Bring Your Brooms Out to Protest Homeless Encampment Sweeps

Coinciding with a Local Homeless Coordinating Board meeting, the housing rights organization Solutions Not Sweeps Coalition will be holding a protest of sorts at the steps of San Francisco City Hall Thursday, brooms encouraged.

The group is asking folks to come out with sweeping devices in hand to bring attention to the city’s push to “sweep” homeless people from the streets and away from public view. According to the group’s website, Solutions Not Sweeps previously sent a letter to the Office of the Mayor, demanding four key concessions:

1. End the illegal confiscation and destruction of unhoused neighbors’ personal property.
2. Replace the complaint-driven and law enforcement-led response to homelessness with an evidence-based approach aimed at connecting people with their needs.
3. End the use of cleaning as a pretext for harassment of unhoused people and establish productive, scheduled, regular, and well-publicized street and sidewalk cleaning where unhoused people reside.
4. End the towing of vehicles that people are using as their homes.

Hoping to add public support to the organization’s goals, the broom rally will take place just prior to the board meeting focused on the Healthy Street Operation Center, which the coalition calls the “facilitator of Sweeps.”

In a press release issued Tuesday, Solutions Not Sweeps refers to the “REAL dirty work” coming out of City Hall itself and on its behalf out on San Francisco streets where mistreatment of unhoused residents and their property is rampant.     

You can join in the “housing for all” call, armed with your favorite broom, as part of the “fun, ridiculous political action” on Thursday, February 27, 2020. Participants will meet up at City Hall on the Polk Street side at 10 a.m.

Additional information can be found on the coalition’s Facebook event page.