SAN FRANCISCO — A top advocate for the homeless in San Francisco accuses city workers of selling belongings that have been confiscated from homeless people during sweeps of encampments.
“We always thought it was a rumor and then it started becoming clearer and clearer that it wasn’t a rumor,” said Jennifer Friedenbach with the Coalition on Homelessness. “Everybody knows the workers are reselling the stuff. Anybody can go in the Mission and see them selling homeless people’s property.”
Friedenbach said that aside from the instances of reselling, it's difficult for homeless people to retrieve property from the Public Works Department.
Public Works spokeswoman Rachel Gordon called this is a serious accusation and said there is no evidence to back up the claim.
“I do not think these accusations are fair," she said., telling KCBS Radio that the city holds on to these items for months in order to try and reunite them with their rightful owners.
Anyone whose items were cleaned up in a sweep can come down to the city’s operation yard to look for them, said Gordon.
“We’ll go down in the storage area and look for them. What we need are things like the general location of where the items were picked up, the time that they were picked up from the street and a description of them.”
But Friedenbach argued that is not a simple task for someone who is living on the street. Most people are not even properly notified that their items were taken by the city, and officials do not have a proactive plan to return property to its owners, she said.