Protesters stood in sharp contrast to the festivities taking place at Super Bowl City on Wednesday as they took to the streets to bring attention to the plight of homelessness in San Francisco.

Organizers and supporters met at the San Francisco Ferry Building, where they chanted, performed songs and held signs with messages like, “Hey Mayor Lee, no penalties for poverty.”

More than 80 helmet-donning police stood facing the equally large crowd of protesters.

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director for the Coalition on Homelessness, which coordinated the “Tackle Homelessness” action, said with the global audience focused on The City this week, there was no better time to highlight the thousands of people in San Francisco without a place to live.

“We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from people in San Francisco, people who are homeless, people that are really pissed off that we can construct a Super Bowl City, give away $5 million dollars to a huge corporation like the NFL, while there’s thousands of people on the street,” Friedenbach said.

Julianna Cheng, a San Francisco resident who attended the event, said she was living on the streets in 2012, while she was pregnant with her daughter. Cheng said it was eye-opening to see how dehumanizing San Franciscans treated the homeless population.

“People don’t realize that they are one paycheck, one heart attack, one eviction away from homelessness,” Cheng said.

Among the organizers’ demands were that Mayor Lee pay back the $5 million spent to host Super Bowl 50 in the form of an investment in affordable housing. The demands also included using unclaimed space in The City to create a safe space for the homeless to sleep, providing hygienic bathrooms and healing services, and ending the criminalization of poor and homeless people.

“The thing that I would say to Mayor Ed Lee, the solution to homeless is housing, and it’s a win-win for everyone,” Friedenbach said.

The protest came just days after homeless began setting up tent encampments under Highway 101, between SoMa and the Mission, to make way for the Super Bowl City, as previously reported by the San Francisco Examiner.

The mayor came under fire in August when he said he wanted to remove homeless persons in the area around The Embarcadero where the Super Bowl 50 celebration would occur. Last week, he said those living on the streets are “human beings who deserve our compassion.”

Just hours before the protest Wednesday, San Francisco’s Human Services Agency gave members of the press a tour of a new shelter for homeless who have no dry place to sleep as El Niño storms draw closer. City officials said that it was a coincidence that they were touting new homeless facilities just hours before planned protests over treatment of homeless in The City during Super Bowl week.

The shelter, at Pier 80 in the Dogpatch neighborhood, could open as soon as Thursday. It will be equipped with 150 beds when operating at full capacity, a total of eight showers and multiple toilets, according to Human Services Agency Director Trent Rohrer, who added the shelter cost roughly $1.5 million to set up.

“What this is hoping to do is address the health concerns that arise when it’s windy and wet,” Rohrer said.

Drawing people out of the streets and into homeless shelters comes with a number of problems Rohrer said, including people who are weary of leaving their regular spots, carrying their belongings to a shelter, complying with curfew hours or not being able to bring in their pets.

The new shelter hopes to squash many of those issues by loosening restrictions, such as allowing homeless people to stay at the shelter for several days instead of just one night, allowing people who have pets and accepting both women and men into the shelter.

A bigger issue for the Pier 80 shelter will be transporting homeless to the Dogpatch neighborhood, Rohrer said.

“The idea is to have a multifold transportation team,” Rohrer said, explaining that the shelter will utilize shuttles to drive homeless people to and from the shelter as well as provide them with tokens to use public transportation.

For now, the shelter is set up to operate for the next few months while the El Niño storms clear out, according to Sam Dodge, director of the Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement, which works to improve city-sponsored housing.

Dodge and Rohrer both said that the timing of the Super Bowl City protest and the opening of the shelter was nothing more than a coincidence and that both groups were working toward the same goal.

“We have a long way to go from where we are and I appreciate the care and pressure coming from protesters,” Dodge said.