As the city geared up for Sunday’s game, at least 200 people took to streets in the Californian city to bring attention to the plight of homeless.
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“This is an opportunity for us to show the world that the San Francisco that we see every day is not necessarily the San Francisco that Mayor Lee and his administration want you to see”.
“People are getting kicked off the streets with nowhere to go”, said activist Shekinah Love. Yet the shelter is in such high demand that it has a waiting list 150 people long, all of whom were skipped over to relocate those who were moved to make way for Super Bowl visitors.
“Homelessness is not a choice, and that’s where we have to start with things”, Coalition for the Homeless spokeswoman Kelly Cutler said. There were more than 7,500 homeless people in the city at last count, a 7 percent increase since 2005, more than 4,300 of whom sleep on the streets.
They tell KRON’s Alecia Reid that there are not enough beds in the shelters to house all of them.
However, the city’s Democrat mayor, Ed Lee, claims the clearance is not a question of clearing homeless people for the benefit of tourists. Police Captain David Lazar of the Central Station issued a warning to demonstrators to not put set up tents on the ground.
City officials say homeless people are moving to shelters or living in tents under freeway overpasses to seek cover during the rainy season.
San Francisco authorities have pushed dozens of homeless people out of the city’s waterfront area to make way for a weeklong “Super Bowl City” for American football fans to enjoy the sport’s biggest competition.
San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr, who has been the focus of protests since the police killing of a black man in December, told Reuters on Wednesday that his department would work “painstakingly” to protect demonstrators’ free speech rights.
The city estimates that there are around 7,000 homeless people living across San Francisco and around 3,000 of those homeless are children.
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The protest had grown to more than 100 demonstrators as of 5:30 p.m., with police lining The Embarcadero to keep protesters out of the street and away from Super Bowl City, while helicopters circled overhead.
