San Francisco has gone to great lengths to clean up its streets ahead of next week’s important US-China summit, including removing homeless encampments across the city.
I know people say they are cleaning this place only because these corrupt leaders are coming to town. This is true, but it is also true that the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is still months away [Ázsiai-csendes-óceáni Gazdasági Együttműködési Csúcstalálkozó] This problem has been discussed before
– said California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday when he announced the tree planting campaign.
According to London Breed, Mayor of San Francisco, the conference is expected to help the city’s economy by $53 million.
KTVU noted that efforts to clean up the city are “felt” in the streets, and at the same time there are far fewer homeless people camping out on main roads.
Mark Savino, who works for the city, told KTVU
It is natural for one to wonder about the displacement of the homeless.
Emails obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle reveal that Christopher McDaniels, the city’s sanitation chief, was “concerned about long-standing encampments close to priority areas.”
According to the Chronicle, those areas include seven transit centers in two neighborhoods long considered the “epicenter” of the homelessness crisis. The newspaper indicated that all tents disappeared from the designated areas a few days before the APEC summit.
President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in San Francisco next week They will meet at the APEC summit. The two leaders last met in Indonesia in November 2022.
The United States hopes to use the meeting to address rising tensions over Taiwan, as well as the crisis in Ukraine and the Middle East, while San Francisco hopes the conference will help recover from a slow post-pandemic recovery.
Aaron Peskin, chairman of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, noted that the conference represented a “tremendous opportunity” and that the city had planned it in as much detail as possible.
