One Week After APEC: San Francisco Reverts To Its Old Gross Self In A Matter Of Days

Last week, the world’s eyes were on San Francisco as the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit was held in the city. San Francisco, which has been characterized as crime-ridden, dirty, and filled with homeless people and people taking drugs on the street in recent years, worked hard for weeks in advance cleaning up the city. Entire homeless encampments were forced out, with some places they used to be being replaced with decorative flower boxes. Street sweepers and city workers cleaned off sidewalks and streets. To many there, it harkened back to the San Francisco of years ago.

While there were some cracks in the facade, such as several robberies against APEC guests, and many APEC guests refusing to venture out too far because they didn’t feel safe, Mayor London Breed and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin called it a success in changing people’s image of San Francisco. The presence of President Joe Biden at the conference also led credibility to change, as he met Chinese President Xi Jinping and other world leaders in and around San Francisco in pristine areas.

However, once the barriers came down over the weekend, the areas so cleaned up for the conference slowly reverted to their pre-APEC condition. And really hurt local businesses in the area saw a combined hundreds of thousands of losses because of the high security measures keeping away most customers.

A business owner interviewed on Fox News said that his area of the city went back only 24 hours after the end of the conference. “It’s horrible. I just drove through the Tenderloin, and it is just a lot of drug heads, drug dealers, and they’re all out, they’re all out in the neighborhood,” said Tom Wong in a Fox News interview. “It’s less than 24 hours, and it’s back to the same thing. It is crime-ridden, drugs everywhere. There’s needles everywhere. There’s poop everywhere again.”

In a Globe interview, Mary Cruz, another local business owner whose store was affected negatively by the conference, said that there was real anger directed towards the city this week because of them not keeping up with the cleanliness levels they had during the conference.

“It was so great the past week to walk out of my house and not see a tent in sight,” added Cruz. “I didn’t make as much as I usually did with APEC going on, but seeing San Francisco clean and devoid of criminals and homeless made me feel that I was in a real city again. This was the San Francisco I remembered growing up.

“This morning, opened my door, and there were a few tents up. I knew it wouldn’t last, but somewhere I still believed the city would have done more to keep things orderly. I haven’t seen anyone using just yet, but I know that is a matter of time now. Things are starting to get that dingy appearance again too. And this just really sucks. Basically, I can have a nice cleaned up city but I lose a lot of business, or I can have a decent amount of people coming in but I have to deal with all that outside. You can’t win in this city.”

San Francisco going back to its old gross self

Another resident nearby the APEC area, Mark Wolf, told the Globe, “I worked from home during the entirety of the conference, so I got to go outside here midday and see all these neat and tidy streets. I moved here almost ten years ago, and I never saw the city like this before. Not one person asked me for money and I didn’t have constantly look down in this one area I walk past that usually has a loose needle or two rolling around. It’s small, but passing by an area that always has food wrappers and beer bottles strewn around because a junkie made permanent camp there to be suddenly clear was great.

“This week, they’re calling it afterglow because of how well they think the conference went, but for a lot of us it seems like a hangover. Things are creeping back in now. The homeless are back and I already saw the return of trash by the sidewalk. I need to go back to my set times so I don’t walk outside too late again.

“San Francisco showed what they could do if they actually cared. The city did look great. But it didn’t last too long. Instead of keeping up, they’re throwing city money into programs that people will never use like usual. Why can’t we have the city always clean like that? Police were there, people were walking around happily. We were a real city for a moment there.”

Final statistics on the cleanup and reversion of San Francisco are due soon.