Two well-intentioned people in San Francisco have started a crowdfunding campaign to purchase tents for some of the city’s homeless individuals.

There’s only one problem: It’s not helping.

Although the tents get people out of the rain, they also convince homeless people that they’re allowed to create campgrounds on city sidewalks. That’s not acceptable.

“We all want to help homeless people on the street,” said Supervisor Scott Wiener. “But the goal is to get them off the street. This is enabling them to stay on the street and die on the street.”

Tara Spalty, an acupuncturist, and Shaun Osburn, a graphic designer, are driving the crowdfunding effort, which pulled in more than $15,000, based on their narrative that city leaders are mean-spirited jerks who are intentionally putting the homeless out in the rain because of Super Bowl 50.

Spalty writes on her Facebook page: “This brutally inhuman policy decision to expose homeless people to the elements as punishment for not leaving the city — many of whom have been evicted due to Ed Lee’s policies — is ... amoral.”

Spalty and Osburn claim the Department of Public Works and the Police Department are approaching homeless folks and confiscating their tents. Both DPW spokeswoman Rachel Gordon and Police Chief Greg Suhr emphatically deny that.

“We are absolutely not confiscating tents,” Gordon said.

Based on the number of times I’ve been on cleanup runs of homeless camps, I believe them. Not that it matters to those who believe Spalty and Osburn. A viral video posted on Facebook on Thursday says “they are removing the tents ... right now.”

But if you watch the video, you see DPW doing what it does day in and day out, cleaning up the site. Some campers had to move their shelters for cleaning, but Gordon, who was there that day, says unless tents were left unattended, they were put back on the sidewalk.

“We’ve been doing this work since January 2014,” Gordon said. “And if we didn’t go in there, it would be a real public health hazard. Last week I was with one of our cleaners and he picked up between 75 and 100 hypodermic needles in one block.”

Getting homeless off streets

Spalty and Osburn, who said they would be willing to talk to any reporter “unless you are C.W. Nevius or Fox News (same thing really),” have simply accepted the confiscating-tents premise as fact.

And they spout the often-disputed numbers from the Coalition on Homelessness that there are 5.5 homeless people for every shelter bed. (That would be 7,800 homeless, which is far above the total for the most recent homeless census, which found roughly 3,500 on the street.)

But the larger issue is that city officials have been working hard to get folks off the street, not give them reason to stay. Honestly, until I went on patrol with the Homeless Outreach Team, I didn’t believe that people would turn down a shelter bed to stay on the street, but they do.

The current move toward innovative shelters like the Navigation Center is addressing that, giving clients a live-in place that is much more like home than a shelter. So does the new site at Pier 80.

“We’re focusing on the long term,” says Sam Dodge, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing Opportunity. “We want to end people’s homelessness.”

So to have someone say, here’s a tent — problem solved — is aggravating.

“It’s not that simple,” said Human Services Agency chief Trent Rhorer. “In the last 11 years, we’ve housed 12,000 people and we’ve returned (free of charge) over 9,000 people to their homes with our Homeward Bound program. We continue to address the problem in a way that ends homelessness. You’re not going to fix that by giving them a tent.”

’Challenging us to do better’

Spalty and Osburn may have the best of intentions, but the city isn’t a free-ranging campground. Dodge, ever diplomatic, tried to be optimistic.

“This is one of the reasons why I love San Francisco,” he said. “People are always challenging us to do better. I welcome that. But I think we can all agree that it is not OK to live in a tent on the street.”

Well, maybe not everyone agrees, but there’s a solid constituency. Dodge is the guy who must field “the hue and cry and 311 calls” from neighborhoods where campgrounds have flourished. What do you tell someone whose neighborhood has become a homeless campground? It is the Super Bowl’s fault?

Besides, Dodge has a better plan. Pier 80 should open Wednesday, providing a live-in shelter all winter. There will be showers and food. Couples can stay together, there will be storage for belongings, and even pets are welcome.

It’s a well-considered, well-funded attempt to get homeless people off the street, into shelter and into services.

None of which happens in a tent on the street.

C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cwnevius