A black-and-white painting of Batman was visible.
So was a full-color portrait of Doctor Strange.
Murals along Commercial Street in downtown San Diego have long been blocked by encampments. Yet at the start of the week, no tents could be seen on either side of the road. The same went for the people who’d been living in them.
“There were hundreds,” Bob McElroy, president and CEO of the Alpha Project shelter, said in an interview. “Where did they go?”
Police began enforcing San Diego’s controversial new camping ban Monday, and although officials said they’ve so far focused only on Balboa Park, the new ordinance combined with other enforcement of laws long on the books has already made notable changes in the encampment landscape.
The “Unsafe Camping Ordinance” allows officers to force people off public land if they’re sleeping within two blocks of a school, shelter, trolley station, waterway or park “where a substantial public health and safety risk is determined.”
Capt. Shawn Takeuchi, head of the city’s neighborhood policing division, said his five-member team did arrest several homeless people Monday by Balboa Park, but only for existing warrants.
Others were given a warning, he said. If any of the same people are found illegally camping a day later, they’ll get a ticket even if they’ve moved locations.
Nobody in Balboa Park accepted offers for shelter Monday, the captain added. Enforcement will continue to focus on schools and parks in the near future, and officials declined to say where the team might move next.
“It’s not acceptable to be living on the streets,” Takeuchi said. “I’m not happy unless homelessness is solved.”
The numbers of arrests made and people moved were not immediately available.
Some of the enforcement Monday concentrated on a field near Roosevelt Middle School, a site repeatedly singled out by NBA great Bill Walton who’s been a vocal critic of the growing encampments.
There were no tents visible by late morning. Police drove across the dirt while a garbage truck parked at the top of a hill.
Two men watched from the edge of the grass.
Raymond Carel, 38, leaned against a metal box. His 30-year-old friend, a former Lincoln High student who asked to be identified as T, sat on a fire hydrant.
T said they’d previously been told to stop sleeping on the field and move into the canyon. Then police came Monday to demand they leave completely.
While he was sorry to abandon a place he’d been for more than a year, T said erbys would sometimes stare or take pictures. “I know the zoo’s across the street, but we’re not animals.”
A car slowed on the road near them, and a woman yelled something through the window.
Carel asked if T had been able to hear what she said. T said it was a woman he knew, and she was offering them a ride to a place they could legally camp.
Mayor Todd Gloria wrote online that “multiple spots” were available downtown at a parking lot at 20th and B streets, which the city’s using as a “safe sleeping site,” as well as in shelters around the area.
Many of those facilities, however, often run out of room. McElroy, at the Alpha Project, said more people had recently been asking for spots but there was nothing more to offer.
He was especially surprised by how empty Commercial Street was, and the CEO said outreach teams were still surveying the city. “They’re scramblin’ around to figure out where everybody went.”
Commercial Street had once been so clogged that tents and tarps spilled onto the road. Yet at one point Monday, the only movement came from a pair of officers crossing the road. One said in ing that the encampment had been cleared a few days ago.
City and police representatives said that change had nothing to do with the camping ban. Although a new “No Camping” sign is on Commercial, a prerequisite to enforcement, officials said the road was cleared because of existing laws against blocking streets, not the result of a special operation.
Even before the ban took effect, one survey found the number of homeless people downtown had dropped by almost a fifth, potentially because of the coming enforcement.
Brenda Roberts, 56, stood Monday near the Central Library.
She’d recently arrived from Louisiana. Her husband died two months ago, and Roberts had heard California offered more services.
Then she learned about the crackdown.
“I’m not a shelter person,” she said. “But I’d rather be in a shelter than in jail, or have a ticket I can’t pay.”
She was unsure what to do if every facility was filled.
Other tents remained throughout downtown. Dozens could seen on 12th and 17th. One storm drain on 16th was almost completely filled with trash, a muddled pile topped with corn and bananas.
The blocked sidewalks — and all that can come with them — have frustrated many people living in nearby apartments.
“Time to put ’em to work, just like everybody else,” said Bruce Gregory, 67, a resident since the late 1990s.
Gregory stood on Park Boulevard and motioned toward a nearby coffee shop. Businesses can’t operate in tent cities, he said, and recent hepatitis outbreaks threatened everybody. Why couldn’t the government hire people for big public works projects, like what the United States did in the 1930s, he asked.
Less than a mile away, on 16th street, a lined formed outside a chain link fence.
On the other side, a trailer run by the Duwara Consciousness Foundation offered private showers.
Every once in a while a man wearing a badge slid the gate open. One person would step through. Then the fence would close again.
A 25-year-old woman sat on a nearby tarp.
Bruises covered part of her face, and she spoke in monotone. She’d been on the streets since she was 16, the woman said. During that time, she’d seen so many dead bodies. Knew so many rape victims. She listed the names of friends who’d died and said she regularly pulls all-nighters to protect women around her from assault.
Her testimony continued for so long that when she finally paused, the line to get through the fence was completely gone.
