Struggling San Franciscans lined up for street relief blast the city’s cleanup for Biden’s APEC conference: ‘You’re just trying to cover s*** up make it look pretty for TV’

Blocks from the APEC summit in San Francisco and just down the hill from the luxury hotel that will host President Biden, struggling housing recipients are lining up to receive $5 in exchange for getting a COVID nasal swab test.

Many of them fear the city cleanup is just for show and wonder what will be left behind when dignitaries and world leaders fly home from across the Pacific.

Among them is Michael Crowfoot, 58, who is getting housing assistance and bringing his paperwork to get the swab – and the money.

“Here’s what it is: You polish some copper and you right this ship and you make everything look nice. You don’t plug the hole in the bucket. You just stick a piece of cotton wool in it,” he says of the cleanup.

City authorities have cleared a row of tents across the street, and while they wait, an ambulance is tending to a situation in the dilapidated hotel that has been converted into supervised single rooms. The neighborhood’s upkeep improvements are “great,” said Crowfoot, who has been using hard drugs for decades and has some missing teeth that could indicate a hard life.

‘You’re not trying to solve the problem. You’re just trying to cover it up, make it look nice for TV,” he told DailyMail.com as Biden prepared to fly into the city for an event that marks a major milestone for both the struggling city and country.

Crowfoot has tended bar, worked in construction and even caddied at the elite San Francisco Golf Club.

“They don’t want to hear what we have to say,” Crowfoot complains, mocking a public works project around the corner that started just days before the summit. “They should be doing something other than building skate parks.”

“All they’re trying to do is make everything look nice and like they’ve done something,” he said.

Sandra Case, who has lived in the city since 2019, brought her pink bicycle and health card to the curbside COVID testing site.

“You come here, you wipe, twice a week you get $5. Sure this helps us, but they don’t focus on the real issues, man,” she says.

“The real problem: look around you,” she says. ‘The real problem is the homeless. The real problem is these babies. The real problem is the young children who are sex slaves here. That’s the real problem. The real problem isn’t the skate parks… it’s the elderly people walking around here. The children who are here. That’s the real problem. And people just don’t even look at that.’

She says she’s not a Donald Trump fan, but she also doesn’t think Biden, who arrives Tuesday afternoon and heads to a fundraiser before meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, is doing everything he can to help people struggling on the streets.

‘What is Biden doing? Scratch his ass and smell it? He doesn’t do anything. “I just feel like he could do more as our president,” she said.

Case receives federal Social Security benefits and says she does “what I have to do” to support herself.

But gift card programs and other support aren’t enough, she says.

Sandra Case is among those who lined up Monday to get tested for COVID-19 and receive $5. She called on visiting dignitaries to look at the “real problem” – homelessness – as the APEC summit gets underway

“Get those homeless people off the streets,” says Harold Thorton, who is from Washington, D.C. and receives housing assistance in San Francisco

Marshall Davenport said he is having trouble filling prescriptions and getting medical care. But he likes the idea of ​​a new skate park that the city opened just days before APEC, having done similar activities in the past.

“Instead of giving us five dollars, why don’t you take those thousands of dollars and make better schools and better places for the homeless, instead of locking us up in damn hotels. Why not have these buildings renovated? I live in the Windsor in the winter and the Windsor is s*****. Nothing but damn mold. I got sick because I was in my room,” she said of the mixed-income residential community.

Harold Thornton is no stranger to the big boys rolling in a motorcade through suffering streets. He is from Southeast Washington, not far from the U.S. Capitol. Thornton did construction work at the Pentagon and even worked at a U.S. Treasury outpost in Maryland (Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was in town Monday to meet with the Treasury ministers of the Asia-Pacific region. She spoke about “ regulation of digital assets, sustainable finance and inclusive growth’. targeted policies consistent with what I have called modern supply-side economics.’)

“My thing is, why are you trying to fix things now? Because I watch the news all the time. They put up trees. There’s a lot of police presence, whatever. You need that anyway. Even when they’re gone, you still need all the police. You still have to cut down trees,” he said.

‘When they are gone, everything is gone. That’s my perspective,” he complains to the visiting officials after going through the Covid testing line with his miniature pit bull.

The city has moved camps, cleaned streets and opened new skate parks in the beleaguered downtown

Although he says he was homeless when he first came to town on a Greyhound bus, Thornton has little patience for the tent camps set up around the corner.

A tent even popped up in front of the building where he receives housing assistance – just hours after authorities chased away other tenters. Services are there for people who abuse them, he says.

‘Get those homeless people off the streets. The tents, whatever. There used to be tents everywhere here. The city cleaned that up this morning. They still have tents here.’

“It doesn’t look good for the city,” he added.

But Thornton favors housing assistance in San Francisco, which faces some of the highest housing costs in the country and was hit by the pandemic as businesses fled downtown.

Not everyone is able to take advantage of the services offered by a network of nonprofits and city agencies.

Marshall Davenport sits on the sidewalk under the orange awning of the Glide social justice center, which provides several meals a day, along with legal and other services.

He says he just got his ID on Veterans Day, but is struggling to fill prescriptions while battling a stomach virus and an issue below his shoulder.

He said he lost his phone so he doesn’t know how to find a clinic, and says he can call an ambulance if his situation worsens. The Louisiana native says he was paroled after a wrongful conviction and then moved to Miami and California

“I think they’re coming because there’s a lot of foolishness among legislators here in California, between both parties, that’s holding back progress,” he said.

Unlike some people on Ellis Street in Tenderloin Monday, Davenport likes the new skate park, which Mayor London Breed’s office has promoted as “the nation’s first street skate plaza.”

He said he did “stuff like that” when he had a YMCA membership in West Palm Beach, Florida.

But Davenport also worries about whether the changes will last, on a day when city street sweepers blow water onto the roads at night.

“We don’t know if it’s just temporary, if it’s going to be in the right perspective for when they get here, you know what I mean? They have to look at how much you have to do every day to maintain that… So that’s quite difficult if you don’t have to get rid of homeless people who don’t have a place. “I don’t like sleeping on the streets,” he said.