Nearly five months after San Francisco voters approved the anti-tent-camp Proposition Q, hoping it would trigger a tsunami of sweeps clearing the streets of homeless encampments, here’s how many times the new ordinance has been used:

Zero.

Prop. Q gives city officials the authority to clear a tent cluster if they give its campers 24 hours’ warning and an offer of shelter. But the trouble is the same one that existed when voters approved the hotly fought measure by 52 to 48 percent in November.

With just 1,539 individual and family-shelter beds available — and 3,500 people living on the streets without any form of shelter, according to the most recent city count — there’s no way to give everyone the offer that Prop. Q requires.

The result is that since November, city officials have been moving on parallel tracks concerning tent camps.

The city agency that oversees homelessness issues continues to engage in a methodical process it has followed since last summer, in which street counselors gradually try to persuade camp residents to leave. It can take weeks to clear a single sprawl — since the election, just three encampments have been removed.

On the other track is the city’s Public Works agency, which sends in street cleaners to do trash pickups that, for the most part, leave the camp residents where they are.

Prop. Q never enters the equation for either effort. Within City Hall, there is little push to enforce it — and a widespread sense that it was largely a symbolic measure.

“I think Prop. Q was passed really to give the general public a sense that there is some direction of helping to get people more off the street,” said Mayor Ed Lee. “I think there are going to be a lot of symbolic things that the public asks for that reassure them that we are headed in the (right) direction.”

Lee said Prop. Q is one of “a whole host of tools” at the city’s disposal, but that the most important goal is “identifying long-term permanent housing with supportive services.”

Lee’s point person on homelessness, Jeff Kositsky, echoes his boss’ careful phrasing.

“It’s a tool that is available to use in the event that we might need it,” said Kositsky, director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. “But at the end of the day, I’m more concerned about getting people into shelter and ending their homelessness. If you treat people with respect and dignity, that happens more efficiently — and we haven’t had to use Proposition Q so far.”

The city supervisor who wrote Prop. Q, Mark Farrell, says it is more than symbolic. He said the city is still working on how to implement the measure, which “from the beginning was all about getting our city departments another tool in the toolshed to deal with tent encampments on our sidewalk.”

“We always want things to move faster,” Farrell said. “But the reality is we have to follow certain rules and procedures inside our city government, and I look forward to it taking effect as soon as possible.”

Kositsky took no position on Prop. Q during the campaign, and as a department head appointed by Lee, he avoids getting involved in City Hall’s public fights over homeless policy. His agency’s staffers concentrate on the one-camp-at-a-time model but have weekly meetings with Public Works trash crews to fine-tune coordination.

Privately, however, there is grumbling among some street counselors that when Public Works steps up its trash clearance on its own initiative — as it did with a weeklong push earlier this month to clear unusually large piles of garbage — it hurts efforts to get camp residents off the streets.

“When they roust a camp after we tell them, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t be bothered while we work with you on getting inside,’ it pisses people off and they’re less willing to believe you next time,” said one worker in Kositsky’s department, who like others did not want to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on such matters for the agency.

That’s an unfortunate consequence, said Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, but the more important consideration is keeping San Francisco’s streets sanitary. So he pushes hard.

“There is frustration on our part that we are going around in circles and cleaning and dealing with very unsanitary situations and filth,” Nuru said. “The city needs to treat this as an emergency.”

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For the past year, Public Works has had three Hot Spots teams patrolling the city’s 75 to 100 homeless camps — defined as two or more tents. They’re hauling away 4 to 6 tons a day of garbage that often includes heroin and methamphetamine needles, the agency says.

As has been the case for years, camp residents often move right back to the same spot after the cleaning is done, in what one worker called “the street version of maid service.” Public Works spokeswoman Rachel Gordon said the department targeted the 10 worst spots during one week in early March and cleared out 53,100 pounds of trash that included human feces, rats and 3,295 needles.

“We couldn’t in good conscience leave them like that,” Gordon said. “No one should have to live like that, and no one should have to live around something like that. It was a matter of public safety and sanitation.”

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, said the Public Works crews are at times too aggressive and haul off people’s belongings in addition to the garbage. But that goes on with or without Prop. Q, she said.

Even though her organization campaigned hard against Prop. Q, Friedenbach acknowledged that it was largely a battle over symbols, not a real policy measure.

“We couldn’t sit idly by while there was a campaign demonizing homeless people and putting out false information and making voters think people would get housing when their tents are confiscated,” she said.

Kositisky’s crews began their more methodical effort to clear camps in August with the creation of the city Encampment Resolution Team. Its half-dozen counselors conduct a campaign of regular visits to a camp to offer the people living there everything from drug rehabilitation and shelter beds to permanent housing or bus rides back to their families. After three weeks, whoever is left has to move along with their belongings. Public Works crews, with police standing by, then sweep away everything that’s left.

Out of the 301 homeless people at eight big camps handled by the team since August, 235 have been put in housing of some sort, according to team figures. For some, that meant a bus ride back to family or a spot in a rehabilitation center. For others, it amounted only to a 30-day spot in a Navigation Center, the shelters that allow people to bring in partners and pets. But even a short shelter stay is an improvement over street life, said team leader Jason Albertson.

“We have a lot of people swimming in the ocean of homelessness, and sometimes all we can do is pull them into a lifeboat for a while before they go back out again,” Albertson said as he oversaw his team’s clearance operation last week of a 40-person camp at Carolina and 16th streets on the northern border of the Potrero neighborhood. “But at least they’ve gotten some rest ... and maybe that helps move them closer to a better situation.”

As he spoke, the property manager at the warehouse across the street was assuring workers there that the tent encampment they have been complaining about would soon be gone. A couple of students strolling to the nearby California College of the Arts waved to the camp dwellers — “they smile, we smile, and that’s all,” said one, 24-year-old Zhiyu Xue — and several waved back.

A sense that the entire scene was changing hung thick in the air. The deadline for the camp to be cleared is Tuesday.

“I would love nothing better than to have a place to live — you think we actually like it out here?” said one camp resident, who would give only her street name, Cat Astrophic. “What these guys are doing, trying to help us out, is great. But Proposition Q? All it did was scare me.”

She added, “It’s bad enough that there are thousands of us out here on the street, but to have some law saying they have to kick us around all the time with a one-day notice and nowhere to go? The only good thing about Proposition Q is that it hasn’t made one iota of difference.”

Kevin Fagan and Emily Green are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com, egreen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron, @emilytgreen