Dozens protest homeless removal from Super Bowl area

Yet, despite assertions by city administrators that they are not trying to hide San Francisco’s homeless population, police have been seen clearing homeless people away from underpasses along the Super Bowl route.

According to city officials, homeless people are moving their belongings to shelters and underneath freeways because of the rainy season. 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.

Protest organizers say there’s been a rise in “quality-of-life” citations, like for sitting or sleeping on a public sidewalk, around Super Bowl events in San Francisco. There are countless moderately priced listings in San Francisco hovering around, or far below, the $473-a-night average, up 91 percent from the city’s typical average Airbnb cost. “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.

Richard Thompson, president of Air Charter Service North America states: “In 2015 there were more than a thousand extra flights into the Arizona area for the game in Glendale which saw the New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks”. One young woman, Nikki Millett, told Reuters that, “What I am against is that homelessness has been a huge problem in this city for a long time and Mayor Lee hasn’t done anything about it until [the Super Bowl]”. She told the newspaper she was charging $249 a night for the Super Bowl, up from $162, but that she had plans to drop the price a bit. The Coalition for the Homeless said over 800 people are on a wait-list for a bed at the shelter.

In a report by the San Francisco Chronicle, reporter Marcus Richardson had been robbed by two unidentified gunmen while taking pictures of the San Francisco scenery at Lombard and Hyde Street around 9:15 p.m. As Richardson was placing equipment back into his auto, he was approached by the two gunmen.

The thought process seems solid – an estimated million people descending on the already housing-strained San Francisco Bay area. We can do more together than we can separately. This has caused a lot of controversy within the community especially with those organizations who help the homeless, or are homeless individuals themselves, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

Perhaps it’s because relatively compact San Francisco has been transformed so cataclysmically in the last decade by the forces of high technology, and the disrupting influx of wealth and development, while the sprawl of Los Angeles camouflages so many of its disparities.

Before Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft, you couldn’t just build more hotel rooms or put more taxis on the street. But reassuring statements from city officials have not stopped critics from drawing a contrast between a multimillion-dollar Super Bowl celebration and the plight of the city’s poorest citizens. “I definitely wanted to take advantage of what’s going on”.