By Laura Waxmann

When the city arrives at an encampment, it often means the homeless residents will be moved on.

But on Wednesday, city cleaning crews cleaned up the sidewalks on 14th and Mission streets and –although the encampment was visibly scaled down – the workers allowed most of the half-dozen or so tents and their residents to remain.

The day’s interactions at the three-week-old encampment shed light on the mounting frustrations of city workers, residents and the homeless.

For their part, neighbors feel the city has decided their blocks are open territory for the homeless who live in tents.

“This northeastern section of the Mission is a containment zone,” said Bryan Nazarian, a 15-year Mission resident who lives half a block up from the 14th Street encampment.

Other parts of the neighborhood, he said, don’t suffer from “the large, long-term encampments the way that we do.”

For its part, the Department of Public Works, says it simply tries to respond to resident complaints. The cleanups are triggered by a high volume of complaint calls.

“You close what you can,” said a Public Works employee Tuesday afternoon, in reference to the complaints. “You try to get to what you can…by the order [the complaints] are called in.”

The cleaning crew descended on the encampment mid-morning. They had come to remove trash, clean the sidewalks and force the encampment inhabitants to downsize, said another worker – not to “displace anyone.”

One of the workers sprayed disinfectant on the..READ MORE