S.F. faces increasing pressure to clean sidewalks as city grows

The streets are always dirty, they say.

Trash covers Market Street. The pavements are grimy. The homeless overtake sidewalks. And the city doesn’t do anything, San Franciscans gripe. Tourists are appalled. Public Works supervisor David Johnwell has heard it all before.

Every day Johnwell and his crew take on the Sisyphean exercise of cleaning the city’s dirtiest blocks. The team of four to six people washes the sidewalks, breaks down homeless camps, gathers used syringes, and collects everything from mattresses to hot tubs. But just hours later, the streets are trashed again.

“The streets are pretty rough,” Johnwell said. “There is more trash and homeless people and encampments everywhere you go. We clean up, and within hours it’s all back. Our department never truly closes.”

But the ever-present street filth has many wondering if the city is doing enough.

“It never gets better,” Barbara Wyeth of Russian Hill said. “There’s always trash. For a city with a reputation for beauty, it’s sad to see it trashed. I think people just kind of accept it as part of urban living. It doesn’t have to be, and it shouldn’t be.”

Tourists also aren’t impressed. It’s not a city that looks superclean, said Pam Bolt of Portland, Ore. She hadn’t been to San Francisco in 24 years and decided to join her husband on his business trip.

“It’s really gross,” Bolt said. “We have been places that just smell rancid. There’s trash and homeless people everywhere. It has negatively impacted how I feel about this city. Our streets don’t look like this in Portland.”

Increased pressure

As the city’s population grows, Public Works faces increased pressure to keep the streets clean. The issue has gained momentum in the past few years as major construction projects roust more homeless people from their longtime, out-of-the-way crannies South of Market. Lack of rain has only worsened the problem.

“Everyone is doing their job. There’s just a lot of homeless people,” said homeless resource police Officer Irvin Huerta. “You have a lot of garbage, needles, feces and urine on the ground. There’s not enough shelters and services to go around.”

Six zone crews sanitize and power-wash the Tenderloin each morning, then fan across downtown gathering litter. Two encampment crews, like the one Johnwell runs, tackle the city’s grimiest alleys.

Altogether, they amass about seven tons of trash each day. The pit stop program, which places staffed, public toilets in the Tenderloin, SoMa, the Mission and the Castro, helps manage human waste in those areas.

“The city is out here every day around the clock cleaning the streets and encampments,” Public Works spokeswoman Rachel Gordon said. “This problem is much bigger than Public Works or the Police Department.”

Budget could provide relief

The proposed city budget, which is still going through the approval process, could help. It includes just under $3 million for a new enhanced residential cleaning program, which will bring aboard 18 new hires to focus primarily on 80 alleyway blocks in SoMa, Chinatown, the Mission and the lower Polk Street neighborhood near the Civic Center. The program will largely focus on alleyways near new residential and office developments. Additional staff would free up existing staff to create a third encampment crew, like Johnwell’s.

“Currently, there is no schedule for those alleys,” said Mohammed Nuru, Public Works director. “Those neighborhoods have been a challenge and have diverted a number of resources away from our day-to-day operations. Having a routine schedule will allow a lot of workers to go back to other parts of the city where they should normally be working. It will make everything cleaner.”

It aligns with residents’ desire for clean sidewalks. The 2014 Listening Tour, by the policy nonprofit San Francisco Beautiful, conducted 937 interviews with residents from August to December 2014. The document included 2,522 ideas on how neighborhoods could be improved. Livable, clean streets were listed as the top priority, just before greening and civic character.

‘Doing the best we can’

Public Works is being aggressive about trash, Johnwell said, even though it can be hard to see progress.

“San Francisco would look so much worse if we weren’t out here,” he said. “When we leave a site, it will be nice and clean and smelling good so citizens can walk on it safely. But the second we leave, it reverts right back. Imagine what it would look like if we didn’t even make that effort to tidy up.”

So Johnwell and his crew continue to tend to a city that never seems to get any cleaner. At 6:45 a.m. on a cloudy Wednesday, the group began breaking apart a homeless encampment at Eighth and Brannan streets. Sweat beaded on worker Yu Chun Jin’s upper lip as he swept broken glass into a trash can.

Bernard Sices, another crew member, drizzled sanitizer on the pavement and sprayed it with water. Nearby, homeless people lined up on the side of the road with their possessions, waiting for the crew to finish. Soon, they moved right back.

“We’re doing the best we can,” Sices said. “If you go back to where we started, it’s like we have never even been there. The ground is dirty again and smells like urine. And we haven’t even been gone for an hour. It’s bothersome and frustrating and never-ending.”