Federal court vacates part of SF homeless-sweeps injunction

A federal court on Monday struck down part of an injunction barring San Francisco from clearing homeless encampments without offering alternative shelter.

It comes just over a week after the Supreme Court overturned a key ruling that its opponents said limited the use of encampment sweeps in western cities.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated part of District Judge Donna Ryu’s 2022 ruling following the high court’s 6-3 decision from late last month.

The Supreme Court overturned an earlier ruling that deemed that penalizing people under public-vagrancy laws when no alternative housing option could be made available violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

The legal questions at play — which centered on Grants Pass, an Oregon city of 40,000 people — resembled many of those in a 2022 lawsuit brought against San Francisco by the Coalition on Homelessness. The group also alleged that The City’s encampment sweeps violated the constitutional rights of the unhoused.

In December 2022, Ryu issued an injunction preventing San Francisco from sweeping encampments without first offering shelter, a requirement already mandated by city law.

Then in February, the case against San Francisco was paused while both sides awaited the Grants Pass ruling. The long wait to find out how that ruling would impact San Francisco ended Monday, with this decision from the 9th Circuit panel vacating the Eighth Amendment claims in Ryu’s injunction.

Meanwhile, though, the decision upheld a separate portion of the injunction, which requires city outreach workers to “bag and tag” the belongings of unhoused residents during encampment sweeps.

That portion of the injunction relied on Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizure by the government.

Mayor London Breed applauded the speedy decision, and said that her office is in talks with City Attorney David Chiu about how San Francisco might update its policies.

“San Francisco is a city that prioritizes compassion and we will continue to lead with services first in all of our outreach efforts but we cannot allow for people to refuse services and shelter when offered and available,” Breed's office said in a statement.

Breed gave some indication of what direction that policy shift might be headed toward in her statements that followed the Supreme Court ruling, saying at the time that the decision would allow The City “to do more to clean and clear our streets,” adding also that San Francisco could become progressively more harsh in penalizing people who do not accept services.

San Francisco already has laws on the books requiring city staff to offer shelter before clearing an encampment.

San Francisco officials have blamed the injunction for limiting its ability to manage encampments on city streets. However, according to city data, encampment sweeps actually increased slightly in the months following the December 2022 court order.

Responding to Monday's decision, lawyers behind the lawsuit against San Francisco pledged to continue their case.

“Criminalization of homelessness is a failed policy, and punishing people for being too poor to afford rent will only make homelessness in San Francisco worse,” said Nisha Kashyap with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area in a prepared statement. “The city must commit to increasing affordable housing and temporary shelter.”

While the Supreme Court’s decision has effectively put to rest legal questions related to the Eighth Amendment, Kashyap said that the lawsuit will continue to challenge The City’s practices related to the handling of homeless people’s property during encampment sweeps.

She noted the lawsuit also raised other questions that have not been resolved by the Grants Pass ruling, including whether or not The City makes adequate accommodations for people with disabilities during encampment sweeps, and whether or not the displacement of unhoused people puts their safety at greater risk.

The 9th Circuit is expected to return the case to the District Court in the coming weeks.