SAN FRANCISCO – An effort to clean up some of the city’s seedier neighborhoods and rid the streets of junkies, hookers and runaways has run headlong into San Francisco’s free-to-be-who-you-are ethos.
Nearly four decades after the Summer of Love, residents and merchants frustrated with what they regard as blight are turning to the city for help or taking revitalization into their own hands.
But other residents of the Tenderloin district and Haight-Ashbury contend a crackdown would rob their neighborhoods of their identity and violate everything San Francisco stands for.
Joey Cain, a board member of the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, complained that those who would drive the vagrants from the neighborhood are turning their backs on the Haight’s “historic obligation” to shelter the downtrodden.
This is, after all, the city that proved so appealing to the Beats, the hippies and practically every other brand of nonconformist.
Haight-Ashbury was the capital of the Summer of Love in 1967, when young people flocked for the music, sexual freedom and drug culture. They are still coming, panhandling on corners and sleeping under the trees in nearby Golden Gate Park.
But the neighborhood has changed. Its stately Victorian homes sell for millions, and the head shops are mixed with chain stores and trendy cafes. Business owners and longtime residents complaint that street kids harass the elderly and leave playgrounds littered with needles.
“There is definitely a tension in the neighborhood between the people who live here and the scene on the street,” said Gary Frank, owner of Haight Street’s Booksmith shop since 1976.
Earlier this year, the city decided to enforce an ordinance that makes overnight camping in Golden Gate Park a misdemeanor. It gave 200 homeless people time to remove their belongings; they were paired with social workers who advised them on how to find housing. Those who had someone back home to care for them were given a one-way ticket.
But an online neighborhood message board was soon filled with diatribes accusing the city of pandering to well-to-do residents and abandoning its principles.
Cain, the Haight-Ashbury community leader, said those who want to drive the homeless out are simply trying to keep real estate prices high.
Elected officials in San Francisco know they must tread lightly to avoid offending people’s ultraliberal sensibilities.
“If that behavior is negatively impacting a neighborhood, we are going to deal with it,” said Trent Rhorer, the city’s head of human services, “but deal with it sensitively and responsibly in a way that gets people in real services instead of simply fining them, citing them and putting them in jail.”
San Francisco’s image as a city that accepts all comers “is everybody’s initial good idea,” community activist Carolynn Abst said. “But over time it wears thin. There is always a new wash of people coming here for the first time and you are cleaning up their bathroom habits.”
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