Read part one here.
On a Friday evening in the fall of 2019, Julie was returning to her West South of Market home after walking her dog. Almost at her front door, a male stranger grabbed her by the back of the hair, spun her around, and punched her in the face. Her dog was slammed against the building next door.
“I forgot my pepper spray when I left the house. People have said, ‘Man, if that was me, I would have taken that guy down!’ Well, that might have worked except I had a dog with me. It was night, and I’ll be damned if my dog gets hit by a car. I still have some flashing in that eye and more floaters than I had before, which makes field vision tests kind of impossible for me,” Julie says. We’re not using Julie’s last name as she is fearful of retribution, not only from unpredictable drug users who camp in front of her dwelling, but from homeless activists who have threatened her in the past. “They tried to come for me. … They tried to find my home address and the gym I go to.” Facebook screenshots from October 2023, viewed by The Voice, support Julie’s claim. One activist who posted a home address had even been appointed to a community advisory board by former Mayor London Breed.
“West SoMa was always a little gritty, but it was safe and pretty clean up until Super Bowl 50, when the gates of hell opened, and hundreds of homeless addicts lined Division Street end to end, both sides, when they were flushed out.” Julie is talking about the tent cities that lined Division Street a decade ago, when the late Mayor Ed Lee and Super Bowl 50 Host Committee Chair Daniel Lurie built a city for the Super Bowl (despite, just like this time, the game being played 45 minutes south in Silicon Valley).
Under Lurie’s leadership, the Super Bowl Host Committee raised $50 million for a week of events like the NFL Experience at Moscone Center and a Super Bowl City along the Embarcadero. San Francisco ranked as the second-wealthiest city in the country per capita (behind Silicon Valley’s capital, San Jose), yet the homeless population had grown 7 percent over the prior decade. In 2016, more than half of San Francisco’s homeless population camped in the area that would become Super Bowl City. That August, Mayor Lee told Bay Area reporters in no uncertain terms that the homeless would “have to leave,” but when confronted by ABC7 News, he spoke from the other side of his mouth. “No, I don’t think we’re hiding anybody,” he said with his trademark coy smile. “This is a city of a lot of tolerance, but we do want to get people off the streets. I mean that is our ultimate and day-to-day goal.”
For Julie, the mayor’s words were infuriating. “I read in the news that Ed Lee wanted the homeless flushed from the area so that people spending money here wouldn’t have to look at them while partying,” she says. “I noticed the Super Bowl 50 junkies immediately. My gym is on Division and Ninth Street. Ground zero. I walked the stretch from the gym to home down Division every day. I would cut over onto 11th, then Harrison, up 12th to Howard Street. When I say the entire area was engulfed, I am not kidding. I had never seen so many homeless before.” Over the past decade, Julie has dealt with mental and physical complications due to Lee and Lurie wanting to impress visitors to a city which, at that time, had a mostly hidden secret: drug addicts living in encampments on the streets — and that was before the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl changed the game.
“None of them were local,” Julie explains. “One guy and his belongings took up more than a quarter of the block on 11th and Harrison, blocking the elderly and parents with strollers from sidewalk use and forcing them into the street. He said he was from Boston but liked the weather better here, was in prison, had a huge meth addiction, citing an eight-ball per day usage, which ‘ruined his hands’ so he allegedly couldn’t work and was waiting for his money to roll in. I started thinking that more were arriving fresh off the bus when they saw junkies being waited on hand and foot, getting free tents, and being allowed to colonize West SoMa with zero law enforcement. When I would call SFPD, I’d get an excuse by dispatch that they don’t have enough manpower, so why bother?”
According to Julie, things were just starting to get better. “I cannot even begin to describe to you what hell on Earth I experienced until fairly recently, but I still get junkies all day, every day, near my home. The things I saw and had to deal with honestly gave me a form of PTSD. Tents were not given to junkies until Super Bowl 50, and it happened in my front yard. They were on my porch shooting heroin, nodding off, blocking my front door, and using the porch as a toilet.”
Then Julie noticed the homeless “advocacy” organizations showing up. “The area was literally destroyed. I saw nonprofits delivering food, syringes, and socks — then came the tents. That was a game-changer. Word got out, and soon the entire area was flooded with homeless, none of whom were from San Francisco. They lined most of the sidewalks in my neighborhood, making it impossible to walk through. They had loose dogs that attacked people, and they were running chop shops and committing other crimes. There were lots of tent fires set accidentally by junkies themselves or by someone else they beefed with. The city did nothing, except for that one time someone thought putting a recycling center near my home would be a good idea, I guess so the junkies could make money to buy drugs. In addition to tents, my street now had homeless people on bikes pulling stolen trash cans and waiting overnight near my home for the recycling center to open.”
Julie was assaulted multiple times and nearly assaulted many more. “A vagrant decided to enter my flat while I was just across the street with my dog. Another time, a guy tried to follow me into my flat, and I just barely made it inside before he was out there scratching on my door. Homeless dogs have bitten me. I was chased by a guy with a beer bottle who kept returning to my neighborhood, and he knew my name. I filed over 300 reports with 311 on him and his buddies. Another guy was parading back and forth in front of me, swinging a tire iron.”
Julie documented everything, including email chains with various supervisors, several San Francisco police captains, police reports from the assaults, and thousands of photographs and videos, which she has posted over the years on social media. Now she says a whole new crop of homeless people have been pushed from the area surrounding Super Bowl 60 festivities and once again into her neighborhood. With the addition of fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin, the situation is far worse than it was during Super Bowl 50. Recent photos and videos taken by Julie near her house show mostly young people she hasn’t seen before passed out against buildings, lying on the ground, sleeping in cars, having psychotic episodes, masturbating while asking women for sexual favors, shooting and smoking drugs, and standing in the “fentanyl fold” (a disturbing side effect of heavy opioid use causing users to bend at the waist due to a loss of motor control).
Like Lee 10 years earlier, Lurie denies that the homeless are being swept out of Super Bowl 60 event zones, even as he plays better defense than Fred Warner. The mayor’s spokesman, Charles Lutvak, said Lurie has conducted “regular outreach work for a year” and plans to continue. “I don’t understand the assumption of a crackdown or sweep,” Lutvak said.
Julie says she will never forgive Lurie and Lee for pushing the homeless to her neighborhood for Super Bowl 50 in 2016, and she can’t believe it’s happening all over again for Super Bowl 60 in 2026. “Had the Super Bowl party not happened here, I probably would have been spared nine-and-a-half years of nonstop misery. Now it’s just an ongoing nightmare. A hard-working single parent who pays taxes and obeys the law has no rights in a city where drug tourists have the red carpet rolled out for them.”