On the face of it, San Francisco’s homeless problem should have improved dramatically over the past year.

After all, last summer Mayor Ed Lee formed the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to focus on the city’s most perplexing problem.

The city spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing in the fiscal year that ends Friday, up from $241 million the year before. Starting Saturday, that annual spending is projected to hit an eye-popping $305 million.

Public Works cleanup crews were busier than ever, picking up more than 679 tons of trash from homeless tent camps since June 1, 2016, and collecting more than 100,000 used syringes from the camps in that time span.

But, despite all the money and effort, reality on the streets hasn’t improved. In many ways, homelessness in San Francisco is as bad as ever.

Just-released numbers from January’s homeless count, conducted every two years as a requirement to receive federal funds, show a very slight decrease. The drop is attributed to fewer families and youths among the homeless, while the number of single adults living on the street — the most visible — has risen.

The waiting list for nighttime shelter beds also has risen, from not even 900 last year to about 1,100 now.

Residents’ complaints to the city’s 311 line about tent encampments, needles and human feces are way up. In 2016, people made 22,608 complaints to 311 about encampments — a fivefold increase from the previous year.

But the biggest indicator is merely walking around the city, where it’s obvious the misery continues.

“It’s worse — that’s my observation,” Supervisor Jeff Sheehy said.

He and his 12-year-old daughter frequently ride BART downtown from their Glen Park home on weekends to shop and explore. They used to get off at the Powell Street Station, but his daughter now refuses to set foot there. They get off a stop later, at Montgomery, and backtrack on foot instead.

“The Powell Street BART Station is basically a homeless shelter, and not a well-maintained one,” Sheehy said. “There are homeless people sprawled all over the place, sometimes shooting up, sometimes with clothes not completely covering their backsides. Some people have seen people masturbating. There’s the smell, the dirt.

“The needles, the human waste, the garbage,” he continued. “I just don’t understand why we think it’s OK.”

The mayor tries to strike a balance between assuring residents it’s not OK and maintaining full faith in the staffers he has charged with improving the problem.

Lee is “more optimistic today than I ever have been” that San Francisco is finally on track to make a big dent in homelessness, and said his final 2½ years in office will be dedicated to improving the situation on the streets.

“We will have degrees of relief,” he said.

But tension between departments at City Hall seems to have bogged down the response. The new homeless department focuses on long-term solutions, while Public Works crews grow frustrated that they’re cleaning the same camps again and again.

And as people on the street remain stubbornly in place, they grow older and sicker. That means help is that much harder to provide, said Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness.

“Seeing who is walking into soup kitchens and who we’re seeing when we do outreach, they’re barely hanging on,” she said. “Like they’re recently released from the hospital with colostomy bags. There are people with cancer on the streets, severe diabetes, heart disease, a lot of really severe mental illness combined with addictive disorders.

“We don’t have a lot of exits out for people, and people are trapped on the streets,” she said.

Clearly, the destitution is awful for people who are living on the streets. And it’s troubling for the people who see it in their doorways. In such a liberal and wealthy city — the 2017-18 city budget is a record $10 billion — why improvement always seems out of reach remains a frustrating question.

Jeff Kositsky, the director of the year-old Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, is certainly trying hard to answer that question and create solutions. There have been victories. The single Navigation Center in the Mission District that was open when Kositsky’s office was formed has now been replicated in the Civic Center area and in Dogpatch. Three more are scheduled to open by early next year. Together, they will offer nearly 500 new beds.

A new team to clean up tent camps has cleared 11 since September, moving methodically to ensure those living in the camps trust the team and agree to move inside. Kositsky said two of the camps have sprung back up — along Shotwell Street between 14th and 17th streets and also at 19th and Folsom streets — but nine have remained clear. He said 70 percent of the people living in those camps have moved inside.

“Thirty percent wandered off, but that’s a lot better than 100 percent,” Kositksy said. “When you just go move people, that’s what they do.”

Kositsky’s department has created a coordinated entry system that is just getting started. It seeks to help homeless people obtain housing and services based on their age, health, time on the streets and other needs, rather than plugging people into a waiting list based only on when they sought help. This is made possible by using one new data system shared among city agencies and nonprofits to smooth the process of connecting the homeless with services.

His department has also engaged the private sector, winning a $100 million commitment from the Tipping Point Community nonprofit to end chronic homelessness and starting a $30 million public-private partnership to end family homelessness.

Despite those achievements, the picture on the streets remains dire. The slow pace of change isn’t helped by a laborious city hiring process that means the homelessness department — which has been up and running since August — still isn’t fully staffed. And that staff is spread across at least six buildings, which makes it hard to run a unified department. That won’t change for at least nine months.

With round glasses and a suit jacket, Kositsky looks like a professor and talks like one too, using phrases such as “strategic framework” and “smart intentionality.” He’s working on a long-term plan to address homelessness and believes focusing on the big picture will pay dividends in the long run. He says the next biennial homeless count, in 2019, will really show results.

For many San Franciscans and City Hall functionaries, two more years is too much time.

There has been tension in recent months between the long-term planner, Kositsky, and the city’s fix-it-guy, Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, whose job is to clean the streets and camps.

“We feel like we’re a maid service,” Nuru said. “We clean, we come back. We clean, we come back. The real question is, ‘Are we getting anywhere?’ We don’t want to just continue going around in circles.”

Donning a baseball cap and rolled-up shirtsleeves during a recent interview in his office, Nuru looked like the hands-on fixer reflected in his Twitter handle, @MrCleanSF. Nuru said the mayor’s administration has done a great job opening Navigation Centers and finding new supportive housing. The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing has opened 303 units of permanent supportive housing in the past year.

But, Nuru said, the time needs to come when people are no longer allowed to sleep on the streets, and the city stops looking the other way when homeless campers inject drugs, cook over open flames, block sidewalks and streets, run bicycle chop shops and break into cars.

“They’re the types who really decrease the quality of life that people expect,” Nuru said. “We’ve got to take them on. ... I am very frustrated, and I have been having closed-door meetings with my team and with other agencies, and we’re going to put a stop to this.”

Nuru wasn’t specific about how he’s going to do that, but he said the tent camp issue has grown notably worse since the Super Bowl in February 2016. A possible reason for that, he said, is the football extravaganza caused advocates for homeless people to fear that those on the streets would be pushed aside permanently, so they began handing out free tents. So now some parts of the city are filled with REI tents — and destitution.

Nuru said that he meets with the mayor often and that when the tensions between him and Kositsky became public, the mayor tried to reassure him.

“He has asked me to try and embrace my colleagues and not get frustrated,” Nuru said. “It just hurts me to see a beautiful city like this.”

Back to Gallery Despite money and effort, homelessness in SF as bad as ever 8 1 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 2 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 3 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 4 of 8 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 5 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 6 of 8 Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle 7 of 8 Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle 8 of 8 Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle















Lee said both men are doing important work that reflects the city’s commitment to “the short- and long-term care of individuals on the streets.” He added that he agrees with Nuru that lawbreaking in the camps can’t be ignored.

“I think we have historically given the Police Department mixed messages,” he said. “Some politicians will say, ‘Yeah, I want those activities to stop,’ and some say, ‘Why would you criminalize the homeless?’ The police are kind of stopped in their tracks.”

Lee said he is adding police officers to the teams that clear homeless camps and is funding new efforts such as harm reduction centers where injection drug users can receive services and supplies, and more beds in the emergency psychiatric ward at San Francisco General Hospital.

“This will take time,” Lee said of improving the city’s streets. “But now I have some answers. We’re breaking it down into biteable sizes.”

Kositsky said he, too, understands the frustrations of Nuru and neighbors who are sick of seeing swelling tent encampments on their blocks. Solving it, though, takes time, he said.

Asked to grade his department’s performance in its first year, Kositsky said he and his staff earn an A for moving in the right direction.

“In terms of the pace at which we’re doing it? I would say a B-minus,” he said. “I certainly wish things were going faster, but they’re going at a steady pace.”

Kositsky said one of the hardest parts of his job is that his successes are hidden away. Once that homeless panhandler is moved inside, you never think of him again. But if that tent encampment is on your block day after day, frustration mounts.

“Our successes are invisible, and our failures to resolve a problem are very evident,” he said.

To the residents of San Francisco who see tent camps on their corners and step over syringes every day, they’re very evident indeed.

Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf