San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Monday “Bloomberg Technology” that her city has constantly been cleaning streets and helping the homeless get shelter while discussing preparing for the APEC Summit of President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping.
Host Ed Ludlow said, “Why has it taken the visit of U.S. President Biden, China’s President Xi, leaders around the world for action on all of the problems the city has been talking about for 4 years now?”
Breed said, “Just to be clear, we have been working on this for a few years. This is not an issue have been sitting around waiting to solve. It is something San Francisco continues to work on. Since I have been mayor, since 2018 we have helped over 10,000 people exit homelessness. We have never had 10,000 people on our streets. We have seen a reduction when other cities saw an increase. This is a problem we continuously worked on. This year, we got additional resources from the state and the federal government that has made a tremendous difference around the challenges that we are dealing with.”
Ludlow said, “A question from our audience that was submitted when they heard that your comment on the program is more people moved temporarily because of the event of this week from specific blocks and neighborhoods to others, or was this permanent action that was taken from what we see on the streets outside?”
Breed said, “It was an effort that took place as we had a court case where it limited our ability to move people off of the street. We still have a few hundred beds available. Our street outreach team is out there everyday. After we got clarity from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, people who were offered shelter are no longer in involuntarily homeless. We are able to move them into housing and support. We have been aggressive once we had the clarity to get people off of the street. Our goal is to provide support to provide compassion and not let people linger on our streets when we have an opportunity for housing.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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