If it seems like all the big homeless tent camps in San Francisco have suddenly vanished, that’s because it’s true. City officials are delighted, and street activists are livid.

The transformation has actually been gradual, as a unified push by teams of street cleaners, police officers and counselors ramped up over the past year and a half to dismantle 30 of the city’s biggest camps. Since the last large camps were removed last week in the southern part of town, none with more than 10 tents has been allowed to spring up.

Mayor Mark Farrell inherited the cleanup from the late Ed Lee when he took office in January and set it into overdrive in April when he ordered the Mission District cleared of all tents. But getting the job done took more than just a more aggressive approach. It required getting the camp residents assistance such as health care and into shelters while making it clear that the big camps are no longer allowed, he said.

“I believe San Francisco residents finally reached a tipping point on this,” Farrell said. “They want action. We have to do everything we can to help people on the streets, but at the end of the day, as mayor, I believe the city should not tolerate people who don’t want to take the offers of shelter and services — which we give to everyone in a camp that gets dismantled — and just choose to stay in tents instead.”

Homeless advocates point to the wait list for one of the city’s 2,300 shelter beds — it is perpetually at about 1,000 — as proof that offers of help as the camps get torn down are hollow.

“All this did was scatter people into all kinds of neighborhoods,” said Kelley Cutler, a Coalition on Homelessness organizer who has monitored the camp clearances. “I now see smaller groups, and they try harder to stay hidden in places like Nob Hill, behind dumpsters.

“They are just getting swept all the time now, having to move every day, and that makes them harder to find for outreach workers, people who want to help them,” she said.

On the street, the response has been mixed, depending on whether the right help was offered to the right person at the right time.

For 38-year-old Krystle Erickson, the clearance has meant tearing her tent down every day or two and moving to a new block. She struggles with heroin addiction and would like to get inside for rehab and stability, but she doesn’t trust the offers. She said when city workers cleared her camp recently they threatened to take her kitten, Booku, to an animal shelter. That just made her mad.

“They say they’re offering services, but I’ve only heard about a few days in a shelter,” she said as she packed up her gear the other morning at Utah and 15th streets. “What good does that do? We’re literally all just scattered now. Every day is a new thing of wandering around in limbo.

“Most definitely it feels like they’re just trying to run us out of town,” she said.

Joseph Lewis, 52, says at first he didn’t appreciate being rousted from his camp of 20-plus tents eight months ago on Fifth Street under Interstate 80. But he eventually ended up at the city’s Multi-Service Center South homeless shelter, where he is enrolled in health programs he had longed to take advantage of and is hoping to get a restaurant job soon.

“It’s OK here, and it was really hard living outside,” he said. “I needed the help, and I’m glad I got it. But the city needs to do more. There are too many of us out there, and nobody really wants to be homeless.”

Farrell’s hard line on street camps is unsurprising, considering he has long favored both carrot and stick approaches to the problem. As a supervisor, he sought more funding for shelters, counseling and other homeless services over the years, but also wrote Proposition Q, which voters approved in 2016 to authorize the speedy dismantling of tent camps.

Things picked up more than a year ago, when the Departments of Public Works, Public Health, and Homelessness and Supportive Housing, along with special police squads that deal with street populations, started cleaning out camps in the Mission.

Around the same time, they also started consulting one another regularly on a wide range of street issues, and that led to the Healthy Streets Operations Center, which now coordinates efforts among the city agencies to not only rid the streets of camps but shepherd their residents into services.

Jeff Kositsky, director of the homelessness department, said the result has been more referrals to health services for very sick campers, and more focused efforts to house people without duplication and inefficiency.

“I don’t want to say ‘Mission accomplished,’ and that we’re done, because our goal is to end permanent homelessness in the city and to put everyone into healthier, housed situations,” he said. “But I am proud of what we’ve done.”

Kositsky said of the more than 1,200 people moved from the big camps, 65 percent accepted shelter of some kind. Among those were 300 people who were chronic, long-term street people who landed in permanent housing.

The challenge now will be holding the line, Farrell said.

“We’re excited about the progress, but of course we can’t rest on our laurels,” the mayor said. “There is going to be a continued, dogged effort to make sure these tent encampments don’t come back.”

Translated to the street, that has meant stepped-up patrols by police, street cleaners and outreach counselors to make sure settlements don’t resprout in their traditional spots — places such as Fifth Street under I-80 and along Division Street in the Mission. In many places, metal police barriers now line sidewalks that used to be covered in tarps and heaping shopping carts.

“We’re not trying to criminalize people, but we are being very clear about letting them know it’s not healthy, not OK to just live in a tent on the street,” Kositsky said. “I would never endorse something that’s just mean. We really are about trying to give people better lives.”

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

Tent camps by the numbers

Over the past 18 months

Big camps dismantled: 30

Size of the camps: 20 to 70 people each

Total number of homeless people displaced: 1,219

Number who accepted offers of shelter: 792

Number of chronically homeless permanently housed: 300