San Francisco is set to enact a homelessness solution it once thought unthinkable: city-sanctioned open-air encampments.
For years, San Francisco police have ordered tents removed from city streets, even at times slashing them with knives themselves. Public Works employees have tossed the ever-ubiquitous nylon homes of desperate people into dump trucks on a weekly basis.
This week, however, San Francisco will launch the first of five planned “Safe Sleeping Sites,” KQED News has confirmed, with the hope that unhoused people will be kept socially distant amid the COVID-19 pandemic in a controlled location, replete with services like showers and food.
The first location was announced Wednesday by Mayor London Breed: an encampment of roughly 90 tents piled nearly on top of each other near the Asian Art Museum – on City Hall’s front doorstep – will be officially sanctioned and allowed to expand onto Fulton Street, between the museum and the Main Library.
The second city-sanctioned safe sleeping site is already under operation by a local nonprofit, Mother Brown’s Dining Room in the Bayview, at a park known locally as MLK Park, on Third Street and Armstrong Avenue.