Biden urged to meet the homeless in San Francisco as advocate compares APEC clean-up to ‘rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic’

President Joe Biden has been urged to meet San Francisco’s homeless and see the city’s misery first-hand, as advocates storm the APEC conference cleanup drive on the streets.

San Francisco’s facelift for the summit involved moving members of the city’s growing homeless population to shelters without adding additional beds, which one advocate likened to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The city, home to world-class cuisine, stunning views and an estimated 20,000 people in need of shelter every year, is revamping ahead of a summit that will bring together leaders from the Asia-Pacific region, including China’s Xi Jinping.

The efforts include removing graffiti from city streets and even building a new skate park, along with the fight against squalid homeless encampments across the city, which have been especially visible since the COVID pandemic hit.

Homeless advocate Jennifer Friedenbach criticized elements of the city’s approach, which she said included directing people from within the designated APEC “zone” to the city’s only shelter with walk-in beds.

That risks harming people who depend on it for nighttime needs.

“So if you happen to be one of the people in there (in a cleared camp) then that’s OK, but if you’re not, you’re out of luck,” she told DailyMail.com.

“They have a big thing going on, they’re spending millions of dollars, they should have opened a temporary shelter or rented a few hotel rooms for people who were in that zone so everyone else wasn’t displaced.

“It just has a ripple effect. You know, you’re like rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. You’re not really steadying the boat,” she said.

A city-based nonprofit has raised $20 million to host the summit, which will bring together world leaders from across the Indo-Pacific and serve as the venue for a high-stakes meeting between President Biden and Xi. A Sonoma casino, technology companies and health care companies have all contributed money to the effort.

Friedenbach said she would “love” to see President Biden and other world leaders visit the homeless to see for themselves the misery and hardship of those living on the streets amid the city’s lack of affordable housing, with a homeless population of currently approximately 8,000. , of which about 4,000 live on the streets and the rest in shelters.

“I would like leaders to visit people who are not housed in their organizations and hear directly from them what the solutions are, and I think many other countries can learn from the United States’ mistakes and that our own American government could really address this issue and in very tangible ways,” she said.

Homeless camps in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District are located near where representatives and CEOs gather

Leaders from the Asia Pacific region will gather at the Moscone Center, and top CEOs will also meet

There are an estimated 20,000 homeless people in San Francisco year-round

President Joe Biden’s meeting this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping follows a Chinese spy balloon incident and Chinese state media calling San Francisco a ‘ruined city’

She called for a massive expansion of ‘housing choice vouchers’ that can be used locally.

She said of Biden: “I’m not sure he spends a lot of time with members of that unhoused community, I think it would be a very positive experience for him in terms of understanding what the problem is because there’s just so much misinformation and all that. making many homeless people their own scapegoats, blaming them for something over which they have absolutely no control.’

The city is grappling with years of battles in federal court, seeking authority to clear homeless encampments amid a housing crisis.

That included efforts to clean up the city’s “most troubled corner” since June.

That corner, where Seventh St. intersects with Market, comprises 20 percent of the city’s drug crime, as the city is on track to set a record for fatal drug overdoses this year, including 54 deaths in September alone.

The closure of national retail chains like Nordstrom since the pandemic has drawn national headlines.

And in the Cold War-style struggle between competing systems, Chinese state media have taken to calling the metropolis by the bay a “destroyed city.”

In one sign of the likely downstream effects of the APEC cleanup, homeless tents popping up in new neighborhoods.

The city’s Department of Health provided updates to community partners ahead of the conference, as part of an effort to ensure recipients receive care through numerous nonprofit organizations, hospitals and public agencies, while thousands of dignitaries and visitors attend the flow into the city center.

“The DPH Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (PHEPR) team has been working with organizers and municipal agencies to minimize the impact on our community and ensure we are ready to respond to any public health needs.” , according to a message dated November 3. email reviewed by DailyMail.com.

After September’s annual Salesforce event called Dreamforce, company CEO Marc Benioff, amid another apparent cleanup campaign, dared to dream what it would be like if the city were in constant disarray.

The event will be held at the same Moscone Center that hosts APEC.

“It’s important to ask yourself why can’t the city be this clean and safe every day?” he wrote on X, the former Twitter site.

“San Francisco has been incredibly clean, beautiful and safe over the last three days of Dreamforce, and it’s great that the city can put its best foot forward for this major event that draws 40,000 people from all over the world, and $80 million for the economics,” he wrote.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s office said addressing homelessness “is a priority 365 days a year.”

“We are on the streets every day, sheltering people every night, and lifting people out of homelessness every day,” said Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications for the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

“When our community hosts events like APEC, we want to put our best foot forward. Dedicated outreach efforts will be focused on the conference area and providing safe places for people experiencing homelessness will be a priority,” she said.

But Cohen also said the agency “is not opening a dedicated holding capacity for APEC. We were not given a budget to add shelter capacity during the summit.”

It has additional capacity in an interfaith shelter running from November through early spring and a 300-bed expansion of adult shelter capacity coming online in November and December.

Cohen called for a “comprehensive and compassionate approach” and said the APEC conference “provides an opportunity to highlight San Francisco’s commitment to this issue and demonstrate our city’s innovation, resilience and determination to achieve sustainable and meaningful to find and demonstrate solutions.’

The city’s most recent homeless count, in 2022, showed that about 7,754 people were homeless in the city on a February evening. Of these, 4,397 were unsheltered.

The figure was actually 15 percent lower than a 2019 pre-pandemic survey.