They appeared seemingly from out of thin air last month: two dozen knee-high boulders, at first glance, unremarkable, placed with remarkable precision along a sidewalk in a quiet alley in San Francisco.
Within days, they became a flashpoint for a city in the midst of a homeless crisis.
Residents of the Clinton Park alley, located north of San Francisco’s trendy Mission District neighborhood, funded the rock installation to deter loitering after what they described as a year of flagrant drug-dealing and unpredictable behavior. Housing advocates and other civic-minded critics were quick to call the boulders out as anti-homeless architecture.
Illustration: Yusha
“Boulders don’t stop people from drug dealing, but they do stop people from sleeping,” Coalition on Homelessness executive director Jennifer Friedenbach said.
So began a tale of Sisyphean feats.
An artist put the boulders up for sale on Craigslist. The post was flagged and taken down. Activists rolled the rocks off the sidewalk and into the street.
The city, which was not involved in the installation, placed the boulders back.
The boulders ended up in the street again. Back on the sidewalk. Back in the street.
At the heart of this whole saga is a simmering frustration, coming in from all directions, at one specific issue. In a city with a US$12 billion budget, where new technology millionaires street-park their Teslas and pay for their multimillion-dollar condos in cash, more than 8,000 people are forced to sleep in the streets each night.
On one end of the spectrum, there are advocates such as Friedenbach, who calls the crisis “a fundamental human rights violation.”
Their concern is for the unhoused, for their ability to access the help and resources they need to get off the streets and into a stable environment.
On the other end of the continuum, there are the quality-of-life complaints and frustration with the city’s seemingly inability to spark much change — the qualms with how visible homelessness affects the housed.
Chris Herring, a sociology doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed 3 million 311 calls in a paper published in the American Sociological Review and found that calls regarding the homeless increased by 781 percent in San Francisco between 2011 and 2017.
“People complain about seeing homelessness. They complain about poop and needles,” said Danielle Baskin, the San Francisco artist who put the boulders up for sale on Craigslist. “They’re complaining about having it affect their daily commute because they have to step over someone’s sleeping bag. I don’t feel that bad for people who are complaining about homelessness. I feel bad for the homeless people themselves, but I think that nobody knows what to do. That’s the issue.”
This sentiment was heavy over the alley this week, after the city removed the boulders at the behest of neighbors. They had been fed up with the constant attempts to roll them into the streets and are working with local officials to figure out a next step.
One Clinton Park resident, who asked not to be named, stood across from the sidewalk in question, which, for the moment, was clear of any encampments or activity. He was supportive of the boulders, though he wanted planters “because people do view boulders as hostile.”
However, he is also supportive of more housing, more shelters, more drug treatment, more mental health treatment and better solutions altogether.
This resident is a nurse practitioner who works with patients living in single-room occupancy units in the Tenderloin neighborhood — patients who have been homeless and are recovering from drug addiction.
He was frustrated with how the whole saga painted everyone who lives in Clinton Park as anti-homeless.
The issue was not with people sleeping on the sidewalks, he said. People have been sleeping on that sidewalk for at least the eight years he has lived in the neighborhood. The issue was with the rampant drug-dealing and drug use.
Almost half the homeless population in San Francisco suffers from both mental illness and substance abuse disorder, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
“People say: ‘Gosh, these boulders, are they going to stop drug-dealing?’ Maybe not, but it’s not tidy,” he said. “It’s just been this combination of getting high, getting dope, getting crystal meth and sitting there for days. There are fights, there are fires. This woman was bringing her infant by to score dope.”
This was not a situation like that of the neighbors who started a crowdfunding campaign to fight the construction of a homeless shelter, citing reasons such as it was “likely to decrease the fair market value” for any projects in that wealthy neighborhood, the resident said.
In a way, he was almost heartened by the outcry against the boulders.
“It would maybe be worse if people didn’t get excited about it, if they just accepted it. People do care. I could see myself doing it too, decades back,” he said.
“We need more transitional housing, more navigation centers, more permanent housing, more access to treatment, more something. It’s frustrating,” he said.
San Francisco has a waiting list of more than 1,100 for a shelter bed.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed is working toward increasing the number of shelter beds by 1,000 by next year, but in the midst of an affordable housing crisis in which the median rent has risen to US$3,700 for a one-bedroom apartment, many in San Francisco are feeling discouraged that they will see any meaningful results.
Oftentimes, the complaints about homelessness will drive the city’s efforts, and they end up only addressing visible homelessness rather than the issue itself.
In 2016, the city passed a ballot measure banning all tents on city sidewalks — but rejected a measure that would have raised the sales tax to fund homeless services.
What that means is that it is now illegal for people to camp on the streets, but there is nowhere for them to go.
“It just pushes people from place to place,” Friedenbach said. “For homeless folks, they’re constantly looking for a place to sleep where they won’t bother folks, and then they get pushed out of those areas into more residential areas. Then the neighbors complain, and they get pushed from one residential place to another residential place, and no one ends up happy in the end, especially not the homeless folk who end up shuffled from one place to another.”
San Francisco has more anti-homeless laws than any other Californian city, Herring said, but the laws have not solved homelessness — they have criminalized it.
Police now have the law behind them to move homeless people along when neighbors complain, but they still have nowhere to go.
In a 2014 study, Herring found that only 9 percent of respondents said they moved indoors the last time they were forced to move, and they were short-term indoor spaces, such as a library or a bus.
“Most people stayed outside, and the majority of folks stayed within the same neighborhood,” Herring said. “A lot of people are just walking around the corner.”
No homeless people wandered along Clinton Park, even after the boulders were removed this week, but across the street, Brooks Zorn sat outside a Whole Foods supermarket, holding a sign reading: “Anything Helps.”
He was disheartened to hear about the anti-homeless boulders. Overall, he felt that San Francisco was much more friendly to the homeless than where he grew up in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, where “you would get arrested if you’re caught sleeping anywhere.”
Just three years ago, Zorn had steady work as a cook and a place to live.
“They shouldn’t view us as homeless people,” Zorn said of the neighbors who installed the boulders. “They should view us as human beings who just have life problems. They could be one paycheck short of being homeless, too. It could happen to them, it could happen to anybody.”
Hannah Hayne sat outside the Safeway market across from Whole Foods with a palm-sized cardboard sign reading “Need Food.”
The 27-year-old said that she could go back to school and get off the streets with some help, but spoke with a circular cadence that suggested there was more to her situation than she cared to share.
She had a head injury that was exacerbated when she was hit by a rock while homeless, she said, which she has been on and off since the age of 16.
“I’ve been outside too long,” Hayne said.
Hayne started to say she understood why people did not want homeless people around, and that anti-homeless architecture like the boulders would give the homeless the boost they need to “get inside,” before her thoughts ran from her again.
“It’s just confusing to me because I feel like there should be an inside to get into. I just don’t understand how there’s not,” she said.
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