The city wants to shake its reputation as a “zombie-apocalypse wasteland.” How it achieves that goal is another story.
“People seem really happy, and they think San Francisco is beautiful,” London Breed proclaimed last November. Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, was praising what had been criticized by many as a last-minute cleanup before the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference. Ahead of President Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, and others gathering in the city, a swath of San Francisco had undergone a rapid revitalization. Homeless encampments? Cleared. Sidewalk feces? Scrubbed. Pedestrian plazas? Beautified.
Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who himself previously served as San Francisco’s mayor, went so far as to say the quiet part out loud. “I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town,’” Newsom remarked during a press conference. “That’s true because it’s true,” he said, adding that, throughout months of conversations, “we’ve raised the bar of expectation between the city, the county, and the state.”
Could San Francisco keep the bar raised after all of those world leaders left town? And what was the daily reality of the city that for years had been derided as a leftist wasteland? A few weeks ago, I went to San Francisco to find out.
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One day I took a long walk across downtown with Joe Creitz, an employment-litigation attorney and a law professor who has lived in the city for 35 years. He’s liberal—by no means the type of San Franciscan who might recommend that I read the best-selling treatise San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He has a deep love for his adopted hometown, and pointed me toward much of its still-there beauty, both cultural and aesthetic. But he also spoke matter-of-factly about the city's problems.
Creitz told me that the Xi cleanup had not dealt “with the problem of homelessness,” only “with the visible manifestations of homelessness in a very precise geographic area for a very limited time.” Some of the cosmetic improvements made in the run-up to APEC have remained. But the city still has significant issues with its unhoused population, drug trade, and crime, as it’s had for decades. The bigger question is whether anything can fix these problems in the long term.
Creitz and I walked throughout the multi-block radius that, back in the fall, had been part of a safety-and-cleanliness perimeter called the “exclusion zone”—the sort of phrase you’d expect to hear in North Korea. This “zone” was established by the State Department and the Secret Service shortly before APEC. We wandered up Market Street and over to one of the public areas that was overhauled before the conference: United Nations Plaza, formerly home to a sprawling tent encampment. The city had attempted to “activate” this space, installing a mini skate park. We found the plaza deserted. But the next day, when I went back to the area to have coffee with Jaime Viloria, a 41-year-old community organizer, skaters were actually out there, their boards clacking against the pavement. Viloria, who lives and works in the Tenderloin, said that the city may have succeeded in cleaning up the plaza, but in the process, it had only moved the old problem elsewhere: Scores of unhoused people, drug users, and drug dealers had simply relocated to the surrounding streets.
Just one block down and two blocks over, on the corner of Sixth and Mission, Creitz and I passed dozens of people milling about, many of whom were bent over at the waist, slightly swaying, apparently high on fentanyl. We walked among numerous sidewalk tents and shanties, frequently sidestepping streaks of feces, or mounds of it, as well as broken glass, discarded clothing, old office chairs, and large piles of assorted debris. “I don’t argue with anybody who wants to say it’s disturbing,” Creitz said. “It’s fucking disturbing—we are really letting down a huge swath of the population.” He didn’t blame unhoused people for occupying public space; he blamed the city’s affordable-housing crisis.
The mayor’s office has grown weary of what it believes to be a reductive narrative about San Francisco. Breed’s spokesperson emailed me a lengthy statement insisting that the city works to address homelessness 365 days a year, not just before high-profile conferences, and that it has made great strides in expanding shelter capacity since Breed took office, in 2018. “San Francisco has and continues to lead with offering services and housing to those struggling on our streets, but we also have a responsibility to not allow people to deteriorate on our streets,” the spokesperson said. “Like cities everywhere, we understand San Francisco has a range of challenges that unfortunately require a significant amount of time, but we’re beginning to see progress being made.”
One of the most challenging questions to answer about San Francisco is whether the city is really “worse” now than ever before. Like every major city, San Francisco has long been rife with both drugs and homelessness. But in San Francisco, perhaps more than in any other American urban center, the coronavirus pandemic catalyzed a new era of tension that has not quite eased.
Back in the spring of 2020, local officials made the hugely consequential decision to reduce capacity at congregant homeless shelters. While some unhoused people ended up in vacant hotel rooms, hundreds had no place to go other than the streets and sidewalks. Tax-paying residents freaked out.
“Suddenly, the volume of the unhoused population in San Francisco became a lot more visible,” Creitz said. “And at the same time, I and a bunch of other people were like, ‘You can’t just throw people onto the street in the middle of a pandemic, in a rainy winter.’ I mean, that’s cruel. That’s ghoulish.” He began buying dozens of tents and personally handing them out to people. His actions were valorized by some, but they pissed off others. With so many San Franciscans newly working from home, online communities such as NextDoor surged with rage at the very sight of the tents. “It’s an irony for the unhoused people, because tents tend to make them a little bit safer on the street, but they’re also a magnet for neighbor complaints and enforcement,” Creitz said. Some homeless people would repeatedly have their tent seized or destroyed; Creitz would provide them with a replacement.
Any data gathering around the number of unhoused people is imperfect. In 2022, the city’s “point-in-time homeless count” showed that approximately 7,754 people were experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, down from 8,035 in 2019 but up from 5,404 in 2005. Following federal guidelines, those numbers are gathered on one night every two years. The 2024 count took place this week, and preliminary findings will be released in the spring, with a full report coming this summer. “Point-in-time” is just that. In reality, the number of people who experience homelessness at least once during the year is much higher—in 2022, it was some 20,000 San Franciscans. Crime statistics, too, fail to offer a tidy narrative. Although violent crime in the city rose 3 percent last year, the per-capita rate remains much lower than it was in the early ’90s. Retail theft and catalytic-converter theft both decreased in 2023, but individual robberies and burglaries went up.
Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, has lived in the city since the late 1980s. Depending on whom you ask, Friedenbach is either standing up for the forgotten men and women of San Francisco or standing in the way of meaningful reforms to make the city more hospitable for the masses. In 2022, her organization sued the city over its practice of clearing homeless encampments without providing adequate shelter alternatives. San Francisco claims to have approximately 3,500 units and beds, roughly 90 percent of which are occupied on a given night. After rounds of injunctions and appeals, the Supreme Court has agreed to rule on the tent-clearing issue this term.
In recent years, Friedenbach told me, the tenor among locals has changed. “A pretty severe level of hatred against the unhoused community has manifested,” she said. “People just walking by, kicking the shit out of them while they’re sleeping.” Some residents have turned sprinklers on homeless people. “San Francisco kind of got shoved into this national spotlight, and things got really twisted in this way that has permeated the minds of San Franciscans,” Friedenbach said. “And that’s not just Fox News.”
Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is filled with shaky clips that depict the city as a drug-and-crime-ridden wasteland. Or, to use the phrase of the moment, like something out of a zombie-apocalypse movie. On January 18, one user posted a video of three men slumped over at a bus stop, barely moving, next to a flaming cardboard box. “Good morning from a #SanFrancisco bus stop outside Asian Art Museum and across from City Hall,” the accompanying text read.
These clips, many filmed in the Tenderloin, frequently go viral and paint the entire city as a hellscape. Viloria, the community organizer who lives and works in that neighborhood, offered a more nuanced take on the daily reality.
“There’s about 30,000 people in this small area, mostly seniors, low-income folks, working-class folks,” he said. “And, yes, crime is a little bit higher in areas like that, but it’s part of living in the low-income area with not a lot of things for people to do. And then you also have a concentration of drug use and drug sales … But to the degree where it feels like a Mad Max world out there? No.”
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, when crack and meth were the dominant street drugs, numerous San Franciscans told me how strangers would behave more erratically or violently. Fentanyl, as has become a colloquialism, turns its users into “zombies.” The drug’s opiate effect also means that people on it are less likely to travel extensively. Many of San Francisco’s wealthiest neighborhoods are uphill from downtown, and a common expression, Creitz said, is that junkies don’t make it uphill.
On the first night of my visit, I ate dinner at an Italian restaurant in North Beach. During APEC, two Czech journalists were robbed at gunpoint in this neighborhood. But that night, I felt safe. Wandering the blocks around the famed City Lights bookstore, I found the streets more or less unchanged from the first time I visited, back in 2008. The area was buzzing, pleasant. I wouldn’t have thought twice about walking at night. But would I have felt differently if I weren’t a relatively tall guy?
Creitz, another tall guy, arrived in the city from Madison, Wisconsin, in 1989, the year of Loma Prieta, the magnitude 6.9 earthquake that collapsed a portion of the Bay Bridge. When the shaking started, he was inside his Lower Nob Hill apartment watering a houseplant. He noticed the pot begin to sway under the water stream. After his power went out, he went to his car so he could turn on the radio and follow the breaking news. This same car radio, he told me, was later stolen.
He told me how, years ago, he was attacked by a man he said was clearly on drugs, and they both ended up in the hospital. He showed me the scar under his right eye. “But true to form, I went to the sentencing hearing and I told the judge, ‘I don’t think putting this guy in prison is going to really help anything. He’s obviously got a really bad drug problem. From my point of view as the victim of this crime, I would prefer that you find a way to get him some help for his drug issue instead of sending him to jail, where he’ll just learn how to do crime better,’” he said. The judge listened but still sent the man away. “I didn’t want to be, like, the vengeful victim,” Creitz said. I was struck by how seemingly nothing could shake Creitz’s belief in the ongoing promise of the city, not even his own traumatic experiences.
We headed toward what appeared to be one of the cleanest parts of the city, the Financial District. I asked Creitz how he had felt earlier in the day, safety wise, on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being “in danger,” as we were walking through the rougher parts. “I don’t know,” he said. “Like, a five.”
It was enough for him and his wife. Other San Franciscans are making their own calculations. The city famously lost tens of thousands of residents during the core years of the pandemic—nearly 7 percent of its population left from 2020 to 2021 alone. But last year, the city gained back nearly 5,000 residents.
Something about San Francisco has always been a magnet—not least its geographic and architectural beauty. As a friend who was born and raised there recently told me, the city is perennially replenished with fools, seekers, and visionaries. The question is whether they can coexist with homeless people.
I asked Viloria, the community organizer, what he thought of Breed’s tenure. “I feel like she gets more pressure being the first Black woman as a mayor, and also coming from the projects,” he said. “But I also feel like she lacks vision.” Seemingly no elected official really wanted to fully take on homelessness and drugs, because neither can realistically be solved in one term, he said.
I kept hearing this exact sentiment from other residents. And it became clear that they weren’t just right-leaning or logged-on billionaires who were dismayed with the local government, but progressive community activists as well.
Read: Why California wants to recall its most progressive prosecutors
One night, I met Lisa Awbrey, who tends a garden connected to an upscale restaurant on the Embarcadero, near downtown. Sitting at a bar in her neighborhood, Haight-Ashbury, Awbrey told me that city officials had also moved Heart of the City Farmers’ Market from UN Plaza to nearby Fulton Plaza as part of its larger effort to “clean up” certain public spaces. She said they made this decision without enough input from the farmers, many of whom had been coming to the market for decades.
(In a written statement, the mayor’s-office spokesperson said that the feedback from the farmers’-market vendors and businesses and residents in the area around UN Plaza has been “positive.” The statement said, “The difference that we see at UN Plaza is proof of what’s possible when we work together to deliver safe, clean, and vibrant public spaces to our communities.”)
Awbrey also told me about a conversation she had not long ago with a police officer. She had called the police to help an elderly neighbor in need. “He said, ‘I just want you to know, the next time you call us, we’ve all been told to go down to Union Square, and that is where we will be. So it takes a really long time for us to respond.” (The SFPD did not respond to an interview request.) Union Square, about a 20-minute drive from Awbrey’s neighborhood, is home to luxury retailers such as Louis Vuitton, the target of a high-profile “smash and grab” scheme that made national news.
During my final morning in the city, I walked over to Union Square and found it unnervingly quiet. I counted 13 police cars around the perimeter of the square, as well as a police motorcycle, an officer with a K-9 unit, and a giant RV that had the phrase San Francisco Police Mobile Command One plastered on the side. I spotted even more officers sitting in unmarked cars. Some were stationed outside the Apple Store, Williams Sonoma, and other retailers. A different group of security people was inside the square’s central plaza, which was almost completely empty save for a handful of tourists ice-skating. I saw two young people preparing a drug dosage behind the cover of black backpacks resting on a ledge. I walked past a man who appeared to be homeless, sunbathing and listening to sports-talk radio, but the otherwise near silence seemed eerie, and antithetical to city life.
On Market Street, not far from the square, I saw private security guards standing watch outside practically every large-scale retailer: IKEA, Ross Dress for Less. In another area, I passed a Walgreens that had plywood on the front windows but was nevertheless open. On one of the side streets that leads into the square, a huge group of people was doing or trading drugs. And then, a little farther down Market, a line out the door for Blue Bottle Coffee, a couple dozen office workers enjoying their morning pour-over—simply going about their day, living with the scene just up the block.
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