Homelessness legal fight ends quietly

Thanks largely to the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, San Francisco has dodged a forced overhaul of its approach to street homelessness.

The City tentatively agreed this month to settle a yearslong legal battle brought by several plaintiffs, including the Coalition on Homelessness, who argued that its aggressive sweeps of homeless encampments were unconstitutional.

It’s hard to overstate how impactful it would have been had the plaintiffs been successful. San Francisco would have been forced to either dramatically expand its offerings of shelter and housing or scale back efforts to forcibly remove encampments from city streets.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022, argued that The City was constitutionally obligated to make real offers of shelter before punishing those living on the streets in tents. It was an argument based in part on still somewhat recent — and controversial — federal court decisions that limit the ability of cities to enforce laws against camping on public property.

A victory for the plaintiffs could have theoretically forced The City to open thousands of new shelter beds if it wanted to forcibly remove people from the streets. San Francisco had about 4,355 people living on the street without shelter in 2024, according to its federally mandated biennial survey of The City’s unhoused population.

The legal fight in San Francisco was fundamentally altered in June 2024 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a similar case — Grants Pass v. Johnson — that the small city of Grants Pass, Ore., had not violated the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment by citing people for sleeping outdoors.

“That ‘misapplication of this Court’s Eighth Amendment precedents,’ the Mayor tells us, has ‘severely constrained San Francisco’s ability to address the homelessness crisis,’” Gorsuch wrote.

The Supreme Court’s ruling, which was cheered by local elected officials, effectively nullified half of the San Francisco advocates’ case.

Nisha Kashyap of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, who represented plaintiffs in the San Francisco case, said the Supreme Court reversed the “incredibly modest” right granted by prior lower court decisions, such as that in Martin v. Boise.

“The right was simply to not be sent to jail for simply sleeping in public when there was nowhere else to go,” Kashyap said.

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All that remained of the San Francisco case was a dispute over whether the City was complying with its own “bag and tag” policy, which requires it to document and store the possessions of people removed from the street. That matter was resolved in the July 17 settlement, which reiterates and bolsters The City’s existing policies and provides an avenue for disputes if advocates for homeless people believe there is a violation.

Among the requirements stipulated in the agreement, Department of Public Works employees must photograph encampments before sweeps, including “all tents, mattresses and complete bicycles located at the site.” Workers will have to document what they dispose of and explain their reasoning for doing so.

The City also agreed to report every three months on its sweeps, including dates and times, photographs of the sites, and bag-and-tag logs. Advocates for the homeless will be given access to the facility where bagged items are stored at least once a month.

“We’re really pleased that this settlement has these really robust monitoring and oversight provisions,” Kashyap said.

The settlement, which does not include an admission of fault by The City, still requires approval by the Board of Supervisors. As part of the settlement, The City also agreed to pay $2.8 million in attorney fees for the advocates and $11,000 to each of the two individual plaintiffs.

“Homelessness is a complex, nationwide problem that San Francisco has put immense resources towards alleviating,” said Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for City Attorney David Chiu, in a statement. “There are many people on our streets who are in crisis, and San Francisco genuinely wants to help them onto a better path. But, the law must appropriately balance the rights of unhoused people with the rights of governments to keep order on the streets.”

Kashyap said there has been a retrenchment of punitive approaches to homelessness in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

“We’re all unfortunately experiencing in real time a reversion to failed practices,” Kashyap said.

It was a somewhat unceremonious end to what could have proven to be a landmark legal battle.

City officials are continuing to push for expanded services, though they champion a decrease in the number of people counted living in tents on the street.

Mayor Daniel Lurie has dropped his initial quest to open 1,500 new shelter beds, but has pledged to continue to broaden The City’s network of services for the homeless and those with mental health or addiction issues, financed in large part by private-sector philanthropy.