If anything was going to put on an exclamation mark on San Francisco's homeless crisis, it was the giant tent city rising on Division Street. The morphing, amoeba-like rainbow of camping equipment was impossible to miss - grocery carts spilling-over with belongings parked alongside piles of debris amassed around cooking stoves.
At the time, few realized the camp would spark a city-wide discussion of homelessness, and a collective soul-searching that hadn't been experienced in the city in years. In other words, it was a catalyst.
Last February, the city was busy sprucing-up its waterfront to host Super Bowl City. At the same time the urban campground not far away was exposing the harsh underside of San Francisco's storied streets in grand fashion.
"We all made that area our home," said Tamara Hoffner, one of an estimated 300 campers who took refuge in the encampment. "It was just like we were all to ourselves."
But on the first day of March in the wee hours of the morning, police and public works crews descended on the encampment forcing its residents to move-on. The city waited to remove the camp until a new shelter at Pier 80 could open. With the shelter now open, Mayor Ed Lee ordered the camp removed.
"They woke us up at five in the morning," recalled Hoffner. "'Get up, move your stuff off the sidewalk so DPW can come spray down the sidewalk.'"
City crews hauled away mounds of trash. The sidewalks were hosed down and barriers set-up in place of tents. Hoffner and the other residents scattered to find new places to set-up camps. A smattering of tents immediately began to re-appear along Folsom Street, beneath underpasses on Cesar Chavez Street, near Mission Bay and behind the Best Buy on Harrison Street. The splinters of the Division Street camp were now visible across South of Market and beyond.
Some campers, like Debra Lujan moved just a block from the Division Street site, setting up a campsite behind a Food Co. grocery store, but with the expectation she would soon have to move again and again.
"I usually move on average of a couple times a week, anywhere from a couple blocks to a couple miles," Lujan said frying a cheese sandwich on a camping stove. "It happens so frequently that you become slightly numb to it."
A couple miles from Division Street, former Division Street camper Ryan Palmer sat amid a row of tents beneath the 280 overpass near Mission Bay, just thirty feet from the rumbling trains along the Caltrain tracks. Palmer found himself caught up in the clearing of the Division Street camp, but now took the upheaval in stride.
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"The thing about life is being able to adapt to what you need to do next," Palmer said.
Hoffner ended-up in a camp near the Dogpatch Neighborhood — though months after the closure of the Division camp she still felt a tinge of sadness.
"Yeah it was crowded, Hoffner said, "but it was home."
The camp and its dense forest of humanity upset neighbors and business owners. No longer were there hints of desperation in wake of the city's tech boom and affordability crisis. The desperation was now all there in one place to see.
Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness said the clearing of the Division encampment merely spread its glaring issues to other parts of the city.
"As a result people got all their property confiscated," Friedenbach said. "They were basically moved to other people's doorsteps — the complaints to the city about homeless people skyrocketed."
Still some believe the short-lived Division camp thrust the homeless issue to the headlines in a way it hadn't before, revealing the public's boiling point and renewing calls for more solutions from the city.
Since the camp's closure, city leaders have made a bigger push to open more "navigation centers," one-stop-shops where homeless can get housing and social services all under one roof.
The Division Street camp and its dismantling still sit among Hoffner's thoughts — a makeshift family dispersed from its makeshift home.
"That day man," Hoffner said, "that was one crazy morning."
