Visible Progress or Political Theater? Factions Disagree on How to Clean Up Street Conditions

This article is adapted from an episode of our podcast, “Civic.” Click the audio player below to hear the full story.

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While San Francisco’s crime rate last year plummeted far faster than that of any other same-sized city — even car break-ins reached a 22-year low — law enforcement activity is busier than ever in areas with the most visible quality-of-life issues. 

The surge aligns with Mayor Daniel Lurie’s intensified efforts to clear the streets of people who sell and use drugs and those experiencing homelessness in neighborhoods with most visible quality of life issues.

“Shootings, homicides, robberies, burglaries — even in 2025 — they’re going down,” said San Francisco Assistant Police Chief David Lazar at a town hall in South of Market in February. “That all doesn’t matter if we don’t feel safe.”

This episode of “Civic” offers perspectives on Mayor Daniel Lurie’s strategies for clearing unhoused people and visible signs of drug use and sales from San Francisco streets, including the establishment of a Sixth Street triage center run by the Police Department.

In February, the Police Department converted a Sixth Street parking lot in South of Market to what it called a triage center — a fenced-off area where police could connect people to social services or put them in a van bound for jail.

According to a city staff report, in the first month of the triage center’s operation, police made 350 arrests, three-quarters of them drug related. Triage personnel connected 275 people to shelter and 408 people to health care.

Advocates for people struggling with homelessness or substance use disorder say the city’s approach is unnecessarily punitive, but some business owners and community members say they approve of what the mayor and Police Department are doing.

Henry Karnilowicz, president of the South of Market Small Business Association, said the effort has led to significantly fewer individuals blocking business entrances, and less visible drug dealing and use.

“Jessie Street is no longer overcrowded with unhoused individuals, allowing businesses like 54 Mint Cucina Romana to attract more customers and thrive,” he wrote in the organization’s March newsletter.

But some housing advocates say the triage center has not changed the status quo for the unhoused population.

“The service providers were basically ordered there as part of their contract, and they are doing the exact same work inside the cage as they were doing outside on the street,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness.

Last year, San Francisco had just over 3,200 beds for a homeless population of 8,300 — more than half of them unsheltered — and more than 20,000 people sought homeless services.

In March, Lurie extended from June to mid-September the timeline for achieving his campaign promise of increasing shelter capacity by 1,500 beds. He also directed that the definition of shelter beds be broadened to include a wider range of accommodations, incorporating various forms of interim housing such as emergency shelters, hotel vouchers, transitional housing and residential treatment facilities.

And he announced a 100-day goal for reorganizing the city’s street outreach efforts. He said the current fragmented structure involving several disparate groups attached to different city agencies will be replaced with neighborhood-based teams working cohesively to connect people to treatment while also “keeping our public spaces clean.”

In the meantime, demand for housing and treatment always exceeds capacity, Friedenbach said.

“It just seems like optics to kind of shame people who are out there,” she said. “We want a decent street response that is effective and humane, and the proposed street response with this administration is far too tied to enforcement and not at all tied close enough to the data driven practices that need to happen. San Franciscans, I think, deserve real solutions.”

Some residents who attended the February town hall said conditions along the Sixth Street corridor deteriorated after police raided surrounding areas known as hot spots of drug use and sales. The Police Department shared a video of a raid at Market Street and Van Ness Avenue that resulted in 40 arrests.

“This is a seven-month displacement issue that resulted from the clearing of Market, UN Plaza, Civic Center, and it landed on our streets,” said one attendee. “I’ve been at Mint Plaza for 18 years, and I’ve never seen it like this in the past seven months.”

When asked how police would respond when the street population moves to yet another location, Lazar said the strategy would be “copy and pasted” to those areas.

As predicted, hordes of people displaced from South of Market moved elsewhere — this time to the Mission District. Lydia Bransten said the surge has been overwhelming. Bransten is executive director of the Gubbio Project, which runs a center that helps connect unhoused people in the Mission to social services and medical care while providing a safe space for rest, coffee, breakfast, blankets, socks and hygiene kits.

She said her staff in January 2024 connected with 1,020 unhoused people in and around the center. In February 2025, they connected with more than 5,000, she said.

“As city government moves people from place to place, what’s happening on the front lines in organizations like ours is that people are experiencing more stress,” Bransten said.

With added stress come increased drug use, erratic behavior, violence and overdoses necessitating more calls for emergency services, Bransten said. City data show that 911 dispatched 900 calls for service in the Mission in March, the highest one-month tally in a decade.

Police responded by moving a bus-sized mobile command unit into the middle of the BART station plaza at 16th and Mission streets.

Some small business leaders still support the police approach, saying it’s the best way to improve their beleaguered neighborhood.

“I’m so fed up with everybody saying, ‘The cops are bad, the cops are bad. Oh, a nonprofit can take care of this,’” Karnilowicz said. “Who are they kidding? It’s nonprofits that are causing the problem, as far as I’m concerned. You know, it’s a business for them. That’s how they make money. As long as homeless sat down on the street, they have jobs.” 

But critics say that without sufficient housing and treatment infrastructure, increased arrests only lead to higher overdose risks post-release and strain jail resources.

A San Francisco Chronicle analysis comparing police data from January and February 2025 to the same period last year found that arrests involving suspected drug use — not drug dealing —  rose to 963 from 692, the largest uptick involving possession of narcotics paraphernalia, a misdemeanor.

And in the first three months of 2025, the Sheriff’s Department logged 193 jail bookings for loitering to commit controlled substance offenses, a rarely used reason for arrest over the past decade.

The incarcerated population has surpassed pre-COVID-19-pandemic levels, reaching nearly 1,300, while staffing levels remained below those of 2019. 

County jails exceed capacity and are experiencing dangerously deteriorated conditions and frequent lockdowns due to understaffing, according to Angela Chan, assistant chief attorney with the public defender’s office.

“It’s very excruciating and agonizing what they’re going through this acute withdrawal without sufficient treatment,” Chan said. “It’s a lot of shock and awe in terms of these social media videos propagated by SFPD, but it doesn’t lead to people getting treatment and doesn’t lead to a reduction in substance use disorder. Actually, what we’ve seen is an increase in drug overdoses overall in the city. And so, it is very concerning, because it’s not just political theater, but it’s political theater that’s causing harm.”

Nevertheless, Lazar said at February’s town hall, jail conditions would not deter police efforts. “We will continue to arrest people,” Lazar said. “We’re not really concerned about jail overcrowding at this point. That’s not going to stop us from doing what we need to do.”