Dozens Protest Removal Of Homeless From Super Bowl City

Despite the city’s recent construction of the Navigation Center and another shelter called the Pier 80 shelter, some say that with two years to prepare, San Francisco should have invested more in advance efforts to solve its homelessness problem.

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.

Protesters have staged a demonstration in downtown San Francisco against plans to clear away homeless people from popular tourist areas of the city ahead of the Super Bowl festivities.

A homeless man in San Francisco holds a sign as he panhandles for spare change in 2010. But according to several Bay Area homeless rights activists and social workers with whom I spoke, it seems that when the cameras are on, the city cleans up trash. “When it comes to large-scale events like the Super Bowl, there are concerns that organizations like Homeland Security and others have about it being vulnerable to violence and terrorist activities”, Dodge said. However, the demonstrators were met by a barricade of police with batons in hand, asking that they move off the streets and onto the sidewalk once they reached Beale and Market streets. Angela Lawrence, a 50-year-old woman who said she became homeless after losing her job with Microsoft, said she and her boyfriend have dealt with an increased and more aggressive police presence in recent weeks.

“Today demonstrates that they can pretend to make a spectacle of a sport and make that more important, but it’s actually the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther party and that’s what we should be talking about, because they are the ones that created liberation”, said protester Magick Altman, 65. “It keeps them homeless, and the wait list is closed so you can’t [get] back on the wait list”, Friedbach said. “There is things like there’s one shelter bed for every 5.5 homeless individuals sleeping on our streets”. She says that although San Francisco has built additional shelter space, it simply isn’t enough to shelter the city’s homeless population. “It’s not about hiding homeless people. That’s a challenge we face not just in San Francisco but across the nation, and we want to make progress with that goal”. “The Super Bowl represents a seven-figure sales bump”.