Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce Inc., said he pushed San Francisco officials to clean up the city before his company's annual conference began in his hometown this week and was pleased with the results.

“We put a lot of pressure on the city this year,” Benioff said during a press event Wednesday. “This looks great. It's very safe at the moment. We're moving in the right direction.”

Benioff caused a stir last month when he said that Dreamforce, San Francisco's largest convention, could leave the city if the event's attendees experienced homelessness and drug use.

“Nobody liked that — I didn’t like saying it,” Benioff said of his threat during a separate event Wednesday on stage with California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“We're coming after you, we want to keep you here,” Newsom said after Benioff noted that the city this week was the cleanest he'd ever seen.

About 43,000 people are expected to participate in Dreamforce, which will generate nearly $90 million for the city, a Salesforce spokesperson said, citing data from the San Francisco Travel Association. The conference is scheduled to end on Thursday.

Moving Salesforce's flagship annual meeting out of the city would be another blow to the region's tourism economy after major events hosted by Oracle Corp. and Google's cloud division were relocated from Alphabet Inc. According to the San Francisco Travel Association, conference spending remains well below pandemic levels — falling to $587 million in 2022 after generating nearly $2 billion in 2019.

The association estimates that convention-related hotel room nights will decline 34% in 2024 compared to this year. Overall visitor spending recovered faster and is expected to reach 88% of pre-pandemic levels this year.

Although Benioff was pleased with how this year went, he did not respond to a press question about whether Dreamforce would be back in San Francisco in 2024, saying city officials still had more work to do. “Homelessness remains a major problem in our city,” Benioff said, adding that more housing is needed and more police officers should be hired.

“It is an ongoing effort to increase the visibility of police and community ambassadors in key tourist areas,” said a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed’s office. “San Francisco is committed to making Dreamforce a world-class event, as we do year after year.”

Salesforce officials said there had been no reports of security incidents related to homelessness or drug use among conference attendees as of Wednesday afternoon. A spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department said there were no such incidents at last year's Dreamforce event.

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At a White House press conference on Monday, a reporter raised her hand and asked National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan a question about the APEC summit being held in San Francisco this week, where President Joe Biden will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and a host of other world leaders.

“San Francisco has cleaned up their streets ahead of President Biden and President Xi’s meeting,” the reporter said. “They’ve moved homeless to other parts of the city, cleared tent cities and trash off the street. Is the president embarrassed that an American city needs to go through a total makeover to be presentable for his out-of-town guests?”

Sullivan deflected the question, but as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation gathering swings into full gear, San Franciscans themselves are noting a timely improvement in the condition of the city’s streets—and wondering how it was accomplished and whether it will last once the summit ends Friday.  

RELATED: San Francisco Cleaned Up for APEC: See Before and After Photos

In particular, there has been a noticeable reduction in the number of tents and drug activity along Van Ness Avenue, United Nations Plaza and the area around the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building, which has long been the epicenter of the city’s drug crisis. 

Press left and right to compare

A large group of people congregate along Mission and Seventh streets, adjacent to the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building, on May 23, left, and the same location, where a chain-link fence has been installed and the area cleared of people, is pictured on Monday. | Benjamin Fanjoy for The Standard; Justin Katigbak/The Standard

“Some of the spots have been out there for 20 to 30 years, and they’re just not there,” said local activist and nonprofit founder Del Seymour. “They’re coming out doing all of this only for APEC. … I’ve got to be fair and give the city a chance to see if we can continue this.”

Shelter Beds Added, but No Change to Regular Pace of Encampment Clearing 

The U.S. Secret Service is restricting access to a 12-square-block radius in the South of Market neighborhood around the Moscone Center, the main venue for the event, and the California Highway Patrol and several other Bay Area counties are deploying over 1,000 additional law enforcement officers to the city to bolster security. 

The city opened 30 beds at its annual winter shelter facility in South of Market on Friday and is “inflating” many of its existing shelter facilities to accommodate roughly 300 more people. It’s unclear when all of the additional beds will become available. 

San Francisco has roughly 7,750 homeless people, according to the most recent point-in-time count, with 56% unsheltered. A waitlist for shelter beds was 487 people long on Monday as the city has struggled to connect with applicants by the time a bed becomes available.

Dre Blake, second to right, and Darrell Sharef, far right, stand by as a Department of Public Works employee washes the sidewalk on Van Ness Avenue. Blake told The Standard he’s on a waitlist for housing but prefers living on the streets over shelter because of past negative experiences at shelters. | Source: David Sjostedt/The Standard

The city’s homeless shelters saw a slight uptick in occupancy as of Monday afternoon—reaching 92% capacity after months of hovering at 90%.

Representatives from the city’s homelessness department denied they added shelter beds because of APEC. However, advocates for homeless people were quick to note the beds came online “just in time” for the city’s moment in the global spotlight. 

Though the addition of shelter beds is recent, the city has been stepping up arrests for drug dealing and other offenses for months. 

Over the summer, the San Francisco Police Department received reinforcements from the California Highway Patrol and the California National Guard to tackle drug-related issues, and the daily population of the city’s jails rose to over 1,100 people for the first time since before the pandemic. The rise in detainees forced the sheriff to reopen a disused facility to accommodate the influx. 

In the weeks leading up to APEC, records show the city maintained its regular pace of clearing two encampments per day, Monday through Friday. However, emails between San Francisco officials show the city made a concerted effort to address homeless encampments in particular areas before APEC. 

Press left and right to compare

A tent, personal belongings and people are clustered outside the Asian Art Museum near United Nations Plaza in San Francisco on May 11, left, and the same location is seen without people on Monday. | Jason Henry for The Standard; Justin Katigbak/The Standard

In an email dated Sept. 25, Department of Emergency Management Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll requested a 24/7 homeless shelter facility in time for the conference. Marion Sanders, chief deputy director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, responded to Carroll by promising to have a “clear plan of action” for the event.

In another email dated Oct. 23, a manager for the Healthy Streets Operations Center recommended delaying clearing two encampments in the Tenderloin until the week before APEC.

“One thought I have is to put in Leavenworth … then Eddy and Mason on Wednesday, but thinking it may be better to do this the week before APEC,” the manager said in the email.

Van Ness Avenue a Focus of Concern

Other emails show city officials expressed particular concern about encampments along Van Ness Avenue, which runs behind City Hall—a venue for multiple APEC-related gatherings, including a fancy party thrown by Mayor London Breed and East West Bank Chairman Dominic Ng on Sunday. City Hall will host another party for journalists covering APEC on Thursday.

Van Ness was listed as one of six priority areas to address before the conference, according to an email first obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle from the superintendent of Street Environmental Services, Christopher McDaniels. The department told the publication the areas were considered priorities regardless of the event.

Members of the Board of Supervisors have been pushing for the city to act before APEC.

Press left and right to compare

A police vehicle is parked next to a homeless encampment on a sidewalk along Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco on Sept. 26, left, and the same location has planter boxes installed to discourage encampments on Monday, right. | Benjamin Fanjoy for The Standard; Justin Katigbak/The Standard

“We understand the importance of presenting our city in the best possible light for international delegates,” a legislative aide to Supervisor Catherine Stefani wrote in an email to a constituent on Oct. 3. “Ahead of the event, our office has been actively advocating for improved conditions along Van Ness Avenue.”

City workers cleared two encampments on Van Ness the week before the conference. But it was not their first trip to the street: City workers visited the street 23 times to clear encampments over a six-month span starting in April, according to the Department of Emergency Management. 

In October, the San Francisco Police Department authorized its officers to enforce anti-camping laws in response to new guidance from the City Attorney’s Office, which is engaged in a high-stakes lawsuit over the city’s encampment clearings. 

A Department of Public Works employee stands beside a truck filled with the belongings of unhoused people. | Source: David Sjostedt/The Standard

During its most recent visit on Tuesday, the city at least temporarily swayed people from rebuilding their encampments on Van Ness. 

Darrell Sharef, a 34-year-old homeless man, said he was going to try to “hustle” enough money to afford a hotel room after the city disbanded his encampment. 

“This is the everyday lifestyle,” he said. 

Another man named Dre Blake said he turned down the city’s offer of shelter because he previously had negative experiences at the facilities.

“It’s just like the streets in there,” Blake said. “Nothing really changes. It’s not like I don’t have to look over my shoulder anymore.” 

Press left and right to compare

A group of people sit on the ground at Mission at Seventh streets in San Francisco on May 16, left, and two pedestrians pass the same location cleared of loitering people as seen on Monday. | Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images; Justin Katigbak/The Standard

As of Monday, the encampments had not returned. Daniel Rivera, another homeless man, said the people living along Van Ness had scattered across the city. He said the city told him and other homeless people to “clean up” due to APEC.

“It’s like getting dressed up for a party,” Rivera said. 

Many weren’t pleased the city asked them to move. For some, past experiences with the city, particularly during encampment clearings, have left them distrustful of government services.

“This is a category five hurricane hitting your spot, and you’re left with nothing,” said Nobel Mitchell, an unhoused man.

Nobel Mitchell salvages his belongings as San Francisco city workers conduct an encampment clearing. Mitchell, who is unhoused, said he’s been set back by previous encampment clearings, during which city workers destroyed his property. | Source: David Sjostedt/The Standard

Some advocates for the homeless expressed concern about the well-being of unhoused people who may have been displaced due to the APEC event. 

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, noted the issues homeless people face don’t disappear even if those people have been moved out of the public’s line of sight. 

“There’s a lot of money coming into this conference, and none of that is being set aside for unhoused people who are being displaced,” Friedenbach said. “They’re just moving people around.”

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Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Salesforce Inc. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said he pushed San Francisco officials to clean up the city before his company’s annual conference began in its hometown this week and is happy with the results.

“We put a lot of pressure on the city this year,” Benioff said Wednesday during a press event. “It looks great. It’s very safe right now. We’re moving in the right direction.” 

Benioff caused a stir last month when he said that Dreamforce, San Francisco’s largest convention, could leave the city if those attending the event were affected by homelessness and drug use.

“Nobody liked that — I didn’t like to say it,” Benioff said about his threat during a separate event Wednesday on stage with California Governor Gavin Newsom.

“We’re sucking up to you, we want to keep you here,” Newsom said, after Benioff remarked that the city this week is the cleanest he’s ever seen it.

About 43,000 people are expected to attend Dreamforce, which will generate almost $90 million for the city, a Salesforce spokesperson said, citing San Francisco Travel Association data. The conference is scheduled to conclude on Thursday. 

A move away from the city by Salesforce’s most-significant annual meeting would be another blow to the area’s tourism economy, following the relocation of major events run by Oracle Corp. and the cloud division of Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Conference spending remains far below pandemic levels — falling to $587 million in 2022 after generating almost $2 billion in 2019, according to the San Francisco Travel Association. 

The association estimates that convention-related hotel stays will decline 34% in 2024 compared with this year. Overall visitor spending has been quicker to rebound, and is expected to be at 88% of pre-pandemic levels this year.

Despite being happy with how things have gone this year, Benioff didn’t respond to a press question about whether Dreamforce would be back in San Francisco in 2024, saying city officials have more work to do. “Homelessness remains a major issue in our city,” Benioff said, adding that more housing is needed and more police officers should be hired.

“Ramping up police visibility and community ambassadors in key tourist areas has been an ongoing effort,” said a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed’s office. “San Francisco is committed to making Dreamforce a world-class event, as we do year after year.”

Salesforce representatives said there haven’t been any reports of safety incidents around homelessness or drug use affecting conference attendees as of Wednesday afternoon. A San Francisco Police Department spokesman said there were no such incidents during last year’s Dreamforce event either.

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At 7 a.m. on Jan. 12, I am on the south side of 13th Street between Folsom and South Van Ness, looking north across two lanes of surging traffic to a tent encampment on a median strip.  

It has rained—hard—in the night, but we are down to a cold drizzle in the pre-sunrise hours.  

Rainwater is still flowing down the streets, and it glistens in the headlights. 

I didn’t wear gloves and regret it. 

The still dark air is moist and heavy and the scene has that leaden quiet you get in a funeral home waiting for the service to start. 

I am under an overpass formed by the Caltrans viaduct that supports the roadbed of U.S. Highway 101. The overpass creates a favorable venue—at least insofar as San Francisco offers one—for those who are living without shelter.  

The viaduct, a steel structure the speckled-gray color of an anchovy, covers the median on the north side of the street and provides protection from the rain when it is falling vertically, a protection that diminishes when there is wind.  

The median is perhaps 5 inches above the roadbed and provides some elevation over the torrent of water that has flowed down San Francisco streets this winter while the city has been attacked by bomb cyclones and atmospheric rivers. 

These modestly favorable conditions have drawn tent encampments to the 13th Street median for many years. Miserable for sure, but less miserable than some other places.  

READ MORE: Is San Francisco’s Best Strategy in Homelessness Lawsuit To Lose?

There are more than a dozen—I count 14—structures located on the median this morning.  

The word “structures” needs some explanation for it implies a level of rigidity that is missing here. Tents, not 2x4s, are the building blocks of these structures. And yet just calling them tents misses the ingenuity—or desperation—that informs their construction.  

The first one—I later learn, perhaps unreliably—was being looked after for someone else by a young man named Marquis Ausby who has been living rough for years and was asked to keep an eye on the structure by its owner.  

But then the owner evidently told somebody at the city that he was leaving his tent, which was enough for city workers to declare it abandoned and begin the dismantlement. 

As they begin to take it apart, it becomes clear that the structure is constructed from three different tents swaddled under a monster piece of heavy gauge black plastic that flaps over the top. One corner of the sheet is knotted to a rope tied to one of the viaduct’s supporting steel beams.  

The domed tops of the three tents are humped below the tarp like the bones of a shoulder, but it isn’t until the tarp is completely removed that the complexity below is revealed. It is a warren, a burrow, a fox hole, though I couldn’t tell you exactly how the component tents related to each other. 

The tents are bulging—a blue fold-up camp chair, a three-shelf bookcase with jars and candles and food stuff. A jumble of running shoes. A black suitcase that might actually be a padded cushion. Buckets, a half-filled plastic jug. Two dozen hot dogs in their clear wrapping, so pink as to be obscene. Dozens of soda cans, most seemingly empty. A candy bag, the wrapper the color of Sani-Flush with cheerful bold yellow and red lettering that could easily spell the words “Jolly Ranchers,” though I can’t quite make it out. 

It takes several beefy Department of Public Works (DPW) employees—wearing masks and yellow hazmat vests—to get all the contents into the back of their dump truck. They use a mechanical lift to lower a platform to the ground so they can drag the tent with the biggest bulge onto the lift and raise it until it can be slid and jerked into the truck. They don’t look inside, though I see some details that make me want to stop everything and find out who this tent belongs to and why they are taking it away.  

There is a blue hand-painted sign, clearly for use in panhandling. It is a wooden board—not something ripped from a cardboard box—and beautifully designed, that proclaims, “Any Amount Helps (A real) Vet. Experience FREEDOM”. The sign falls from the tent like all the other debris but it lands painted side up on the sidewalk, ironic commentary on those that “Experience HOMELESSNESS.” 

A hand-painted wood sign likely used for panhandling exhibits the care of its creator, even as it lies abandoned on a 13th Street sidewalk after falling from a tent that was being cleared by city workers. | Joe Dworetzky/Bay City News Foundation

The largest of the tents is actually illustrated. Over a side window there is a face drawn in black Sharpie on the gray nylon material. The drawing is on the exterior of the tent, perhaps three-quarters of the size of a human face, but this face is closer to something from Marvel comics than one you might meet on the street. The illustrator has done that hard thing of putting fingers to either side of the face, making them so large that it seems as if the figure is hiding behind, holding on, and peering out over the screen window. It’s a haunting drawing, not great art but the eyes stare out at me for the entire time it takes for the hazmat men of DPW to throw the tent away. 

The rules of engagement

The city conducts these operations twice a day, first at 7 in the morning and again at 1 in the afternoon. They follow a certain set order of operations. 

First off, a cluster of city workers—members of the Homeless Outreach Team and the Encampment Resolution Team (HOT and ERT)—move from tent to tent, waking sleeping residents and telling them that the street needs to be cleaned and they’ll need to move their things. They are supposed to say—though whether they actually do is contested—that the resident will be allowed to come back after the cleaning is over. The city people also ask if the resident wants shelter or housing. If they do, the whole moving stuff business will be a lot simpler. They can just take what they need and the city will get rid of the rest.  

One problem with the protocol—and this is undisputed—is that at the beginning of the morning engagement, city workers do not know yet if or how many shelter beds are actually available. The city has closed the shelter system to self-referrals because it is essentially full. That doesn’t mean that no beds at all will be available on any given date, it is just that the beds that open will come from people leaving shelter, possibly for actual housing, but more likely because they are returning to the streets or to a hospital or are headed out of town. The city won’t be able to confirm that daily availability until later in the day, so the city workers tell the tent residents that they will circle back later in the morning with more information. 

And it’s not just knowing if there is a bed in general.  The city operates dozens of shelters and they have different rules and capacities. Not all will work. If you have a dog, a shelter with a no-pet policy won’t do. If you are a couple, you aren’t going to split up for dormitory space. If you are in a wheelchair, you can’t climb stairs. And then there is the issue of your stuff. If you are only allowed to store a suitcase, you’d be giving up all of your possessions that did not fit.  

An offer of shelter in the abstract is not meaningful; you need the details. 

But meanwhile, the pack-up-and-move process goes ahead. 

Tents that are unoccupied and not packed up may be determined to be abandoned. Abandoned tents and their contents—like the one I watched being dismembered—are loaded onto trucks bound for the dump.  

Tents that are occupied but are not moved by the owner are supposed to be bagged up, tagged and moved to a city storage facility. The owner is supposed to be able to retrieve his or her possessions within the next 30 days; thereafter they will be treated as trash and sent to the dump.

A haunting sketch of a face drawn in black Sharpie appears on the gray nylon tent material of a 13th Street homeless encampment resident in San Francisco on Jan 12, 2023, before being cleared from the sidewalk by city workers and discarded. | Joe Dworetzky/Bay City News Foundation

In litigation, the advocacy group Coalition on Homelessness is challenging the city’s compliance with protocols. They say that these operations are sweeps, which are currently banned under a federal injunction. The advocates say that police are often on-site during these operations to lend an air of coercive authority.  

The cleaning, they say, is pretextual. Not the cleaning itself—the city does clean the street—but the motivation for doing it. The advocates argue that the cleaning is a way to harass and beat down the homeless, to create more pressure for them to get services, and to show the neighbors and the public that they are doing something.   

What is happening, they contend, is not about cleaning the streets but about busting up the encampment, something a judge has enjoined.  

Mobile homes

As I watched the 13th Street encampment being swept, I was struck by how much of the stuff around the structures is for mobility. If you don’t have a place to store things and are at risk of being forced to move at any time—some people have been swept dozens of times—you must be able to carry your stuff.   

There are the little shopping carts that lived their former lives in high-end groceries, and for every one of them there are two of the traditional big orange and red plastic carts that come from Target. 

There are wheelchairs, baby strollers, joggers. Bicycles in every state of disassembly. There is a cart with three sides of metal bars and four wheels, like the dolly you might see in a department store for moving dummies around.  

There are three small dogs in one of the tents. When they come out they’re wearing little red colored coats for warmth.   

As the morning progresses, a couple of tent dwellers are starting to pack up their tent. They move slowly, methodically. It’s a big process with all this stuff. Anything you don’t take is abandoned and you aren’t renting a U-Haul. You have to roll it away yourself. You’d hate to have to do it once, much less frequently. Particularly without advance notice and in the rain. 

There is one man—mid-fifties I’d say. Black. Wiry. Surprisingly cheerful. He takes two or three hours to put together his transportation. At the front there is a working bicycle—it’s a beat-up beach cruiser in a light blue color—then there is a span from a silver outdoor aluminum ladder, not a step ladder, but a full get-up-on-the-roof-and-clean-the-drains sort of ladder.  

The ladder has two homemade mounts so it can trail behind the bike parallel to the road, a long thin loading platform for everything else he is packing. The far end of the ladder is on a small dolly, the sort with four little hard black wheels that can each turn 360 degrees if they need to.

A ladder serves as a cart to move belongings from a homeless encampment on 13th Street in San Francisco to another location on Jan. 12, 2023. | Photo by Joe Dworetzky/Bay City News Foundation

He has ropes and cords and bungies, no two the same, and as he adds things onto the bed of the ladder he lashes them down like he is preparing to take a ship to sea and could not have loose barrels skittering on the deck. 

There is a black wheelchair on the street—not electric, but in pretty good shape, all things considered; it’s the sort of serviceable black wheelchair that might be queued on a jetway at the airport waiting for seniors to disembark.  

The chair is waiting to be thrown over the side of the truck into the stuff heading for the dump, when the man with the bike and ladder sees it and heads over for a brief inspection. He likes what he sees and rolls the chair over to the dolly at the back of the contraption and attaches it there to roll along behind the long ladder. 

With the wheelchair lashed on, he mounts the bicycle at the front and slowly begins to pedal.  

The attachments move creakily along behind him. The rig reminds me of one of those long firetrucks that has a compartment in the rear with a second steering wheel, but he is doing this all alone.  

There is no drama. No one is yelling at anyone. Everybody has done this before.  

If the city’s purpose is truly to clean the street, I wonder why they are doing it while it is still raining. And why does it start at 7 a.m.? If you have the misfortune of living in a tent during the winter with the soaking rains, why is it required that you wake at 7 and move your tent in the rain?

I think of the street cleaners in my neighborhood. They don’t come at 7 a.m. I don’t know if they come in the rain but I doubt it. And if it is cleaning, why isn’t there a schedule? Every other Tuesday between 10 and 12?

The cleaning might be easier if there were large trash cans or dumpsters and scheduled pick-ups. 

At first, I keep my distance from the residents; it feels impossibly rude—even for a reporter—to be approaching someone’s structure while their life’s possessions, their intimate objects, are in plain view on a wet city sidewalk. But no one seems to expect privacy.

There is a woman across the street, her tent set apart from the others. Maybe she is 40 but I could be off by 10 years. People experiencing homelessness have told me that living on the street is particularly unsafe for women and I wonder if her distance from the encampment reflects that fact, but I can’t bring myself to ask her about her safety when I see three stuffed animals in the things she is packing.

A 13th Street homeless encampment resident uses a cart to move belongings to another location on Jan. 12, 2023. | Joe Dworetzky/Bay City News Foundation

I talk to a young man named Justin Henninger who says he is 28 and has been homeless since his father kicked him out of the house when he was 14.

He has been out of jail for a week and has been staying here under the overpass with his 3-year-old dog.

He notes that there has been a lot of rain this week and says, “My little tiny dog was soaking wet, and I’m pretty sure both of us got sick.”

I ask how he compares living on the street to being in jail.

“It’s really not far off. I mean, the only difference is I can go places. That’s really the only difference,” said Henninger. “Like in jail, you don’t get none of your personal belongings … out here, people are just going to take your stuff, so you don’t get that either. I can’t go work a job because I can’t leave my dog in a tent.”

He pauses and sums up the experience, “It sucks.”

This story was written by Joe Dworetzky of Bay City News.

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In the run-up to a rare open-air hearing on the city’s drug crisis, San Francisco authorities cleared and swept United Nations Plaza — normally a hotspot for drug use and petty crime — to set the stage for an unusual open-air hearing on the city’s drug crisis to prepare crisis.

Around 10 a.m. Tuesday, a group of more than two dozen people were busy street selling and using drugs near the east side of the square. An Urban Alchemy employee approached the crowd and told them they would have to move soon because the mayor was coming.

City worker Mason Newt pressure washers the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco ahead of a board of directors hearing scheduled for the area later Tuesday. | Benjamin Fanjoy for The Standard

The open-air oversight panel hearing — likely the first of its kind in the panel’s history — required the coordination of multiple departments and agencies working together to shoo away the plaza’s ordinary residents and disrupt the typical daily flow of drug sales and use.

Throughout the day, workers from Urban Alchemy and employees from the BART Police Department and the Recreation and Parks Department were regularly seen roaming the area while workers from the Public Works Department cleaned up the surrounding sidewalks.

“I’ll clean it up for the mayor,” said a public works sanitation worker, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press.

In addition to the cleaners, the city spent $4,650 on media services and logistics to organize a broadcast of the hearing — all for a question-and-answer session that typically takes between 15 and 20 minutes of the board’s time .

United Nations Square appeared quiet just after noon on Tuesday, hours before the mayor and bosses began the scheduled question-and-answer session on the city’s drug crisis. | Garrett Leahy/The Standard

The mayor is expected to answer questions from CEO Aaron Peskin and others about the drug crisis; The Board will then take a break and meet at City Hall for the remainder of the session.

On Monday, Peskin sent a letter outlining his demands on Breed.

In the letter, Peskin called on the mayor to “establish a permanent emergency operations center that will coordinate on a daily basis all the many agencies and departments that can handle this crisis,” and called on her to coordinate multiple parties involved in stopping the public drug trade involved .

On Tuesday, the Department of Emergency Management confirmed a pilot program planned as part of Breed’s upcoming budget proposal that could allow enforcement of outdoor drug use laws.

City Hall employees place the board’s tablecloths on a table in front of the federal office building at UN Plaza. | Garrett Leahy/The Standard

About two hours before the mayor’s arrival, the UN Plaza was unusually quiet. The clean-up crews are gone and only a few people walked around without anyone visibly taking drugs. Just before 1 p.m., workers cordoned off an area in front of a federal office building at UN Plaza while others set up tables and chairs.

On Natoma and Minna streets near Seventh Street and in front of the San Francisco Federal Building, several people said they were evicted from the UN Plaza around 7 a.m. However, they said they knew nothing about the mayor’s appearance.

“I don’t know that the arrival of the mayor would change anything,” said Trevor Pearsoa. “They always move us around like this.”

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San Francisco’s long-contested Housing Authority, which faced a $ 30 million deficit two years ago, has cleaned up its finances and operations and is no longer behind with the federal government, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Housing Authority, which provides vouchers for approximately 13,000 housing units and owns public housing units in Potrero Hill and Visitacion Valley, has faced management and maintenance problems for decades due to federal budget cuts and poor local oversight. Tenants complained of shabby water pipes, broken elevators, and insect infestation – the situation was so dire in 2013 that then-Mayor Ed Lee dismissed and replaced almost all of the Housing Authority’s officers.

In a letter last week, Hunter Kurtz, HUD’s Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing, told city officials that the Housing Authority had “fixed their standards” for several agency-managed programs, including the Section 8 program.

Acting Director Tonia Lediju, who brought Mayor London Breed with her last year to repair the beleaguered department, said the HUD letter was evidence that “it’s a new day at the Housing Authority”.

“We’re turning it around,” she said. “It’s not perfect yet. We’re not where we want to be, but we’re on the right track. “

Two years ago, an audit by the San Francisco Housing Authority found a deficit of $ 30 million, forcing the city to take control of the agency and reallocate about $ 7 million that was earmarked for other uses. A few months later, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development urged the city to take responsibility for the agency because it had defaulted on several agreements and commitments.

Lediju, the city’s chief auditor, was hired to take over the agency and the operations and finances were outsourced to third-party companies.

The San Francisco Housing Authority manages Section 8 vouchers that are used to pay for both private landlords and nonprofit housing associations that have acquired most of the city’s public housing over the past decade.

Lediju said it will allow the city to raise more federal funds, which will result in housing more families and low-income individuals, especially homeless veterans.

“We will apply for additional vouchers,” she said.

The housing agency’s improvement is due to the city just completing its $ 2.2 billion rental assistance demonstration program that transfers ownership of 3,500 public units in 29 buildings from the agency to nonprofits like Mercy Housing and Chinatown Community Development Center was transferred. This program included the renovation of much of the city’s public housing.

The housing authority still owns the land on which the former social house is located, but no longer owns the buildings. In addition to managing the Section 8 voucher program, the Housing Authority also owns two affordable complexes, one on Potrero Hill and one in Sunnydale. These complexes are being rebuilt and gradually being taken over by private non-profit organizations.

Joaquin Torres, Chairman of the Housing Authority Commission, said, “The cure for this failure is a vote of confidence from the HUD.”

“We have demonstrated beyond a doubt that San Francisco is really meaningfully and seriously invested in our most vulnerable residents,” he said.

JK Dineen is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen

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