Postcards from SF: Our homeless camp stretching 0.8 mile, both sides of the street from 13th/Otis to 13th/San Bruno. pic.twitter.com/JIMGn7L7Fi
— Violet Blue ® (@violetblue) January 22, 2016
Anyone who's been down San Francisco's Division Street between the roundabout to Duboce has seen it — a line of homeless peoples' tents that seems to grow by the day. At a recent show at nearby bar Slim's I overheard a fellow concertgoer ask "are all these tents people all coming down here because of the Super Bowl?" He was referring, I assume, to August headlines that Mayor Ed Lee had said that the folks who typically live on the streets near the nascent Super Bowl City "are going to have to leave."
According to a report published today by Bloomberg, "San Francisco has dispatched workers to the scenic Embarcadero to provide them with help finding shelter somewhere besides the future site of Super Bowl City," and Supervisor Jane Kim says that that area — and that area alone, is getting homeless services attention.
“We should be making sure that we’re delivering services throughout the city not just because of a special event,” Kim says.
“Specifically, to hide an issue for tourists and visitors that are coming in -- we should be providing this type of compassionate, strategic approach all the time.”
Let's be clear — I'm not saying that the blocks and blocks of makeshift shelters along Division are a conclusive result of Lee's Super Bowl efforts, just that that's a possibility I've head raised. What is clear is that this area is currently the site of a larger gathering of homeless people than we've seen in a long time.
Here's hoping that stretch of road gets as much compassionate, strategic attention from city workers as the stretch of road that's currently being made into a "City" for a football game fifty miles from here.
@violetblue I lived a block away from there for a decade. This is way worse then it was at the "height of the crash"
— AliceInBondageLand (@BondageLand) January 22, 2016