The City’s moratorium on encampment cleanups is still in effect due to Covid concerns. The results are the dangerous and disastrous growth of encampments on BID sidewalks.
The scheduled cleanups that would move encampments and disinfect the sidewalks beneath them were suspended in March. The BID clean teams do not have the authority to move people or their possessions.
Despite that, we make every effort to obtain voluntary compliance from the people living in the street to give us any trash they want removed. Our Clean Team hits the streets at 5 a.m. and begins the steady work of hauling away tons of trash and debris from gutters, sidewalks and streets. The BID's 50 trash cans throughout the district are emptied several times a day.
Not surprisingly, calls for the BID’s on-demand pressure washing service skyrocketed this quarter. We’ve been averaging in the high 700’s for each of the first two quarters of 2020. In this third quarter, we responded to 928 power wash requests.
The BID’s #1 priority is to get the City cleanups back. We are advocating for this at City Hall and also in the media. Our district is under enormous pressure as the epicenter of the country’s homelessness crisis.
