Biden urged to meet the homeless in San Francisco as advocate compares APEC clean-up to 'rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic'

President Joe Biden has been urged to meet San Francisco's homeless and see the city's squalor first-hand as advocates tear into the APEC conference clean-up in the streets.

San Francisco's facelift for the summit has involved relocating members of the city's burgeoning homeless population to shelters without providing additional beds, in what one advocate compared to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The city with world-class cuisine, glorious views, and an estimated 20,000 people in need of shelter annually, has been sprucing up in advance of a summit that will bring Asia Pacific leaders including China's Xi Jinping.

The effort has included removing graffiti from city streets and even building a new skatepark, along with contending with filthy homeless encampments spread throughout the city, with particular visibility since the COVID pandemic hit.

Homeless advocate Jennifer Friedenbach blasted elements of city's approach, which she said included directing people from inside the designated APEC 'zone' to the city's only shelter with walk-in beds. 

The APEC conference in San Francisco brings world leaders and diplomats from across the globe. The city has been clearing streets from a conference zone, and some advocates want President Biden to visit homeless people

That risks harming people who have depended on it for nightly needs.

'So if you happen to be one of the people in there (in a cleared encampment), then okay, but if you're not, you know, you're s*** out of luck,' she told DailyMail.com.

'They have this big thing they're spending millions of dollars they should have opened up a temporary shelter or rented some hotel rooms for folks that were in that zone so that it didn't displace everybody else. 

'It just has this ripple effect. You know, you're kind of just like rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. You're not really steadying the boat,' she said.

A city nonprofit raised $20 million to host the summit, which brings world leaders from across the Indo-Pacific, and is serving as the venue for a high-stakes sit down between President Biden and Xi. A Sonoma casino, tech companies, and health firms have all contributed funds to the effort.

Friedenbach said she would 'love' for President Biden and other world leaders to visit the homeless to see for themselves some of the squalor and difficulties of those on the streets amid the city's lack of affordable housing, with a homeless population right now of about 8,000, with about 4,000 living on the street and the rest in shelters.

'I would love leaders to visit with unhoused people in their organizations and hear from them directly what the solutions are, and I think a lot of the other countries can learn from the United States' mistakes and our own United States government could really address this issue and in very tangible ways,' she said.

Homeless encampments in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco are located nearby where delegates and CEOs will gather

Asia Pacific leaders will be gathering in the Moscone Center, and top CEOs are also set to meet

There are an estimated 20,000 homeless people in San Francisco year round

President Joe Biden's meeting this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping follows a Chinese spy balloon incident and Chinese state-run media calling San Francisco a 'ruined city'

She called for a massive expansion of 'housing choice vouchers' that can be used locally.

She said of Biden, 'I'm not sure if he spends much time with members of that unhoused community, I think it would be a really positive experience for him in terms of understanding what the issue is because there's just so much misinformation and so much scapegoating of homeless people themselves, blaming them for something that's totally out of their control.'

The city has been struggling through years-long federal court battles seeking authority to clear homeless encampments amid a housing crisis.

That has included trying to clean up the city's 'most troubled corner' since June.

That corner, where Seventh St. intersects Market, includes 20 per cent of the city's drug crimes, all while the city is on track to set a record for fatal drug overdoses this year, including 54 dead in September alone.

The closing of nationwide chain stores like Nordstrom's since the pandemic have drawn national headlines. 

And in the Cold War-style battle of competing systems, China's state-run media have taken to calling the metropolis by the bay a 'ruined city.'

In one sign of the likely downstream effects of the APEC cleanup, homeless tents have been popping up in new neighborhoods.

The city's Department of Health has providing updates to community partners in the run-up to the conference, as part of an effort to ensure recipients are getting care through myriad nonprofits, hospitals, and public agencies while thousands of dignitaries and visitors stream into downtown.

'The DPH Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (PHEPR) team has been working with organizers and city agencies to minimize the impact to our community as well as ensure we are ready to respond to any public health needs,' according to a Nov. 3 email reviewed by DailyMail.com.

After September's annual Salesforce event, called Dreamforce, amid another apparent cleanup effort, the company's CEO Marc Benioff dared to dream what it would be like if the city were spiffed up all the time.

The event is held in the same Moscone Center that hosts APEC.

'It is important to ask why the city cannot be this clean and safe every single day?' he wrote on X, the former Twitter site.

'San Francisco has been incredibly clean, beautiful, and safe for the last 3 days of Dreamforce, and it is great that the city is able to put its best foot forward for this major event that brings in 40K people from around the world, and $80M to the economy,' he wrote.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed's office said dealing with homelessness is 'a priority 365 days a year.'

'We are out on the streets every day, sheltering people every night and moving people out of homelessness every day,' said Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications of the city's Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

'When our community hosts events, like APEC, we want to put our best foot forward. Dedicated outreach efforts will be focused on the conference vicinity and offering safe places for people experiencing homelessness will be a priority,' she said.

But Cohen also said the agency 'is not opening any special shelter capacity for APEC. We have not been budgeted to add shelter capacity during the summit.'

It does have additional capacity at an interfaith shelter running from November through early spring and a 300-bed expansion of adult shelter capacity coming online for November and December.

Cohen called for a 'comprehensive and compassionate approach' and said the APEC conference 'provides an opportunity to spotlight San Francisco's commitment to this issue and demonstrate our City's innovation, resilience and determination to find lasting and meaningful solutions.'

The city's most recent homeless count, in 2022, found approximately 7,754 people experiencing homeless on a February night in the city. Of those, 4,397 were unsheltered. 

The figure was actually down 15 per cent from a 2019 pre-pandemic survey.