San Francisco will appeal homeless enforcement ban
San Francisco says it will appeal a federal magistrate’s order prohibiting the removal of homeless people from encampments without offering them shelter — a rule the city insists it’s already following.
City Attorney David Chiu said Monday his office would ask the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a Dec. 23 injunction by U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu that barred police from sweeping homeless encampments, citing their occupants for sleeping in public and seizing their belongings while she considers a lawsuit against the city. She cited federal appeals court rulings saying local governments violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment when they make it a crime to sleep on a street or sidewalk and do not make shelter available.
“The Court’s order is unnecessarily broad and has put the City in an impossible situation,” Chiu said in a statement. “The City engages, shelters, and houses tens of thousands of people each year,” but “there are people living on our streets who refuse shelter, and there are those who have secured a shelter bed but still choose to sleep on the streets. It is unreasonable to tell the City that it is powerless to do anything in those situations.”
But Ryu said in her injunction that San Francisco had acknowledged it was removing unhoused people who were not offered shelter. The Coalition on Homelessness said in court filings that city law enforcement officers had removed people from encampments without providing shelter. One filing quoted a UCLA sociologist as saying the city’s shelter system had only 10 to 50 unoccupied beds on any given night in 2022. In its final tabulation for the year, the city said it had 7,754 homeless people, with nearly 4,400 sleeping on the sidewalk, in a tent or in a vehicle.
San Francisco officials also say Ryu’s order poses a potential conflict with a the city’s obligations under a 2020 settlement with UC Hastings College of the Law, recently renamed UC College of the Law, San Francisco. In response to complaints by businesses and residents of the Tenderloin neighborhood, the city agreed to immediately remove 70% of the tents in the area, to move their occupants into hotel rooms, shelters or city-approved encampments, and then to make reasonable efforts to eliminate remaining encampments.
At a Jan. 12 hearing, Chiu’s office asked Ryu to scale back her injunction and eliminate any conflict with the 2020 settlement. But the magistrate said she saw no conflict, since any removals under the settlement would have to comply with court rulings requiring the city to offer shelter to anyone it removes from the encampments. She referred the opposing sides to another magistrate for negotiations on a possible settlement, but said the lawsuit in her court by a group of homeless people and their advocates would go to trial in 2024 if no agreement was reached.
“We tried to seek clarity on the scope of this injunction, but the Court declined to provide that,” Chiu said Monday. “Unfortunately, we have no choice but to appeal this decision.”
A lawyer for the homeless plaintiffs offered a different perspective.
“San Francisco cannot possibly claim that unhoused people have access to shelter when it has closed the shelter system, closed same-day shelter lines, and unhoused people no longer have any realistic way to voluntarily access shelter anywhere in San Francisco,” said attorney Zal Shroff of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. “The City’s appeal is a disingenuous, nakedly political move that will cost all San Franciscans in the long run.”