About a week ago the city announced they would start cleaning up the streets and urban blight, and it appears they are making a go of it.

Three days ago, on my walk to work, I passed Cedar Street as it was being power washed. No one but the power washing workers were on that street and for some weird reason the cleaning solution smelled like a Jolly Rancher candy tastes. The people who live on that street were lined up along Polk, against a wall with their stuff stacked beside them. No one seemed distressed about the situation, they just stood calmly in a waiting state.

As I walked onward I passed the habitually crumbled and nodded-out trash dwelling squatters that once lived for weeks on the corner of Polk and Ellis. I'll call them the "Squatters" because they not only squat locations but they also hold themselves in slumped over squatting positions with their long dirty hair perpetually hanging in front of their turned down faces. The Squatters were now lined up along Polk beside a building's wall, all their trash from their corner habitat was spread along the wall and they were sleeping like curled up cats amongst it.

A little further along on that walk I saw that some of the long standing tarp shelters that lined the north side of Ellis were not there. And Willow Street, on either side of Polk, was now only sparsely populated with people and tents.

Yesterday's walk to work revealed that the clean up effort was holding. There were still addicts crouching about on the side streets smoking fentynal and crack, but not as many as usual, and the tents were still limited in number.

Today no one was camped nor hanging out along Cedar Street, it was clean. Along the north side of Ellis, in front side of the Civic Center Inn, there were now only one or two tents. All the the ensconced handmade shelters that occupied that sidewalk were gone. Seeing this change blew me away! The side walk was clear, reclaimed, and returned to an accessible and safe place to stroll along. For the past few years and only just days ago that site had been severely congested, desperate, disturbing and filthy. That community was now gone.

As I crossed Eddy the usual gathering of addicts and mental patients were loitering in a daze outside the Shanti Project, taking turns meeting their water needs at the curbside dispenser. When I reached Willow Street I was astonished. The deranged scene that dominated the west side had disappeared! While the east side appeared to only accommodate a small spillover of loiterers from Shanti.

On my walk home from work I saw that the Civic Center Inn, a boarded up and broken looking motel covered in graffiti and surrounded by street dwellers, had a new look. In just one day the place had been restored with a fresh coat of paint featuring light-toned manila accented with dark grey. The parked cars that lined the motel's backside lot, cars with busted windows and broken bodies, were no longer there either. All that remained in that parking lot were two guys taking apart bicycles.

The Squatters had moved again too. Their pile of refuse had been relocated further north along Polk. They now lived beside the curb of the sidewalk, their 20+ feet of flotsam and jetsam lined half the sidewalk all the way to the corner of Geary. They had created a new narrow path for pedestrians to traverse, one that that required a witnessing and careful navigation of their fragmented mess. The Squatters were a scene unto themselves, untouchables, that could not be cleaned up by the city.