The wild-haired man amped up on methamphetamine started screeching at Sho just as she slid her car into a spot on Clinton Park alley in San Francisco. “The sky is falling on you! You! Aim for the right! All day long, lady!” he yelled, hands jabbing the air.

Sho ignored him. Then as she opened her trunk, the man rushed up closer, gibbering about wanting to carry her groceries upstairs. “Oh no, you don’t!” Sho yelled, glaring angrily. “Get away!”

The man backed off. Sho shook her head in exasperation.

“Take that and times it by 30, and it’s what we hear all day long,” said the woman, who asked that her last name be withheld because she fears retaliation. The Chronicle agreed, in accordance with its policies on anonymity. “I’ve lived here 30 years, but the past couple, with things like this … If I won the lottery, I’d be out of here.”

And there it is — the same frustration that spurred residents of this two-block-long alley near Market and Dolores streets to pool $2,000 several weeks ago to buy 24 heavy boulders and install them on the sidewalk. A loud, violent homeless camp dominated by drug dealers and addicts was making life unbearable, they said, and they thought the rocks would make it hard to pitch camp.

It backfired.

Activists called the boulders abusive to homeless people and harassed the residents, issuing death threats online, confronting them at home and at work. After opponents rolled the rocks into the street and city workers put them back — five times — the neighbors gave up Monday and let the city truck the rocks away to storage.

For now, the street is clear of drug dealers and campers, except for a few stragglers who stroll through like the man who screamed at Sho. But the saga is far from over, everyone involved agrees. What the drama highlighted was the tension over how to handle the city’s twin crises — drugs and homelessness. Is putting boulders on streets a heartless act meant to penalize the city’s most vulnerable, or a desperate move by exhausted residents who want to feel safe on their own block?

Residents and city officials are talking about putting landscaping or bigger boulders on the sidewalk. Drug dealers told The Chronicle they intend to move back as soon as the attention dies down. Some homeless people said the same — though they hope the pushers stay away, because the campers without extreme addiction problems didn’t like the commotion while they were trying to sleep.

Meanwhile, some in the neighborhood are so fed up that, like Sho, they’re ready to flee. Regardless of how the boulders battle turns out.

Simply having homeless people on the block trying to snatch a night’s sleep was tolerable, they said. But over the past year and a half or so, they said, the camp along the wall behind Pet Food Express became a dope-selling bazaar of big tents with meth and heroin on shelves, addicts shooting up and snorting nonstop, and loud, late-night music and fights between people with knives and guns.

Residents and business owners called 311 and 911 more than 300 times over the past year alone, more than double the number of calls in 2017. Police came, but often could not arrest dealers because they’d hid their stashes before the patrol cars rolled up, residents said.

Inspired by boulders and similar preventive landscaping being used in other parts of San Francisco — and the state — a few residents in August came up with the idea of installing rocks and raised funds from their neighbors. The rocks got rid of the biggest tents, the ones residents said mostly sheltered dealers, and the troubles declined. Then in late September, media attention drew activists and online hostility, and the situation got ugly, neighbors said.

“We’re leaving as soon as we can sell this building,” said attorney Jeffrey Keller, whose office backs up to Clinton Park homes. “We just can’t take it any more. You try to be kind, but we’ve had graffiti, and drug addicts breaking into the building, and we have to power-wash needles and feces off our parking lot every day.

“I can hear them screaming outside my window. I got attacked by one of them with a hammer. We finally had to hire security for thousands of dollars a month. These people outside here have psychoses, they are mentally ill, drug addicted — they need help.”

Keller moved to his current location nine years ago. He said his breaking point came several months ago.

“I came out of my parking lot and a homeless woman was screaming and crying at the top of her lungs, holding something in her hands,” he said. “I came closer and saw it was a petrified rat. That was it. The point where you ... Just. Can’t. Take. It. Any. More.”

Several homeless campers said they were also fed up.

“That wasn’t such a bad place to sleep, you know, off and on, with the nice neighbors — until the new dealers and junkies came in,” said DeDawn Ali, 71, who has been homeless for decades and came to check Clinton Park after the rocks were gone. “They didn’t clean up, didn’t keep it cool. They made it bad for the rest of us because everyone lumps us into the same thing.”

Like other campers, he said the boulders didn’t prevent anyone from sleeping. In fact, they were nice to sit on. It was the intense media, activist and public works attention that chased everyone out, Ali said. He now sleeps downtown.

“It got too hot,” said Toro Castano, 48, who moved his tent a couple of blocks away when the boulder flap hit. “People scattered to here, the Haight, the Castro. Might be back later. But the dealers really messed it up for us. They sold too much, made too much noise, and they didn’t make a correlation between making that kind of commotion and the police coming and residents getting fed up.

“It’s too bad,” he said. “It was nice having that wall to sleep next to.”

One meth and heroin dealer, who didn’t want to be named for fear of being arrested, said he would “be back there as soon as all the attention dies down.”

“That was a great spot,” said the dealer, who moved his sales operation a few blocks away. “Not far from Safeway (a longtime gathering spot on Market Street for homeless addicts), we had good food and nice cover with that wall, and steady customers. If there was ever any fight it was the neighbors trying to kick our ass.” Several residents denied physically confronting any campers.

Paul Boden, head of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, derided the boulders as part of the “new trend in anti-homeless architecture” throughout the West. In the past few years, governments and residents have installed rocks in Portland, Ore., San Diego, Sacramento and other locations to thwart homeless camps — an expansion of longtime practices such as shortening bus benches to prevent homeless sleepers.

“It’s cruel,” Boden said. “You want to deal with drug dealing problems, yes, do it, because that’s not cool. But boulders are terrible. And hypocritical. They say tents block the sidewalk, but boulders are OK? How does that work?

“If you really want to make the problem go away, deal with the underlying situations — lack of affordable housing, lack of shelters, not enough help for homeless people,” he said. “This boulder thing? All it does is move homeless people somewhere else.”

Some neighborhoods in San Francisco have quietly installed planters on the sidewalk to thwart campers in the past couple of years. But the biggest effort came in 2017 when city workers deposited dozens of boulders under Highway 101 near Cesar Chavez Street in a longtime camping area called the Hairball.

Homeless people scoffed at the Hairball boulders and kept sleeping alongside them, but stepped-up police patrols eventually did what the rocks could not.

“The cops come every morning at 7 a.m., that’s what stops us, not those rocks,” Alberto Deguzman said the other day as he pushed his heaped shopping cart past the Hairball, which is still dotted with boulders. “I liked the rocks. They were nice to camp next to and sit on. But now you can’t do anything there without the cops stopping you.”

Police spokesman David Stevenson said his department “declined to speak on specific strategies on Clinton Park,” but added that the city’s approach to narcotics scenes is “to lead with services, via the Healthy Streets Operations Center,” which addresses street homelessness through police and counseling. The goal is to get addicts into treatment and serious dealers into jail, he said.

Mayor London Breed said if the Clinton Park drug problem gets out of hand again, she will pressure Police Chief Bill Scott to lean harder on it. She also said she is “definitely open” to the idea of installing landscaping or bigger boulders on the street, though any action will require considerable discussion.

“This community has been really held hostage, and part of what they did was take action because they felt the city was not doing enough,” Breed told The Chronicle. “I think it’s important that we listen to the community and come up with a solution that could work to make the quality of life better for them.”

Richard, another longtime Clinton Park resident who didn’t want his full name used for fear of retaliation, said that whatever the neighborhood does next, it should involve more outreach to the homeless. Not just something to block camp sites.

“Up there by the wall was a real problem, yes, but those boulders really just opened up all the contradictions,” he said. “This isn’t just homeless versus residents. It’s a bigger issue about poverty, shelter, housing and more. Handle the bigger problem, and you won’t have this problem.”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron