A residential side street in San Francisco now resembles a scene out of the rocky West after a group of neighbors banded together to place about two dozen boulders along the sidewalk to try and deter homeless people from camping out amid the city’s ongoing crisis.
Neighbors along Clinton Park in the city’s Mission Dolores neighborhood said the rocks are meant to keep drug users from having a space to shoot up as they camp out overnight.
“They’ll shoot up and stay overnight,” neighbor David Smith-Tan told KTVU. “A bunch of my neighbors, we all chipped in a few hundred dollars and I guess this is what they came up with.”
San Francisco has long struggled with problems of human waste and needles on the streets of the Tenderloin district, where many addicts and homeless people are typically found. The city has set up public toilets and last year announced the creation of a special six-person “poop patrol” team to clean up the human waste.
Similar landscaping measures have been implemented in other parts of the city. The California Department of Transportation has put rocks in an open space off Bayshore Boulevard to deter encampments, while the Eureka Valley-Harvey Milk Branch of the San Francisco Public Library – in the same neighborhood – has made design choices that are perceived as anti-homeless, according to KTVU. – READ MORE