A Few Words from the Nightclub Mogul Who Conducts Illegal Sweeps of Homeless Encampments
By: Pete Glikshtern
Tags: Homelessness, Pete Glikshtern

A Few Words from the Nightclub Mogul Who Conducts Illegal Sweeps of Homeless Encampments Pete Glikshtern Oct 14, 2020·14 min read

My name is Pete Glikshtern. A freelance writer by the name of Nuala Bishari recently did a hit piece on me, which was published online at SFPublicpress.

About a week later, Marke Bishke did a much more balanced, but still not entirely accurate story for 48Hills.

A friend suggested that I could just tell my own story, so that’s what I’m doing.

Pull up a chair.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for 40 years. My parents immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979, when I was nine years old, and except for several years in Berkeley, I’ve never lived anywhere else.

I went to a Jesuit high school here in the City. It was a requirement for graduation to log at least 100 volunteer hours. I was taught that community and service to others are the lynchpin of being a decent human being. This was the 1980’s, and some of the priests who taught at my school also worked in El Salvador, putting their lives on the line to help people not get murdered by the death squads. I got to see first hand how one lives their values.

I love the City. I raised two kids here. My daughter went to NYU for school, and stayed to work in New York. She is 29. My son just finished at City College, and is “at” UCLA this quarter. He is 19.

When my daughter was in junior high, I signed us up to volunteer for Project Open Hand. The two of us would hop on our bikes once a week after school, and deliver meals to homebound AIDS patients all over the Tenderloin. We did this most of the way through high school. Some weeks we had 40+ stops on our route. We would take time to talk a little to almost everyone. For many of our “clients,” we were the only human contact they had all day.

I did the same with my son.

It was important to me that my kids had real and regular contact with San Franciscans, who were less fortunate than us. I wanted for them to appreciate how lucky they were, and also to understand that people who are poor and sick, and live in deplorable conditions, are still people, just the same as everyone else. As a parent, you can preach all that until you’re blue in the face, but it’s not the same. We made friends with some of our clients, and sometimes helped them to cheat on their very strict diet with the occasional candy bar.

I’ve always volunteered. I’ve always been active in my neighborhood. I take time to get to know my neighbors, both those with homes, and without.

When I come across a person acting erratically, yelling on the street or at the park, I always stop and say hello. I ask if they’re ok, how their day is going. Eight times out of ten they stop yelling and say hello back. The other two times, they stop yelling and just walk away. Sometimes they tell me a weird, convoluted story about God-knows-what, trying to explain themselves. I always listen, and try to make sense of it. I ask questions.

They’re out there, with barely a connection to our reality. A simple hello — the most basic acknowledgement of their existence by another human being — is almost always enough to bring them back and calm them down.

Ms. Bishari painted me as a ruthless criminal, who cares nothing for the plight of the homeless. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our homeless dilemma is frustrating, infuriating even. But the inconvenience and occasional danger of it has never made me blind to the suffering that takes place on our streets every day.

Advocating for people to have the “right” to live this way is not enlightened or progressive. It is cruel and additionally, it completely disregards the wellbeing of the rest of our population.

Our politicians have been throwing untold hundreds of millions of dollars at the homeless, and things are only getting worse. Why?

Here is my personal take with regard to homelessness in San Francisco.

By way of a disclaimer, I find it very difficult to speak to this issue without sounding like a San Francisco “nativist.” I am not a nativist. I recognize that we are all of us human beings. Here is the part that sounds nativist. Almost none of the people living on our streets are from here.

Don’t get upset. Don’t tune out. Keep reading.

I know that almost none of the people living on our streets are from here because almost none of the people who live in our homes and apartments are from here. Anecdotally, almost no one who lives in San Francisco is actually from here. This is in no way an issue when we’re talking about people who have a job, pay rent, pick up after their dog, etc.

Here is why it’s an issue when it comes to the homeless.

Let’s hypothetically say that, we have built and staffed enough supportive housing, that we have arranged for access to all the necessary services — even drugs — and we have found a way to get every single homeless person in San Francisco off the street. Let’s say this happens tomorrow.

(This is not pie in the sky stuff. This is imminently doable. We have the money. There are only some 8,000 homeless here.)

Guess what?

The day after tomorrow, or week after, or a month after the last of our homeless is off the street, there will be 8,000 more. And when we’ve housed and provided for these new 8,000 people, there will be 8,000 more. There is no end to it.

There is no way for us to establish “residency,” the way the UC system does for its applicants. And even if there was, what would we do with that? There are still the 8,000 new homeless people living on our streets.

You always hear politicians and pundits say that the root causes of homelessness are complicated. They are not. Systemic discrimination, generational trauma, lack of education and, lack of economic opportunity, combined with a calamitously inadequate health care system and a total lack of a social safety net are at the root of homelessness.

How do we as a City address all that?

Weirdly, the answer to that is not complicated either. We don’t. We can’t.

There is no way for San Francisco to undo the centuries and millennia of people all over the world being shitty to those who are less fortunate than them, or even the relatively brief 400 odd years of our history here, on this continent. It really is that simple.

The status quo is untenable though. What do we do?

While many of the things Mayor Breed laid out in her piece on Medium have always seemed really sensible to me, none — nor all of them combined — is going to be the “silver bullet” that fixes homelessness.

The only realistic solution is, to figure out a way for us all to coexist, and live with homelessness. And the only way this can happen is, if we figure out a way to eliminate anti-social behavior on our streets.

In my opinion, a good place to start is, by disallowing camping and personal possessions on our streets and sidewalks between the hours of 8AM and 8PM.

People do not have homes. They have to sleep somewhere. That is a reality. But demanding that our streets and sidewalks are clear of encampments, people’s personal affects, trash and excrement, is not unreasonable. Pitch your tent for the night. Pack it up during the day. Clean up after yourself. If you cannot, it’s not the end of the world. We’ll do it for you.

We need honest, open conversation on the subject of homelessness. We cannot continue to allow hysterical crusaders like Ms. Bishari’s to dictate the narrative.

I will posit just one more thing.

Ms. Bishari and all the “civil rights” lawyers she and Marke Bishke quote in their stories tell themselves that they are helping the homeless by fighting for their rights. They are not. They are just keeping people who desperately need help from getting help by rendering the City helpless, terrified of the bad press they might get.

No one in San Francisco wants to see the homeless persecuted. Overwhelmingly, we all just want to find a solution.

I am committed to working diligently toward that solution, and a better way forward for all San Franciscans. I live my values every single day. My ask from all of you, is that you do the same.

Social justice is not supported by words on a page, or lies in the media.

Social justice is about real action, in real life! It is about a commitment to truth and faith in your fellow citizens. And it starts with plain old love and respect for other human beings.

Thank you for taking time to read this.

If you’re curious about the night that was the subject of all the uproar, here is what actually happened.

We’ve run all types of events at 10 So. VanNess (SVN) for several years. Most of the access to the building is located on 12th Street. In the wake of COVID, with regular activity grinding to a complete halt, the homeless encampments quickly grew to take up the entire sidewalk, and the whole length of the block on 12th from Market to So. VanNess.

These encampments were a roiling hell of garbage, drugs, and violence. When Tech Crunch contracted with us on July 20 to use the building to host their virtual Disrupt event, we immediately called DPW, HOT, and every other City agency under the sun, for them to address the situation. And we kept calling.

Most of our calls and messages went unanswered. Occasionally, we would be told that there just weren’t resources to deal with it. Finally, week of 08/31 we were told that DPW would be out the following Monday. Monday came and went, and then Tuesday. DPW never showed.

On Wednesday, I went around to every tent on 12thStreet, introduced myself, asked people’s names, and explained that we needed to clean up. Most people with whom I spoke were understanding and cooperative. I followed up and continued to speak with everyone almost every day the rest of that week. Because our City does such a poor job with homelessness, I have had dozens of these kinds of conversations over the years. This was not new hat.

12th Street. Before.

I speak to homeless people the same way I speak to any other person, the way I am “speaking” here. I always acknowledge that their situation sucks. I explain that, I understand that they have to be somewhere. I explain why I am asking them to move. I also acknowledge that I am asking something of them, that they do not necessarily want to do. With direct, respectful and honest communication, most people are very willing to accommodate.

With the exception of one person in one encampment — there were several on the block — who seemed to be speaking for several other folks who were always too high to be able to actually talk, everyone with whom I spoke had no issue with being asked to relocate. Most of them moved over the course of the week leading up to the Tech Crunch load in.

The one guy who took issue with being asked to move, Ashwood, grew increasingly hostile with me. At one point, he tried to intimidate me by threatening to call his “uncle.” I told him that I was fine with him making that call. His “uncle” showed up not long after, riding in on a huge, very expensive looking Harley Davidson motorcycle. He was a put together, older man, roughly my age, really pleasant, and completely sober. We had a conversation. I explained what I was asking and why. He went back and forth a couple times and left, promising to check back in.

The next day, when I spoke with Ashwood, he told me that he and his crew were leaving. And they did.

The staff I brought to haul away the trash that had been left behind were not hired goons. They were my regular janitorial team, with whom I’ve worked for more than a decade. I worked right alongside of them the entire time, to make sure they were not harassed, and also just to help with the clean up.

Jeffry McLemore, who Ms. Bishari quotes in her 09/15 article as claiming that he had resided on our block of 12th Street, in fact never did. I was at those encampments every day for a week. I introduced myself to every resident multiple times. I also got everyone’s name. There was no one named Jeffry McLemore.

On the off chance that someone gave me a fake name — not sure why they would do that — the person now identifying themselves as Jeffry McLemore is supposedly telling Ms. Bishari that we threw away priceless violins, urns with parents’ ashes, and $11,000 in cash! Take a step back for just a minute, and examine that. Does it seem even remotely plausible that anyone living in a homeless encampment would leave these sorts of valuables unattended all night?

(Also, how does someone living on the street have $11,000 in cash?)

Ms. Bishari is printing these absurd allegations to get a rise out of her readers. It is clickbait journalism at its absolute worst. She makes no attempt to get at the truth. She is just checking off boxes to fluff up her off-the-shelf, generic narrative. The homeless are inscrutable. Check. Any attempt to deal with the homeless, other than just stepping over them on the sidewalk is a criminal enterprise. Check.

12th Street. After.

“The sweep was observed by SFPD officers, who did not attempt to prevent the sweep,” writes Ms. Bishari. The insinuation obviously being, that the police did not do their job. But look at the facts. Three different groups of officers were on the scene on three different occasions during the time in question. Each time, they spoke with onlookers. They spoke with me. They observed the activity, including the garbage trucks. Is it possible that, the stuff we were hauling away actually was just trash, which had been abandoned there by the former residents of these encampments, who had all left? Which would then explain why the police did not intervene? Hm.

Tori Larson of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, who is quoted in Ms. Bishari’s article as stating that my actions were “blatantly illegal,” says so without ever having spoken to me, or anyone other than Ms. Bishari, as best I can tell. Making this kind of a statement in the public press without the benefit of even a rudimentary investigation, to discover the facts of what actually took place, is at best irresponsible, but more likely, malicious and possibly actionable.

Anything Ms. Bishari would have told Ms. Larson is hearsay, and therefore not acceptable in establishing what actually happened, if we’re talking legalities. The claims about the lost valuables are something that some unnamed individual(s) had allegedly told the person, whom Ms. Bishari interviewed — so hearsay about hearsay — which she then relayed to Ms. Larson. That’s hearsay x3, if you’re keeping score at home. And based on that bunch of hooey, Ms. Larson, makes the pronouncement that my actions were, “blatantly illegal.” One can’t help but wonder how Ms. Larson did in her evidence classes at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Ms. Bishari quotes one Jonathan Huerta, a resident of the Civic Center Navigation Center across the street, as claiming that we threw out materials he had been storing at the camp to fix his truck. This begs the question though, if Mr. Huerta has a residence, why is his stuff across the street, blocking the public right of way? Are we all now allowed to use City streets to store our personal belongings?

Mr. Huerta is further quoted as saying that, “the encampment residents were frantic, trying to reclaim their belongings.” This is an outright lie. With the exception of two individual tents, all of the encampments were abandoned. The only video I’ve seen posted, shows me and my team peaceably helping the couple who owned one of the remaining tents, to move their things across the street. You can actually see the owner of the tent in the video, working alongside my team. He’s anything but frantic. He is calmly pointing out things for us to move. You can see me, and my team, wheeling his bicycle and his spare tires over to their new location, and his girlfriend scooting around on her Little Rascal, with her suitcase in tow, having fun. The woman narrating the video keeps saying that we’re stealing people’s things, but that’s not at all what the video shows.

In this same video, you can actually see the last tent on the block. It remains completely unmolested. I knew that tent belonged to someone, so we left it alone, even through the owners were not around at the time we were cleaning up, and we could easily have tossed those things as well. Again… hm.

Here’s another fun fact. There were at least a dozen people, most of them residents from the Navigation Center across the street, taking video on their phones. Where is all that footage?

If we had it available, here is what it would show.

My team and I were cleaning up trash, which was blocking the entirety of the sidewalk on the North side of 12thStreet. There were packs of rats scuttling every which way. With the exception of the two tents I’ve described above, the encampments were 100% abandoned. There were random homeless people, picking through stuff as we worked. They freely took what they wanted. We threw out the rest.

At some point, a car pulled up in the middle of 12th. A very agitated man jumped out with a snarling pit bull, and proceeded to start screaming at me, and trying to sick the dog on me. The poor animal was more scared than anything, but it was being aggressive. I told this man repeatedly, “Get your dog. If it winds up biting me, they’ll put it down. I don’t want for the dog to be put down.” (Side note, I am a pit bull parent. I own three rescues.) The man was out of his mind, sweating, high as a kite. While I was trying to manage the dog, he punched me repeatedly in the face. One of the staff from the Navigation Center was screaming at him to, “get the hell home.” She knew his name. He is a resident of the Civic Center Navigation facility. To be very clear, this man did not, and had never lived in the encampments in question. Why was he attacking me?

There are several dealers — having spent a week dealing with stuff on the block, I know these guys by face now, and their cars and Harley — who sell to the residents of the Civic Center Nav Center on 12th. These residents, for their part, turn around and sell to the people on the street. That’s why the encampments had grown so large. Ready access to meth. This was also why one of the residents of said facility was attacking me. I had inadvertently disturbed their delicate meth ecosystem.

One of the people gawking at the scene called 911. The man who had been attacking me jumped back into his car and peeled off when he heard the sirens. When the police arrived, they had me lay face down in the street at gunpoint because, as I came to find out after being handcuffed and searched, the person who made the 911 call falsely told the dispatcher that I had a gun and was brandishing it.

My team wore masks because… COVID. Ms. Bishari’s insinuation that our dress and the masks were some sort of an intimidation tactic, is shameful. I specifically did not wear any face covering, because I did not want to give the appearance that I was trying to hide my identity. We all wore long-sleeve shirts and work gloves because the trash we were cleaning up was full of human excrement and urine, used needles, broken glass, dog feces, and very alive rats. Packs of them.

The City’s position that homeless encampments should be left unmolested during the pandemic is beyond irresponsible. These encampments are dangerously unsanitary and, teeming with drugs and people out of their minds on drugs, living on top of one another. This is not a humane way for people to live!

rachel, Forbes, SFGate, Supervisor Matt Haney