San Fran cleans out the homeless?

Everybody is a social justice warrior until the homeless show up outside your residence or place of work. Then they channel Marie Antoinette.

San Francisco Has Embraced a New Tool to Clear Homeless Camps

City officials point to cleaner streets as evidence that a more active approach is working. Some say the tactics are making conditions worse.

By Maggie Grether, WSJ

Aug. 16, 2025 5:30 am ET

San Francisco increased arrests for illegal lodging after a Supreme Court ruling.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court granted cities more power to penalize people for sleeping outside, handing city leaders a new tool with which to clear homeless people from the streets.

Since then, San Francisco has been among the most aggressive in wielding it.

Between July 2024 and July 2025, the city arrested or cited more than 1,080 people on illegal-lodging charges, over 10 times the number of illegal-lodging arrests during the same period a year earlier. In April 2025, illegal-lodging citations and arrests hit 130, the most in a single month since the Supreme Court’s ruling.

San Francisco has struggled for years with an entrenched population of unsheltered people, many with mental-health and addiction problems, and others who have been pushed onto the streets and into shelters by the city’s skyrocketing housing costs. Residents and business owners complained about safety as encampments grew; advocates for the unsheltered population complained that city officials were criminalizing homelessness.

Some say the ramped-up sweeps are merely shifting the homeless population around the city, and putting homeless people at greater risk. City officials say pairing increased enforcement with street outreach has paid dividends, helping to reduce the most visible aspects of homelessness.

In June, San Francisco reported the lowest count of tents and encampment structures since the pandemic, an 85% decrease from a peak in April 2020. In neighborhoods where large encampments once blocked sidewalks, residents now find streets walkable.

Person collecting belongings from a homeless encampment.

San Francisco has struggled for years with an entrenched population of unsheltered people. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Residents, business owners and visitors “deserve to have a clean and healthy city,” says Evan Sernoffsky, a San Francisco Police Department spokesman. “Having streets blocked with sprawling encampments is not a feasible situation,” Sernoffsky says.

San Francisco’s removal of encampments became more aggressive last summer, after the Supreme Court’s ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which overturned a lower-court ruling that found it unconstitutional to penalize people for sleeping in public when they have nowhere else to stay.

In the 12 months following that ruling, around 220 new anticamping ordinances have passed across the country, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Nowhere has the ruling had a bigger impact than in California, which accounts for a third of those ordinances. The state is home to nearly half of the unsheltered homeless people in the country and includes about 70,000 shelter beds to accommodate more than 187,000 homeless people.

In San Francisco, homelessness became a defining issue in last year’s mayoral race, won by Daniel Lurie. The Levi Strauss heir, allied with the city’s tech sector, won on a platform emphasizing cleaning up streets to boost economic growth.

Lurie has touted a homelessness policy focused on improving interdepartmental coordination and expanding shelter capacity. He has sought to redirect millions in homelessness funding away from permanent-housing and prevention programs and toward temporary shelter, a move opposed by many advocates for the homeless, arguing that permanent housing is the only way to create long-term reductions.

Under Lurie, the city has also continued the stepped-up arrests of people sleeping outside, started under then-Mayor London Breed after the high-court decision.

“We’re always going to lead with services, but let me be clear: There will no longer be an option for people to sleep and use drugs on our streets,” says Lurie.

City officials point to a decrease in encampments as evidence that the sweeps, paired with other strategies including streamlined street outreach, are working.

San Francisco mayor-elect shaking hands with a resident.

Daniel Lurie during a January visit to San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood after he was elected mayor. Photo: Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP

During the pandemic, large encampments on sidewalks in many neighborhoods forced pedestrians to walk in the middle of busy thoroughfare streets. Many of those streets are now much clearer. In the Tenderloin neighborhood, which became known as the epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis, the city recorded 15 tents in the June tent count, down from 214 in April 2020.

Fewer encampments haven’t necessarily translated into better conditions across the city, according to residents and local nonprofit leaders.

San Francisco conducts a full count of the city’s unsheltered homeless population every two years, with the next count planned in 2026. So while there are fewer tents on the streets, it is hard for city officials to determine whether the amount of people without shelter has decreased.

The 2024 count recorded more than 8,300 people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco on a single night; the city has a shelter capacity of around 3,600. The wait list for an adult shelter bed in the city currently stretches to more than 400 people. Since 2022, the number of people falling into homelessness has steadily outpaced the number of homeless people becoming housed, according to data tracking the flow of people through the city’s shelter system.

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, says that despite a policy that requires the city to store possessions seized for 90 days, people often lose access to personal belongings, including photos, medication, sleeping bags and identification during sweeps.

Friedenbach cites a 2023 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that displacement caused by encampment sweeps might substantially increase drug-related deaths among homeless people.

“It’s pretty devastating for folks and ends up exacerbating the crisis that they’re experiencing,” says Friedenbach.

A Public Works spokeswoman says in an email that the city stands by its policy, adding that the courts have deemed it constitutional. The city and the Coalition on Homelessness in July reached a legal settlement over the city’s so-called bag-and-tag policy.

Kunal Modi, the city’s chief of health and human services, says the city is aiming for the right balance between enforcement and services.

“Our goal is that we show up to any situation more like a Swiss army knife, where we have multiple tools and capabilities that are at our disposal,” says Modi.

A pedestrian walking past the Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

The Phoenix Hotel in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco in March 2024. Photo: Jeff Chiu/AP

Even in neighborhoods that have seen dramatic reductions in tent encampments, residents remain divided on whether sweeps have meaningfully improved street conditions.

Gina Fromer, chief executive of Glide, a social-services provider in the Tenderloin neighborhood, says sweeps have forced people in the neighborhood to become more transient, carrying their belongings in pushcarts and wagons, and moving from block to block to avoid sweeps.

“People don’t have anywhere to go, and we’re moving them from one place to the next,” Fromer says. “We’re not solving the problem.”

Jamie Flanagan co-owns the rock ’n’ roll inspired Phoenix Hotel, which has operated in the heart of the Tenderloin for over 30 years. Flanagan says his block has returned to prepandemic levels of cleanliness, but revenue is still down 40% since the pandemic.

Financial pressure is forcing the hotel to close in January. Flanagan says bringing back prepandemic levels of business requires more than just cleaning up streets.

“What businesses in the Tenderloin are seeing is really the longer-term effects of the reputational damage done by all we’ve been experiencing for five years,” Flanagan says.

Lurie says his measure of success on homelessness is simple.

“We’re gonna know it when people feel safe walking down the street,” he says.