San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Can a new lawsuit finally change S.F. sweeps?
On Monday afternoon, I drove into San Francisco and pulled off at the Fifth Street exit. While waiting for the light to change, I watched as half a dozen people — many wearing vests labeled “encampment resolution” — supervised the removal of homeless people’s belongings next to the highway.
A few hours later I ran into one of the camp’s former residents as he struggled to process how much he had lost. Earlier that day he’d received a text saying he had a doctor’s appointment. He was sure it was the 29th, not the 26th, but not wanting to miss it, he left his belongings at the camp and ran to his doctor’s office. There, he was told the text was sent accidentally; he’d had the right date. By the time he returned, everything he owned had been taken by the city.
It’s far from the most egregious sweep I’ve heard about. In the four years I’ve been writing about the city’s practice of clearing homeless camps, I’ve seen tents seized mere hours before a huge storm, watched friends observing the sweeps be arrested, and heard stories of people being held back by police while bulldozers trashed their homes. With each sweep people lose savings, family heirlooms, prescription medicine, and even human ashes, and the impacts are traumatizing.
A few months ago, I met a woman living outdoors who hadn’t slept in days. She’d livestreamed a sweep at her camp, getting some Public Works employees in trouble for breaking the rules. In response, she said for weeks a Public Works employee had stalked and threatened her. As she shared her story she cried, her whole body shaking in fear.
But no matter how many stories are published on the tragic results of these sweeps, nothing seems to change. There is a short-lived flurry of outrage on Twitter, and then the practice continues.
As a reporter I’ve long seen how backward these sweeps are. And now, when there’s more public unrest than ever over the conditions on our streets, the city is going to pay for it. On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights San Francisco, and Latham & Watkins LLP filed a huge, 105-page suit against the city on behalf of Coalition on Homelessness and seven plaintiffs. The city, the suit states, is responding to its homelessness crisis using “unlawful and ineffective punishment rather than affordable housing and shelter.”
The densely packed lawsuit and the dogged legal teams behind it are a formidable opponent for the city, which for decades has struggled to keep up with its growing homeless population. And if successful, it will serve not just those struggling on our streets, but the understandably frustrated city residents who call for the sweeps in the first place.
Since 2018, the Healthy Streets Operations Center, a multi-departmental agency tasked with removing the physical evidence of homelessness, has conducted hundreds of these operations each year. With a single email or 311 call, anyone can trigger a deployment of police, Public Works employees, and members of the city’s Homeless Outreach Team. They descend on an encampment, clear belongings and offer shelter to residents — sort of. As Sam Dodge, the director of Healthy Streets told me last year, the team often only has beds available for a small percentage of the camp at any given time. But even that is iffy; the sweeps tend to start early in the morning, but the shelter waiting list capacity isn’t released until 9:30 a.m. every day. This means someone who’s had their tent seized by the city at 6 a.m. would have to wait three hours to see if they qualify for a bed.
More often, people dissipate, setting up their tents one block over, until the whole cycle starts again. Evidence of the sweeps’ ineffectiveness is everywhere; a recent Chronicle story disclosed that the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness, defined as people with disabilities who have been unhoused for more than a year, rose from 2,138 in 2017 to 2,691 in 2022. And this week, a study released by California Policy Lab and the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UCSF criticized the city’s fragmented approach to helping the most vulnerable people experiencing homelessness, ruling it expensive and largely ineffective.
Sweeping homeless camps was never going to be a solution to the crisis on our streets. The few people who accept shelter during these operations do not justify the massive human rights violations, the trauma that is inflicted, and the tax dollars spent on these efforts. It has always been a veneer, an attempt to act like the city is responding to its residents’ concerns over the crisis on their doorsteps while never actually addressing its root cause or investing in a solution.
As a recent Chronicle poll showed, there is an abundance of compassion in San Francisco toward people experiencing homelessness, but an incredibly low sense of faith that the crisis on our streets will be resolved. We are oversaturated with the daily tragedy of homelessness and distrusting of our city’s ability to respond to it.
But the law is catching up. And where stories of homeless disabled people’s walkers being tossed in trash compactors have failed to change policy, maybe this suit finally will.