How Supreme Court homelessness ruling impacts San Francisco

Legal experts said the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on Friday that gives cities across the country the green light to conduct homeless-encampments sweeps could have wide-ranging implications in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, city leaders celebrated the decision, but they were largely coy when describing how the decision could change their approach to removing people experiencing homelessness off the streets.

By a 6-3 vote, the high court on Friday overturned a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Grants Pass — an Oregon city of 40,000 people — violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment by penalizing people who sleep in certain public places such as parks and alleys.

San Francisco leaders had been eagerly awaiting the decision for months amid its ongoing efforts to address and legal battles over its homelessness crisis.

In September 2022, the Coalition on Homelessness filed a lawsuit alleging that San Francisco violated the U.S. Constitution by clearing homeless encampments and homeless people’s property. The case was paused in February while both sides awaited the Grants Pass ruling.

Attorneys representing the Coalition on Homelessness have maintained that, no matter what the outcome of the Grants Pass case, its own would move forward because it poses legal questions that go beyond the scope of the Eighth Amendment.

“Today’s shameful decision guts a key civil rights protection for unhoused people, but it will not derail our lawsuit against San Francisco, which has policies and an ordinance requiring the city to offer shelter before clearing encampments,” said John Do, senior attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, in a statement.

In the short term, it’s unclear how the decision will affect The City’s efforts to clear homeless encampments.

The terms of the injunction imposed by U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu in December 2022 effectively require The City to abide by its own laws, which require offers of shelter before clearing people from encampments, as well as “bagging and tagging” their belongings so they can be recovered at a later date.

Mayor London Breed told reporters Friday that The City is already in the process of developing new policies in response to the decision, though she later clarified that The City does not need to adopt a new law in order to clear encampments. But, she said, The City could become progressively more harsh in penalizing people who do not accept services.

“With this opportunity, we’ll be able to do more to clean and clear our streets, especially with those who are refusing shelter and services from The City,” Breed said.

Breed said her administration has “what we want to do ready to go,” but must first train city employees in implementing it.

Breed said the decision would allow The City to “do a lot more than we have in the past, and basically enforce our laws,” including the sit-lie law that prohibits sitting or lying on city streets. (Breed announced last September that The City could and would enforce the law, even while under the injunction that set limits on its enforcement of laws against homeless people.)

The new ruling could affect matters on the ground, however, such as how The City documents its offers of shelter and how many times it must do so before escalating enforcement.

“We’re offering help, we’re offering services, but we also have a lot of restrictions with the laws, and I think this decision has really provided us with clarity that we will use in order to be a lot more aggressive with people who are choosing to stay on the streets of San Francisco,” Breed said.

The Supreme Court’s verdict overturned Martin v. Boise , a 9th Circuit decision that prevented cities from restricting public camping unless the person has “access to adequate temporary shelter.” That precedent was at the heart of Ryu’s injunction, which forced The City to make determinations such as whether individuals were voluntarily or involuntarily homeless .

University of San Francisco law professor Andrew Lah said Friday’s decision significantly minimizes the importance of those determinations.

“How many people are homeless on a night versus how many shelter beds you have available? That’s not at issue anymore,” he said. “It doesn’t fully resolve questions about what local jurisdiction can do ... But it removes that large barrier, which was what Judge Ryu relied on with Martin.”

Though The City quickly celebrated the decision as a victory, its attorneys are still working to determine how it affects ongoing litigation here.

“It’s certainly going to take some time to sort out,” City Attorney David Chiu told The Examiner.

Chiu said the City Attorney’s Office will advise the government on the path forward as it reconsiders policies in addressing homelessness on the ground.

In the courtroom, Chiu said The City will make sure “the status of our litigation catches up with” the precedent established by Friday’s ruling.

In the meantime, he said The City will continue with a “compassionate, services-first approach” to addressing unsheltered homelessness.

UC Berkeley law professor Jeffrey Selbin stressed that the majority opinion made clear cities don’t have to use a punitive approach in favor of housing-first policies to address homelessness.

But he said the fact that San Francisco leaders pushed for the Supreme Court to make this ruling indicates that they think “criminalization was actually a tool that they needed.”

Selbin said the decision removes a “bare minimum floor of constitutional protection for homeless people to sleep somewhere if there was no shelter available.”

He added it’s not clear how things will play out on the ground level in The City.

“But I do think again, for politicians who who’ve been itching to do more on this issue — by which I mean clearing and criminalizing encampments — it’s gonna be a green light,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me that people take this opportunity to crack down.”