Limits on homeless sweeps are upheld
Supreme Court leaves landmark ruling in place
Homeless advocates won a major victory Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court decided to leave in place a landmark ruling preventing cities from rousting people from street camps unless they offer them shelter or housing. But they’d really already won more than a year ago.
Cities and counties throughout the West had been following the dictate limiting street sweeps since September 2018, when the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a decadeold lawsuit filed by homeless people in Boise, Idaho, against anticamping ordinances there. The Supreme Court’s refusal to take up an appeal of that case now simply confirms it as the law in the nine Western states, including California, that the Ninth Circuit covers.
Homeless community leaders say they hope the mandate will now be taken up in other parts of the nation, as well as pressure local
communities to create more shelters, services and housing.
“This could challenge locally communities to actually present a real alternative,” said Paul Boden, head of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, which works on homelessness issues. “Cities have been following Boise, yes, but interpreting it their own ways and still sweeping homeless camps, still moving people around like they shouldn’t be doing. They say they’re offering shelter as alternatives, but there never really is enough.
“It’s not ignorance of the law,” he said. “It’s just finagling what the law means. It’s a workaround.”
Officials in San Francisco and Oakland, the two cities struggling the most in the Bay Area with homelessness, disagreed. They said they’re already doing everything they can to house the homeless, and that they do offer shelter and storage of belongings, another mandate of the Boise ruling, before a camp is cleared.
The context can be a bit fuzzy, considering both cities always have waiting lists for shelter spots and fall far short of having enough affordable or supportive housing for their homeless populations. But when clearing a significant street settlement for health or danger reasons, both cities give advance notice and send in street counselors with offers of aid, and that’s what they say keeps them in compliance with the Boise dictate.
“The court action is a nonissue for San Francisco because we are already complying,” said Jeff Kositsky, head of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. “It changes nothing — our practice has always been to offer shelter anyway.
“Law enforcement doesn’t work anyway for solving homelessness,” he said. “We are one of the only cities on the West Coast that doesn’t have big tent encampments any more, and we did that by making legitimate offers of services to people when we move them.”
Karen Boyd, a spokeswoman for the city of Oakland, echoed Kosistky.
“It was only ever a simplistic interpretation of the ruling to say you can’t move people if there are large fire or health hazards. You can.” Boyd said. “I don’t think this court action changes anything.”
Cities, counties and states across the nation are confronting the same problems, although homelessness has been most acute along the West Coast the past few years. It’s become common practice to lean more toward housing and services than toward criminalizing homelessness, but with street counts rising, resources spread too thin and the public weary of tents and squalor, tensions have become unavoidable.
The Boise precedent had a significant impact in Sonoma County this summer when a homeless advocacy group won an injunction preventing officials from dismantling street camps. The county is now struggling to find accommodations for a 300person encampment on parkland in the southwest end of Santa Rosa, the biggest camp the county has ever had. In the meantime, officials are allowing the settlement to remain.
On Monday, members of Sonoma County Homeless Action group — which filed the suit that won the injunction — cheered when informed of the U.S. Supreme Court action by The Chronicle.
“We are absolutely thrilled,” said Scott Wagner, a member of the group who regularly visits the campers along Santa Rosa’s Joe Rodota Trail to offer aid. “It’s an affirmation of the common sense and the sense of dignity that people need a place to stay.
“Now the Board of Supervisors is going to have to come up with some real money to help the people on the trail,” he said. “Everybody has to stop flapping their jaws now and do something.”
Sonoma County supervisors are scheduled to hear proposals Tuesday for routing the trail campers into shelters, services and housing. County homeless managers said Monday’s court action has not affected their plans since they’d already been under the Boise mandate anyway.