.
Even during Apec, you didn’t have to stray too far from the summit site to encounter imagery more usually associated with San Francisco. Above one underground station serving the historic Mission District, drug use was in full swing last Wednesday night, with addicts openly shooting up on the streets.
A new survey shows that San Francisco is on track to witness more drug deaths in 2023 than in any previous year on record. In their meeting last week, China’s President Xi Jinping told President Joe Biden that he was willing to help crack down on illicit Chinese shipments of fentanyl and the chemicals used to create it. Ms Breed calls Mr Biden’s commitment to the fight against the epidemic “really a game-changer for us”.
Cynics abound regarding the city’s potential to turn itself around. The mayor plans to take vacant retail and office space and replace it with mixed-use buildings that include residential units in the city centre. Other cities across America are facing a similar conundrum, but San Francisco is particularly hard hit by the determination of tech sector employees to work from home rather than chat around the water cooler in old-style office space.
“There is a perception that San Francisco is a God-forsaken hellscape”, Josh Koehn, a reporter at the San Francisco Standard, said. “But by and large, residents of San Francisco do understand that this is still a pretty great place to live”.
Breed’s long-term political future will hinge on residents buying in to her vision of the city’s comeback, and on visitors telling their families and friends that things aren’t as bad as they might think.
“How we push back is by what people experience,” she says, “reporting their stories, their experiences differently than what others are trying to put out there.”
She wants you to leave your heart in San Francisco. But whether her city is ready to accommodate your ardour will determine the outcome of its next chapter.
