San Francisco Public Works crews and San Francisco Police Department officers clear out people in tent encampments, sometimes destroying people’s belongings.
San Francisco Public Works crews and San Francisco Police Department officers clear out people in tent encampments, sometimes destroying people’s belongings.
Unable to solve its growing homelessness crisis with housing and shelter, San Francisco — much like other cities such as Oakland and Sacramento — has used crackdowns and cruelty to bully unhoused people and send a clear message that they’re unwanted. That’s the main allegation behind a lawsuit filed against the city and county by a coalition of homeless groups on Tuesday afternoon.
The lawsuit provides a window into how we truly treat the poorest of the poor here in the city of St. Francis, where an increasing number of people suffer in open misery on the streets despite city officials’ claims that things are getting better.
The lawsuit says San Francisco has not built enough affordable housing and advocates for the homeless want the city to spend at least $4 billion on affordable homes.
In a 103-page complaint, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area alleges that city officials have repeatedly violated both the U.S. Constitution and the California State Constitution by aggressively displacing them from their tent encampments and seizing their property. The plaintiffs — including the Coalition on Homelessness and seven unhoused or formerly unhoused individuals — are calling for an immediate halt to these tactics. They also want The City to commit to spending $4.8 billion to create more affordable housing in a city with about 8,000 unhoused people, nearly 4,400 of them unsheltered.
“San Francisco presents the image of a caring municipality with a concrete plan to address the root causes of homelessness,” reads the suit filed late Tuesday. “But in reality, The City’s decades-long failure to adequately invest in affordable housing and shelter has left many thousands of its residents unhoused, forcing them to use tents and vehicles as shelter. In the face of this mounting crisis, The City has marshaled significant resources toward unlawful and ineffective punishment rather than affordable housing and shelter.”
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The lawsuit details the stories of seven homeless and formerly homeless San Franciscans who say that, contrary to The City’s supposed compassion for the unhoused, it regularly unleashes city workers to wage cold-hearted campaigns of displacement and harassment against poor people on the street.
Toro Castaño, a 50-year-old who was homeless from 2019-2021, said he endured regular harassment while living in a small homeless encampment near 16th and Market in the Castro. The lawsuit says he was regularly awakened by police officers or Department of Public Works crews at around 4:30 in the morning and ordered to leave the area or face arrest for “illegal camping.”
“This was a traumatic process,” said Castaño in a written declaration. “Often, crews would come wake us up at 4:30 a.m. They would spray large volumes of water and chemicals on or near us that would damage our property. One time, they sprayed an extremely pungent deodorizer on the street that lasted for days and was extremely unpleasant — with the goal of making it so we would not return.”
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Castaño said one SFPD officer regularly drove by the area while blasting threatening messages from a loudspeaker:
“Pack your bags — we are going to be cleaning the house.”
“We’re coming for you.”
“You’re going to be first on our list.”
Worst, Castaño said, was one day in August 2020 when crews from the Healthy Streets Operation Center swept his camp and declared most of his belongings to be a fire hazard. Castaño said he lost nearly $10,000 worth of property, including his tent, his boots, his Macbook Pro and his mother’s “priceless” wedding kimono.
Not once did city personnel offer him services or a place to go, said Castaño. In March 2021, he secured housing with help from a private organization and is no longer homeless. He also won a $9,000 settlement from The City for destroying his property.
“Another two to three years, I do think we’ll see some things turn around down here,” said C…
“The City’s destructive conduct is in clear violation of its own written policies, the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of due process and fair notice, and the corollary protections of the California Constitution,” says the complaint.
The lawsuit also names as a plaintiff Teresa Sandoval, an unhoused double amputee who says DPW took her prosthetics during a sweep. Molique Frank, another plaintiff, says he was harassed for years while homeless and “physically assaulted by both an SFPD officer and a DPW worker while pleading with them not to destroy his belongings.” Frank recently settled a $5,000 claim against San Francisco for destroying his property while he was homeless. He currently lives in a hotel, but he says he fears becoming homeless again after the city-funded hotel program ends.
Zal Shroff, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, says the lawsuit is designed to expose how city officials have quietly pursued a campaign of cruelty and persecution in lieu of offering more shelter or housing.
“I think the broader purpose of this lawsuit is to draw attention to The City’s failed affordable housing policies, and that it has chosen criminalization, which is the most expensive and least productive way to solve homelessness — because it actually doesn’t solve homelessness. It exacerbates it,” said Shroff in an interview.
Shroff said city officials like to pretend San Francisco offers shelter and services to everyone, but testimony from the unhoused plaintiffs indicates otherwise. This puts city officials at odds with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Martin v. Boise, which deemed the persecution of unhoused people with no other place to go as tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment.
In addition to demanding an immediate halt to these tactics, the lawsuit calls on San Francisco to spend $4.8 billion to build 6,624 new affordable housing units and to disband the Healthy Streets Operation Center, which it says has participated in the sweeps.
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“The City is acutely focused on expanding our temporary shelter and permanent housing options to alleviate our homelessness crisis,” said Jen Kwart, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s office. “Once we are served with the lawsuit, we will review the complaint and respond in court.”
The lawsuit, which was filed with support from the ACLU of Northern California and attorneys from Latham & Watkins, has been a long time coming. It should spark questions about how our leaders are addressing homelessness. This ongoing tragedy calls for compassion, empathy and housing. But callousness and cruelty toward the poor provide easy political shortcuts for some.
Around the state, politicians have begun to speak of homelessness as a problem that needs to be “cleaned up,” as if impoverished people are piles of trash to be swept off the street. In Oakland, the city has ramped up its campaign to shut down encampments.
In the Sacramento County and the city of Sacramento, local politics seem to have devolved into a contest to see who can propose the harshest law to ban the unhoused from public places. Local officials have banned homeless people from camping on the river and on sidewalks, and there’s a new proposal to ban them from the vicinity of schools. Los Angeles already passed such a ban in August.
“As the pandemic recedes, elected officials across deep-blue California are reacting to intense public pressure to erase the most visible signs of homelessness,” wrote Lara Korte and Jeremy B. White of Politico last week. “Democratic leaders who once would have been loath to forcibly remove people from sidewalks, parks and alongside highways are increasingly imposing camping bans, often while framing the policies as compassionate.”
Such flagrant displays of cruelty may temporarily placate public anger, but they won’t solve the crisis of homelessness.
It will continue to grow — and to outpace our ability to harass all of the people who find themselves sleeping in squalor on the street. After all, without housing, where are they supposed to go?
“San Francisco has more ordinances criminalizing homelessness than possibly anywhere in the United States,” said Shroff, citing a 2015 study by the Coalition on Homelessness. “It really is a crisis of economics. And it’s a crisis of affordable housing.”
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Gil Duran is editorial page editor
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Gil Duran is Editorial Page Editor of The Examiner. @gilduran76
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