EXCLUSIVE Addicts and homeless swarm back to San Francisco streets after Gavin Newsom’s cleanup for Chinese President Xi – as locals learn to do the ‘Poopie Dance’ to avoid stepping on human waste

• Exclusive DailyMail.com photos show the homeless filling the streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District where vagrants regularly relieve themselves on the sidewalk just weeks after the APEC forum
• ‘As you walk around here, it’s kind of like you have to do a Poopie Dance, always looking down to avoid stepping in s**t,’ a local architect told DailyMail.com 
• The city’s homeless population has returned after California Gov. Gavin Newsom cleaned up the streets for Chinese President Xi’s visit last month 

They call it ‘The Poopie Dance’ and San Franciscans are having to learn it – and quickly.

It involves constantly looking straight ahead to find a clean line between where you are on the street and where you want to go.

Sadly, it’s the reality in parts of the Bay City as the growing homeless population have taken to using the famed streets of San Francisco as one giant open-air toilet. 

‘As you walk around here, it’s kind of like you have to do a Poopie Dance, always avoiding stepping in s**t,’ Rick Garcia, an architect, told DailyMail.com as he finished lunch in Union Square and prepared for the precarious walk back to his office.

‘The part that’s most disturbing is when you walk past two parked cars and see someone squatting. 

‘It’s best not to confront them because you don’t want to engage.’

NOW: In San Francisco, scenes of despair wiped from public view for one week in November are back now for all to see, in a sad return to normalcy. One area DailyMail.com visited beforehand was Jessie Alley, which had been hosed down and cleared of tents, mattresses, cardboard boxes, drug paraphernalia and human waste

THEN: Last month, waste management dump trucks could be seen carrying old street mattresses, tents, chairs, and other assorted belongings after removing them from Jessie Alley 

Exclusive DailyMail.com photos show the homeless filling the streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District where vagrants regularly relieve themselves on the sidewalk

The city’s homeless population has returned after Gavin Newsom cleaned up the streets for Chinese President Xi’s visit last month

Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met for the first time in more than a year in San Francisco for high-stakes talks to try to bury the hatchet amid escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing

Sprawled out in a tent is Pam Phillips, 55. ‘We need to stay warm, or we die,’ said Phillips, who said her 32-year-son died of a drug overdose on the streets a year and half ago. ‘We’re becoming a third world country. The president should have come down here to see this for himself’

Last week during a debate on Fox News with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis openly mocked the reality by displaying a map delineating feces purportedly found on the city streets.

‘California does have freedoms that the other states don’t,’ the republican quipped. 

‘You have the freedom to defecate in public in California.’

The need to tread carefully is most imperative in the city’s historic Tenderloin District – a 40-block area downtown.

Steven Rice, program manager with Code Tenderloin, a homeless aid organization in San Francisco, winced when he heard about the Florida governor’s swipe, but also acknowledged the underlying truth

Steven Rice, program manager with Code Tenderloin, a homeless aid organization, winced when he heard about the Florida governor’s swipe, but also acknowledged the underlying truth. 

He too struggles to step around human and canine waste, generated by people and dogs they use for protection.

‘That’s the poop map,’ he laughed. ‘Oh, I agree with that. If you live in San Francisco, nobody’s going to disagree with that.’

‘We walk like this,’ Rice explained, tapping his black work boots on the floor of his office. 

‘I designed a method to not step in s**t. When I am walking, I look ahead of me to a mark on the sidewalk, and I see, oh that’s a clean line.’ 

‘Then when I reach that point, I do it again. I look outward and I come back to my feet, that’s a clean line.’ 

During the debate, DeSantis claimed: ‘Human feces is now a fact of life, except when a communist dictator comes to town.

And many locals agree with him. Indeed, scenes of despair wiped from public view for one week in November are back now for all to see, in a sad return to normalcy. Call it the post-APECalypse.

‘It’s really bad, worse than I’ve ever seen it,’ Howard Ul, 60, manager of the Golden State Donut Shop in the city’s Tenderloin District, told DailyMail.com Friday. ‘Every corner here around here now is like garbage. They’re all back.’

Several drug addicts were milling just outside. He was keeping an eye out for vagrants who often reach over the counter to swipe pastries.

‘Why do we have to stand here and watch them, watch that guy die, watch this lady die, watch this guy falling down on the street?’ he asks, frustrated.

‘Everyone came for APEC, and overnight this area was cleaned up,’ he said. ‘They did an awesome job. My question is – why don’t they come to clean anymore? What are they doing to keep it up and help people who can’t seem to make choices for themselves?’

Last week during a debate on Fox News with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis openly mocked the reality by displaying a map delineating feces purportedly found on the streets of San Francisco.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom greete Chinese President Xi Jinping last month in San Francisco 

Gates were erected ahead of President Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco last month. President Biden’s motorcade is seen before the meeting 

‘It’s really bad, worse than I’ve ever seen it,’ Howard Ul, 60, manager of the Golden State Donut Shop in the city’s Tenderloin District, told DailyMail.com Friday. ‘Every corner here around here now is like garbage. They’re all back’

‘The Monday afterwards, the gates were gone and so were all the police,’ local architect Rick Garcia, 48, told DailyMail.com. ‘A little bit of residual cleanliness remained but then pretty quickly the mentally disturbed folks, the fent zombies, started making their way back into the neighborhood’

One local told DailyMail.com that a mentally ill man struck his co-worker with a stick during a violent confrontation, and that another apparent vagrant also tried to mug him earlier this year

San Francisco took drastic measures last month to ensure world dignitaries didn’t have to interact with homeless during the summit.

As President Biden flew in to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the city worked around-the-clock to clear out encampments, boost shelter placements and deploy ‘night ambassadors’ to keep vagrants away from the area.

‘As you walk around here, it’s kind of like you have to do a Poopie Dance, always looking down to avoid stepping in s**t,’ Rick Garcia, an architect, told DailyMail.com

Protective steel fences were erected around the Moscone Center in the SoMa District, where the event was held. Police were also out in force, roads closed, and traffic detoured.

The six-day event, drawing some 20,000 visitors, went off without a serious hitch. But after the conference wrapped up Thursday, November 17, so did the special attention paid to SoMA and the bordering Tenderloin District, where the worst of the city’s homelessness is concentrated.

‘The Monday afterwards, the gates were gone and so were all the police,’ architect Garcia, 48, told DailyMail.com. 

‘A little bit of residual cleanliness remained but then pretty quickly the mentally disturbed folks, the fent zombies, started making their way back into the neighborhood. And since they’re tolerated, they’d been able to come here unchecked.’

Garcia said a mentally ill man struck his co-worker with a stick during a violent confrontation, and that another apparent vagrant also tried to mug him earlier this year. 

He was finishing lunch Friday in the food court of a mostly empty San Francisco Centre mall, during what should be the bustling holiday shopping season, before heading back to work along sidewalks littered with filth.

‘The APEC cleanup was politics at its best, and DeSantis’s jabs were also politics at its best,’ said a disheartened Steven Rice. ‘But why did DeSantis need to take the negative jab? Why couldn’t he just say, “You did a good job cleaning up for APEC, how can we help sustain this”?’

Speaking with DailyMail.com before APEC, Rice said that he was happy to see the focus on cleaning up the city, hoping it would be more than just a photo op. 

After the conference wrapped up Thursday, November 17, so did the special attention paid to SoMA and the bordering Tenderloin District, where the worst of the city’s homelessness is concentrated

A homeless man sleeps under his umbrella on the steps of San Francisco’s Moscone Center where the APEC conference was recently held

Shopping carts and trash are seen strewn across the sidewalk in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District 

Homeless man, Dominic Roper, 34, spoke about how he was nearly stampeded by a mass of pro-Palestine demonstrators marching down his street during APEC. He said that the following week, on Thanksgiving morning, he was kicked out of a shelter after having a seizure

‘This is our opportunity to let them (unhoused people) know a more permanent solution is down the road,’ he said at the time.

Speaking with DailyMail.com afterward, he noted that ‘we did do a lot of placements.’ He also highlighted the recent expansion of various city services to address the homeless crisis, including a program called “Homeward Bound” that helps connect people with their families elsewhere in the country.

‘Fundamentally, things remain the same. When you relax your guard, things tend to go back to business as usual, as they say.’

Around the corner from his office, a homeless woman named December, 35, described APEC as nothing more than a ‘show’.

‘It was like a week they acted like they cared for us,’ she told DailyMail.com. ‘But all they really cared about was the money. They pretty much wanted us to be forced inside so people wouldn’t see us.’

In the weeks leading up to the conference, the city specifically targeted a half dozen encampments for action by giving occupants advance warning that they would be cleared out, before crews came in and hauled off anything they left behind. 

One area DailyMail.com visited beforehand was Jessie Alley, which had been hosed down and cleared of tents, mattresses, cardboard boxes, drug paraphernalia and human waste.

It took just hours for homeless people to return to the various sites or find news ones.

Michael Scott and his wife Pam fear they’ll be separated if they go to shelter, and as winter approaches, they’re lighting cans of hand sanitizer on fire to keep warm at night

‘It was like a week they acted like they cared for us,’ one homeless woman told DailyMail.com. ‘But all they really cared about was the money. They pretty much wanted us to be forced inside so people wouldn’t see us’

On Mission Street, a woman identifying herself as Simpson Samikka, 47, ranted about spacecrafts landing on rooftops and kidnapping children, her arms flailing as she struggled to keep her balance on the sidewalk

‘They wanted this to look good for the president that day,’ ailing Michael Scott, 62, told DailyMail.com, sprawled out in a tent with his wife Pam Phillips, 55, in Jessie Alley, as a dealer sold drugs in plain view. 

‘Every time they make a move, we lose our stuff. And then once they leave, we can come back and tear this motherf***er up. They don’t stop us from coming back. Where else would we go?’

Scott and his wife fear they’ll be separated if they go to a shelter, and as winter approaches, they’re lighting cans of hand sanitizer on fire to keep warm at night.

‘We need to stay warm, or we die,’ said Phillips, who said her 32-year-son died of a drug overdose on the streets a year and half ago. 

‘We’re becoming a third world country. The president should have come down here to see this for himself.’

Nearby on Mission Street, a woman identifying herself as Simpson Samikka, 47, ranted about spacecrafts landing on rooftops and kidnapping children, her arms flailing as she struggled to keep her balance on the sidewalk.

Beside her, a young man named Ryan, with his trusted pitbull by his side, sat in a wheelchair with his hands trembling, lighting up a bong with fentanyl. He told DailyMail.com that he rustles up $30 a day to buy 15 doses, each lasting about an hour.

Standing behind him, another homeless man, Dominic Roper, 34, spoke about how he was nearly stampeded by a mass of pro-Palestine demonstrators marching down his street during APEC. He said that the following week, on Thanksgiving morning, he was kicked out of a shelter after having a seizure.

‘I’m sure the city benefitted from all that money that came into the city for APEC,’ Roper told DailyMail.com. ‘They should be putting that money back into the streets to help people. But they’re being phony. As soon as it was over, they don’t give a s**t.’

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