NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} he intrepid spirit of entrepreneurialism that made San Fransico and its suburbs into a hub of innovation was on display earlier this year when one of the city’s more inventive elected officials pioneered a “Doom and Squalor” walking tour of the city. Sightseers forked over $30, money subsequently given to nonprofits that don’t “actively degrade” the community, to survey the blighted landscape around Mid-Market, Union Square, and the Tenderloin district. The sensory feast to which they were treated included the sights and smells of sprawling homeless encampments, and an obstacle course littered with hypodermic needles and all the diverse fecal specimens the mammalian order can produce. “It’s fanning the flames and not offering concrete proposals nor recognizing the good work,” said one irritated local official. But this invitation to marinate in the “doom loop” in which the city was caught made its point.

For years, San Francisco’s elected and appointed officials retailed a self-serving fiction — the idea that their city’s sordid state was a fact of life. Sure, crime was on the rise, but only back to what locals should consider normal rates with the subsidence of the pandemic. After all, crime is just one of those “basic city-life experiences,” said former police commissioner John Hamasaki dismissively. Yes, flagship retailers were closing their doors at an alarming pace, a phenomenon attributable both to petty crime and the city’s rampant open-air drug use. But “it would be very hard to just patrol and arrest your way out of this problem,” one local reporter said. Of course, an epidemic of voluntary homelessness made residents feel unsafe. But as an antiseptic analysis of that condition by McKinsey & Co.’s analysts confirmed, the problem was multifarious. In the absence of creative and lavishly funded governmental initiatives, this already chronic condition would persist.

It was all nonsense. In the end, all it took for San Francisco to clean up its act was the threat of embarrassment. With the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit scheduled to descend on the city this week, the Bay Area mobilized and executed an operation designed to clean up the city. The enterprise has been a remarkable success.

“We don’t want dignitaries coming in on [Highway] 101 and seeing graffiti,” said California Department of Transportation official Cheryl Chambers. Of course not. So in advance of the APEC summit, the city sought to transform its “doom loop” into a “bloom loop.” San Francisco transformed vagrant-choked public parks like the blighted U.N. Plaza into vibrant and wholesome recreational venues. City workers labored around the clock to deep-clean the subway system, plant greenery, and generally beautify sites inside and beyond the summit’s “security zone.” It redoubled efforts to clear graffiti, and it commissioned murals to cover up that which couldn’t be washed away. It tore down forgotten scaffolding around its monuments, and it completed the refurbishing of public works that languished in disrepair. Perhaps most importantly, the city dispatched local police and retained the services of law enforcement from surrounding municipalities to clear out the homeless.

“With APEC coming, I am concerned about historical encampments that are close to priority areas,” read a memo produced by a city superintendent who cited seven notorious intersections where homeless gather. Suddenly, the city’s public-safety apparatus surged to life. The homeless were rousted and relocated, their makeshift shelters displaced and “fence-like barriers” erected on city sidewalks to prevent their return. The city has even employed something it calls “night ambassadors” to monitor the streets and herd stragglers into vans destined for shelters, hospitals, and rehabilitation facilities far away from the city center. “They started clearing the tents earlier this week and there is definitely a lot more police presence,” said community activist Ricci Lee Wynne in astonishment. “The police just told me that there’s a major conference, that the president is coming, and asked if we could stay away for a week,” a frustrated street person said of his temporary inconvenience.

“It’s noticeable how clean the streets look and how few homeless encampments there are on major thoroughfares,” one local reporter marveled. “And city officials are saying that there are no additional funds that are being allocated for beautification,” she added. “Departments are just using existing budgets. They also say that those budgets are being moved so that they can focus on those areas where APEC is taking place.” That is more a confession than a revelation. No new funding was necessary to engineer this miracle. The city wasn’t forced to hastily construct new accommodations for its homeless population or draft an army of civil servants into the mission. As Wynn observed, the alacrity with which the streets were cleared and rendered livable “tells me the city had the capability to do this all along.”

“I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming into town,’” Governor Gavin Newsom said. “That’s true.” The governor deserves credit for his honesty, if little else. For years, San Francisco residents have complained of the filth and degradation with which they were surrounded, only for their elected officials to dismiss the complaints. A comprehensive 2021–22 survey of 3,000 residential streets and commercial districts found what should have been intolerable levels of litter, broken glass, graffiti, and animal and human waste products glutting the sidewalks. “There’s poop everywhere,” said Tenderloin resident Joe Souza. Crime had become so rampant that public- and private-sector workers were told to work from home so as to minimize threats to their personal safety.

The apathy San Francisco’s authorities display toward property and quality-of-life crimes has become a public scandal. The polls suggest that residents are fed up with their mayor and Board of Supervisors. Yet what shook the city out of its complacency was the specter of a looming humiliation like what local officials experienced when San Francisco “hosted Super Bowl 50 and the nation’s media fixated, sometimes almost gleefully, on the city’s homelessness crisis,” the San Francisco Chronicle admitted. The APEC summit demonstrates that the city’s commitment to abdicating its responsibility to its residents is total. That dereliction becomes untenable only when outsiders are in a position to notice the fraying social compact.

“What about the people who are here year-round, you know, and, like, local hard-working, working-class Bay Area folks?” one resident asked. Why can the city pull itself together for the benefit of foreign leaders but not for its own citizens? The answer is now plain: It can, it just doesn’t want to.