If you've walked through Hayes Valley recently — especially after dark — you've noticed. What was once one of San Francisco's most pleasant neighborhoods for an evening stroll has become yet another casualty of the city's eternal shell game with homelessness.

Residents report a dramatic surge in encampments and street-level drug use over the past two months, with large congregations forming around Patricia's Green and the Trader Joe's on Fourth Street. People passed out on doorsteps. Individuals in visible states of mental and emotional crisis. The kind of scenes San Franciscans have sadly learned to narrate with clinical detachment.

So what happened? If you've been paying attention, you already know. The city has been aggressively clearing encampments from high-profile corridors — 6th and Market, Market and 8th, the areas around City Hall. And as one local put it bluntly: "They didn't solve anything, just move the problem around."

Another resident was even more direct: "Looks like they pushed them down there. City Hall has been clean."

This is the oldest trick in San Francisco's bureaucratic playbook. Sweep the visible misery away from the political epicenter, declare progress, and let residential neighborhoods absorb the fallout. It's not a homelessness strategy. It's a PR strategy.

Meanwhile — and you truly cannot make this up — home prices in the neighborhood continue to climb. So Hayes Valley residents get to pay more for the privilege of stepping over unconscious bodies on their front stoop. Fiscal responsibility, San Francisco style.

Let's be clear about what's not happening here: nobody is being connected to meaningful treatment. Nobody is being held accountable for open-air drug use. No new shelter capacity materialized to handle the displacement. The city simply squeezed the balloon and Hayes Valley got the pop.

San Francisco spends north of $600 million annually on homelessness services. For that kind of money, residents deserve more than a game of geographic musical chairs. They deserve actual outcomes — fewer people on the streets, more people in treatment, and neighborhoods that don't have to wonder which corridor the city will sacrifice next.

Until City Hall treats this as a policy failure instead of a visibility problem, every neighborhood in San Francisco is just one sweep away from becoming the next dumping ground.