It’s been 200 days since the Lurie Administration decided to make cleaning up the area at and around 16th and Mission Streets a priority. That day, March 12, the San Francisco Police Department drove a “mobile command unit” — a large white vehicle with police branding on it — onto the southwest BART Plaza.
“We are just getting started,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said at the time, promising to be “relentless” in clearing Mission Street and the side alleyways and streets of unpermitted vendors, drug dealing and drug use.
Since then, the city has been relentless and made some progress — the BART plazas and some of the streets in the surrounding areas have gotten clearer. But it has taken time. On Day 100 of the campaign, open drug use and vending still raged on Mission Street between 15th and 16th streets.
Now another 100 days in, the city has allocated even more resources and gotten a better handle on the situation. The results are uneven and can falter when police, ambassadors and other city workers retreat…