A landmark Supreme Court decision allowing cities to criminalize sleeping outside has paved the way for San Francisco officials to sweep the city’s more than 500 homeless encampments, irrespective of whether those individuals have anywhere else to go.
On Monday, a lower court overturned an injunction that had prevented the city from conducting such sweeps, creating a crisis for the more than 8,000 unhoused people in a city that only has 3,600 shelter beds.
Mayor London Breed now lauds the outcome, stating that it is simply a priority to “manage our public spaces.” Under her administration, the city’s Healthy Streets Operations Center has conducted, and now plans to increase, “encampment operations,” where city workers are supposed to offer unhoused individuals shelter they can access immediately. If they decline, they can be cited, issued move-along orders and even arrested.
These initiatives, mentioned in Breed’s response to the decision, claim to work towards the “decrease [of] homelessness.”
I spent a week speaking with unhoused people and their advocates to get a sense of how this decision, and policies like the Mayor’s, impact people sleeping on the streets of San Francisco. From these discussions, it is clear that the Supreme Court’s ruling, and subsequent city policy, doesn’t do anything to actually decrease homelessness, but instead cruelly exposes unhoused people to more harm on the street and in shelters.
To get a better sense of what the city’s interaction with unhoused individuals on the streets really looks like, I spoke with Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project. From his advocacy work and firsthand experience being unhoused, Boden described homeless sweeps as horrific displays of police bombarding into someone's home and forcing them to leave.
“You have a militaristic institution coming in and chasing you the fuck out. That's what a sweep is in its core reality,” Boden said. “A sweep is such an innocuous bullshit term. It's displacement. It's harassment. It's degrading. It's dehumanizing.”
Dave Neelans and his wife Gail have been living on Haight Street for the past two years. At the intersection of Haight and Cole, surrounded by tourists and vivid murals, Neelans told me that due to fear of police harassment, they do not feel comfortable sleeping or leaving their belongings unattended for any period of time. “They bother us even though we don't bother them at all,” Neelans said. “We don't leave [our stuff] anywhere. We pick it up and carry it.”
The city sweeped 89 encampments this past year, according to Healthy Streets data.
For the past few years, San Francisco advocates have been fighting in court for people like Neelans and his wife — and the new Supreme Court decision has triggered a seismic shift to the battleground.
Respondents in The City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson argued that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment, as defined by the 8th Amendment, to criminalize people sleeping outside when they have no other safe alternative. Meanwhile, Bay Area proponents of police-led crackdowns on unhoused people on the street, like Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and Breed, wrote amicus curiae briefs in support of the Oregon city’s case.
The court ruled against the respondents by 6-3, led by the conservative cohort of the court.
San Francisco is facing its own lawsuit, in which, supported by Attorneys for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California, the Coalition on Homelessness sued the City and Breed. On behalf of a group of unhoused people, the plaintiffs argued that the perpetual nature of sweeps of unhoused people, conflating with a lack of shelter space, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment.
They also argued that the city is violating a number of laws in their alleged property destruction and treatment of disabled unhoused individuals.
According to Nisha Kashyap, program director of racial justice at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, the case in San Francisco is going to proceed despite the Supreme Court’s ruling. Although the plaintiffs are not able to argue the 8th Amendment clause due to the new decision, they are still continuing with other components of their argument.
“While I think the decision is devastating in a lot of ways, it's really important to know that our case here in San Francisco remains,” Kashyap said. “We will continue to make sure that the city is not only following the law, but also following its own policies and doing the things that it tells its constituents and its voters that it's doing.”
The city bolsters itself on its claims to provide the offer of shelter for unhoused individuals. According to San Francisco’s Municipal Code, it’s city policy to “offer to every person experiencing homelessness in San Francisco a safe place to sleep.” Yet, for many these shelters are not an option.
Alina Simonyova is an unhoused woman living in the city’s Navigation Center interim housing. Established in 2015 to be housing for folks experiencing long-term homelessness, these centers are an alternative to traditional shelter spaces.
The city’s municipal code requires that all shelter spaces be safe, clean, free of violence and equipped for disabled individuals. However, in conversation with me under the awning of GLIDE church in the Tenderloin, Simonyova described her experience inside this shelter as “horrible.” She has feared for her safety, awoken to loud noises, and had security threats not be taken seriously by staff. Simonyova found the center to be better than traditional shelters however, which she described as “ghetto hell.”
There have been many reports of other unhoused individuals, largely female-presenting, who have had traumatic experiences in shelter housing.
Neelans and his wife are against shelters. “Shelters are unsafe,” he told me while she nodded along. “They're just dirty. They're noisy. If you're married, they don't have any respect.”
While crime data in the shelters is not reported, according to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, there were 2,500 reported “incidents,” approximately 200-340 each month, within the city’s shelters between July of last year to this June. “This is a relatively low rate of these type of incidents,” stated Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.
Responding to concerns of sanitary conditions in the shelters, Cohen claimed that shelters are well-maintained and clean.
Regardless of their condition, many can’t even get into a shelter if they wanted to. In her response, Breed stated that “San Francisco has made significant investments in shelter and housing.” While it is true that the city has opened more shelters, they are 93% occupied, which leaves merely 255 shelter beds available for the approximate 3,000 people sleeping on the streets, according to Cohen.
Further, the city claims to be working towards getting shelter residents into permanent housing, via the city’s Coordinated Entry system. It’s hard to believe, being that so many are ruled out in city assessments.
Mary Kate Bacalao, co-chair of the Homeless Emergency Service Providers Association, calls the Coordinated Entry program “The Hunger Games of Homeless Services,” in her 2021 blog post.
According to Boden, “[Shelters] were created to be temporary emergency facilities. They were never created to be housing, a tier of housing for poor people.”
From the community members I spoke with, it’s clear that the Supreme Court’s decision is not going to decrease homelessness, but will further harm and criminalize those unhoused individuals who need real support, both on the streets and within shelters.
Kashyap finds that “Nothing about the decision in Grants Pass is going to make our homelessness crisis better…We know that criminalization of homelessness is a failed policy. It only leads to fines that people can't afford, jail time, the loss of property, the loss of connection to service providers, etc. There's just a whole cascade of negative consequences that result from criminalization. And so all of those things will make it harder, not easier for people to get off the streets.”
When asked for her thoughts on the criminalization of homelessness, Simonyova said, “My favorite perspective on how the poor are treated in this country is actually a quote by Morgan Freeman. He said, ‘If you want to understand a nation’s character, take a look at how it treats its poor and inmates. Look at how they treat the felons and the homeless.’”
