How An Unhoused San Francisco Resident Navigates a New Era of Street Enforcement

When Armando Herrera got out of drug treatment last year, he returned to the streets of San Francisco — still unhoused, but in a better place than he’d been in years.

He’d kicked his addiction to alcohol and meth, regained a sense of confidence and reconnected with his kids. Ten months away from the chaos of street life had given him something like stability. But back outside, he found the ground had shifted.

Before rehab, he could set up his tent in one spot and leave it there for weeks. Now, the rules of survival had changed.

“You can’t leave [your tent],” he said. “The first time, they give you a warning. The second time, they give you a ticket. The third time you go to jail.”

So these days, he camps near an industrial building with two others, but never for very long. They arrive late, set up after dark and break down again before sunrise in a daily cycle of, as he puts it, “Go and come back, go and come back, go and come back.”

That routine has kept Herrera out of jail, but it hasn’t gotten him off the street.

A decade into homelessness, he’s navigating a new and more aggressive era of street enforcement in San Francisco, one shaped by last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling giving cities broad authority to punish people for sleeping outside, even when there are no shelter beds available.

Since then, some 50 cities statewide have passed or strengthened anti-camping ordinances, according to a May report from UC Berkeley. San Francisco has leaned into a tougher stance.

Since July of last year, the city conducted at least 471 encampment sweeps and placed over 900 people into shelters. Meanwhile, police arrested more than 1,100 people for “lodging without permission,” essentially public camping, and the city’s district attorney filed charges in just over 250 of those cases. So far, about 100 have been resolved, most through diversion programs that allow people to avoid a criminal record if they meet certain conditions.

Those efforts have reshaped the streets and changed the lives of unhoused residents like Herrera.

Herrera has a warm, slightly weary demeanor, with a smile that reveals straight white teeth and deep creases around his brown eyes. He’s 53 and has lived in San Francisco for three decades. He said he moved here from Mexico City and married an American citizen. He had three kids, a home and a furniture restoration business. Then it all unraveled.

“It’s been kinda like chaos for the last 15 years,” he said.

The details and timeline of his story are a little murky. He said after the 2008 financial crisis, his business failed, then he worked for someone else in the furniture business until a job injury ended that, too. He said his wife died, and he lost contact with his kids. His disability benefits provided enough income to pay for a place to live or for food and essentials, but not both. In 2014, he lost his home.

For a while, he got by in cheap hotels, selling what he had until there was nothing left.

“That’s when I started seeing people putting tents everywhere,” he said. “I was like, ‘Well, might as well do the same,’ since I really got no place to go.”

He camped with others for safety and a sense of belonging. “Being homeless and then being alone, you just feel like you don’t belong,” he said. “That’s when depression comes.”

Eventually, he was arrested for possessing a stolen bike — something he said he bought off the street. From jail, he entered a diversion program, which led him to rehab. That’s where he was when the Supreme Court handed down its decision.

Then-Mayor London Breed was among the first in the state to begin enforcing a crackdown on public camping, vowing to make people sleeping outside “so uncomfortable on the streets of San Francisco that they have to take our offer [of shelter]” in part by authorizing police to issue citations, which could lead to misdemeanors.

Back outside, Herrera found fewer tents and fewer familiar faces. “All the people that I knew back then, they’re gone,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s because they have housing now … they just totally disappear.”

To keep from getting ticketed, Herrera learned to stay mobile. He got a storage unit and bought an electric scooter, lashing a city garbage can to it so he could haul his supplies.

“You have to carry all the stuff everywhere you go,” he said. “It’s a pain in the butt being in the street and not being comfortable and not being in a place where you can lay your head and take a nap.” He said it’s exhausting to be around people constantly.

For all the ways the new era has made Herrera’s life harder, he said there are some upsides.

The crackdown on encampments has changed the way housed residents treat him. In the past, when he had a messy camp near businesses, he said owners dumped water on his tent, and once, he suspects, even set fire to it. “They were always calling the cops,” he said.

Now that he moves his tent daily, he said some of those same business owners smile at him. “They do treat me differently,” he said. “They always say hi.”

In the parts of the city hardest hit by homelessness, business owners and residents have long said encampments make their lives miserable — driving away customers and forcing them to dodge syringes and human waste on the sidewalk. Some say things have improved since the sweeps ramped up. Others say not much has changed.

For Kathy Vaughn, a Tenderloin resident, the difference is personal.

“I just felt like nobody gave a damn,” she said.

Before, she had to walk in the street, dodging cars, to avoid the tents that stretched from her doorway to the corner store. “It was like literally a nightmare to try to get through this neighborhood,” she said.

Vaughn was homeless herself once, and said she has empathy for unhoused people, but she supports the city’s more aggressive approach. “I love my neighborhood. I love the people,” she said. “I wanna see it even better.”

Herrera said he didn’t like the old status quo either. He hated feeling like a nuisance.

“It’s better for both of us. I never thought it was a good thing,” he said of setting up camp in front of businesses and apartment buildings. “I did it because I needed it.”

While he may be keeping a lower profile now and making life easier for business owners and housed residents, he’s still homeless. He said he wants to work. He had a job with the Salvation Army for a few months, and eventually hopes to get back to restoring furniture.

“I need a place I can stay so I can go on with my life,” he said.

He recently got a break: his social worker told him some housing had finally opened up.

“I was like ‘No, I can’t believe it!’ I almost started crying,” he said. “I gave her a big hug.”

Herrera had few details about the offer at the time, but was expecting to move in within the next few weeks. It’s not clear if that happened. He hasn’t answered his phone since.