Metropolis of San Francisco & Mayor London Breed Sued for Harassing Unhoused San Franciscans, Violating Civil Rights to Cowl Up the Metropolis’s Inexpensive Housing Failures

Last night, the Coalition on Homelessness and seven individual plaintiffs filed suits against the City and County of San Francisco and the Mayor of London Breed for their efforts to criminalize homelessness through a series of brutal police practices that violate the constitutional rights of homeless people in San Francisco injure. Plaintiffs are also seeking an injunction to stop these practices in an emergency. The plaintiffs are represented by the San Francisco Bay Area Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, and the global law firm Latham & Watkins LLP.

For years, San Francisco has claimed it is taking steps to address the city’s homelessness crisis. But in fact, the city is forcing homeless people out of sight – destroying their vital belongings and citing and arresting them for sleeping in public when they don’t have shelter. San Francisco has more laws criminalizing homelessness than any other place in California, and possibly America. This regressive policy of mass incarceration only perpetuates San Francisco’s homelessness crisis and scapegoats the homeless for the city’s egregious failure to support affordable housing for San Francisco residents.

San Francisco lacks – and always has lacked – adequate, affordable housing and housing for thousands of homeless San Franciscos. San Francisco’s threats, subpoenas, arrests, and removal of homeless residents from public spaces therefore violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The city also engages in a practice of illegally confiscating and destroying the personal property of unaccommodated residents in violation of the Fourth Amendment. These practices are helping San Francisco claim that it’s solving the homeless crisis — when in fact it just swept it under the rug.

San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is one of pricelessness. When long-established residents can no longer afford their apartments, they are forced onto the streets. San Francisco politicians have understood this for years, but they have not acted. Instead, the city has consistently relied on tough crime policies to respond to homelessness, rather than addressing the root cause of the problem: the clear lack of sustainable affordable housing.

It’s immoral, cruel, costly and ultimately counterproductive – not to mention unconstitutional. The city knows this because it consistently violates its own policies, which purport to require a humane, service-oriented approach to the homeless crisis. The reality is that homeless San Franciscans are waking up to find their survival goods being confiscated and destroyed as they face criminal penalties if they sleep outdoors, even though the city offers little to homeless San Francisco residents in terms of shelter, housing and services until it has nothing to offer. This lawsuit combines vast amounts of public data with eyewitness accounts to expose the city’s unlawful behavior that is making it nearly impossible for thousands of San Francisco residents to emerge from homelessness.

Those affected by homelessness in San Francisco are disproportionately people of color due to decades of discrimination in housing, education, healthcare, and the criminal justice system. Today, for example, blacks make up 6% of San Francisco’s total population, but make up 37% of the city’s homeless. Black renters in San Francisco still face some of the worst housing discrimination in the country. This targeted exclusion has only exacerbated the homelessness crisis for people of color.

San Franciscans deserve real homelessness solutions. This begins and ends with the city actually investing in affordable housing. This lawsuit seeks to hold the city accountable for its unconstitutional attack on unhoused San Franciscans. The city can punish unaccommodated people for a housing shortage it causes.

Customer testimonials:

Plaintiff Nathaniel Vaughn, a lifelong San Franciscan who was recently homeless, muses, “We don’t deserve to be treated like criminals and have our belongings thrown in the trash when we are most vulnerable.”

Plaintiff Toro Castaño points to the impact this is having on homeless people: “The city’s feuds [are] a dehumanizing disruption to that little bit of stability I was trying to build for myself during one of the hardest times of my life.”

Plaintiff Sarah Cronk says the same thing: “We’re just trying to create and build as much life for ourselves as we can – both with dignity and safety. The city makes that impossible for us.”

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness: “San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is its affordable housing crisis. Instead of investing in sustainable, affordable housing, the city has spent millions of dollars ridding our neighborhoods of visible signs of homelessness. Punitive approaches exacerbate homelessness by making it more difficult for people to access already limited services, find work and secure stable housing.”

Attorney Statements:

“The city is using homeless residents as scapegoats for a crisis of economic and racial justice that it helped create. San Francisco should fight to end homelessness. But the only real solution to San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is housing. Instead of solving homelessness, the city has invested in detention measures that are making the crisis worse. Not only is this unconstitutional, it’s just plain bad politics. We should expect much better from our political leaders.” – Zal Shroff, Senior Staff Attorney, Bay Area Attorneys’ Committee on Civil Rights

“Racism is embedded in the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco as people of color are disproportionately targeted by anti-homelessness ordinances. The current system is grievance-oriented, allowing housed residents to dictate traumatizing enforcement against unhoused people trying to live in whiter, gentrifying neighborhoods. This suggests the city is doing more to appease wealthy homeowners than supporting the health and well-being of the most vulnerable with real opportunities from homelessness. Through the lawsuit, we seek to expose the city’s illusory shelter opportunities and end the racist consequences of criminalization.” – John Do, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California