Residents and business owners of San Francisco's troubled Tenderloin neighborhood have been cleared to move ahead with much of their renewed lawsuit accusing the city of contributing to the rampant crime, public illegal drug use and other nuisances within their community, and demanding the city take action to solve those problems.
On Oct. 15, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar agreed the plaintiffs now had done enough to back their legal claims against the city of San Francisco for allegedly helping to fuel the problems that have plagued the Tenderloin in the past five years.
"Plaintiffs argue that the City’s acts, such as the operation of a congregate shelter which allows residents to use and sell narcotics; operation of narcotic consumption sites in the Tenderloin; instruction of SFPD to drop off addicts at the center; distribution or facilitation of the distribution of drug paraphernalia to addicts in the Tenderloin; and street-based support for those that reject shelter and live on the sidewalk have actively placed and encouraged addicts and dealers to come to the Tenderloin which was a substantial factor in producing the harm," Tigar wrote in his ruling.
"Accepting Plaintiffs allegations as true, as it must, the Court cannot at this juncture conclude that it is implausible the City’s acts were 'more than [a] negligible or theoretical' cause of Plaintiffs’ harms."
The ruling comes about three months since Judge Tigar had initially tossed many of those accusations against the city. However, at the time, the judge also gave the plaintiffs an opportunity to amend their lawsuit to fix the shortcomings he had identified in their complaint.
The lawsuit landed in San Francisco federal court in March, when a group of Tenderloin residents and businesses filed suit. Plaintiffs include Tenderloin residents with disabilities and immigrants, as well as businesses such as the Phoenix Hotel and the operators of the Best Western Road Coach Inn.
The lawsuit accuses San Francisco city officials of establishing an unwritten policy since 2019 of allowing greater criminal activity within the Tenderloin to essentially corral crime and illegal drug dealing there and stem its spread into other, wealthier neighborhoods.
The lawsuit asserts this policy has made the Tenderloin a more difficult place to live and has left businesses struggling to survive.
The lawsuit notes that sidewalks and streets throughout the Tenderloin are packed not only with homeless people, but gang members and others selling and taking drugs of all kinds, including fentanyl and other highly addictive illegal drugs, while other criminal activity flourishes without fear of law enforcement.
The city, in response, argued it was criminals who created the nuisance, not the city, so the city cannot be sued over its policies to enforce or not enforce the laws within its borders.
In July, Tigar largely agreed with the city, nixing, for that moment, the claims related to the city's alleged Tenderloin containment policies.
In that ruling, the judge still allowed the plaintiffs to advance claims that the city violated disability access laws by allowing homeless encampments and drug markets to proliferate on city sidewalks, denying people with disabilities the ability to freely move about their own community.
The plaintiffs, however, returned to court with a revised complaint, leveling more specific allegations against the city.
In the new complaint, they particularly take aim at the city for partnering with left-wing activists to create a designated space for public drug use and for taking over a hotel to serve as a "housing first" homeless shelter that does nothing to steer homeless drug users to treatment, but rather allows rampant drug use to continue inside and around the shelter.
In his ruling, Tigar said specific accusations like these should allow the plaintiffs to move forward with most of their claims against the city.
The judge agreed that the plaintiffs can't press their claims that the city's policies and actions amounted to a "state-created danger."
But he said other elements of the complaint allow plaintiffs to get past the legal immunity that would otherwise allow the city to defeat their attempts to persuade the court to order the city to enforce the law in the Tenderloin. The judge said such an open-ended order would conflict with the law, as it would have required the court to place greater "legal and financial burdens on the City."
Now, the judge said the plaintiffs' more specific claims could give the judge the ability to order the city to take more specific actions to remedy the nuisance by essentially ending their support for policies and organizations that the plaintiffs say are making the Tenderloin's problems worse.
The judge has not yet ordered the city to take any specific actions in the Tenderloin.
Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys with the firms of Walkup Melodia Kelley & Schoenberger, of San Francisco, and Kline & Specter, of Philadelphia.
San Francisco is represented by the office of City Attorney David Chiu.