A group of residents and businesses who call San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood home cannot use an injunction entered amid the Covid pandemic to now force San Francisco city officials to take greater actions to address Tenderloin homeless encampments and the associated societal ills that plague the neighborhood, a federal judge has ruled.
On Oct. 30, U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar refused the motion to enforce an injunction entered against the city in 2020 amid a legal action brought at that time, accusing the city of doing too little to address the nuisances caused by rampant homelessness that the plaintiffs said hammered quality of life in the neighborhood and all but surrendered control of city sidewalks and other public spaces.
While recognizing the injunction could be read to force the city to take action, Tigar agreed with the city that the injunction was limited to the time of the declared public health emergency surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic.
U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar
| cand.uscourts.gov
Living conditions and public safety in the Tenderloin have been a point of growing conflict between those living and working in the neighborhood and San Francisco city government for years.
Residents of the neighborhood and those trying to run businesses there have repeatedly claimed the city has, at best, turned a blind eye to the problems plaguing the Tenderloin and a deaf ear to their cries for help.
Among other problems, the Tenderloin residents and merchants, and others with a stake in the neighborhood's condition, have called on city officials to take steps to clear the sidewalks and other public spaces of the tents pitched by perhaps hundreds of homeless individuals.
They have asserted these conditions become fertile ground for all manner of public health and safety problems, including public human urination and defecation, public drug use and selling and violent crime, while leaving some areas of the neighborhood all but impassable.
Since 2020, those concerns have served as the centerpieces of lawsuits brought in federal court, as Tenderloin residents and business owners seek court orders forcing the city to take action.
Most recently, Tigar has refused to dismiss a lawsuit brought this spring, in which residents and hotel owners accused the city of wrongly carrying out an unwritten policy under which they alleged the city had all but surrendered the Tenderloin to greater criminal activity and more homeless encampments in a bid to corral it within the neighborhood and prevent such activity from spreading elsewhere in the city.
However, that lawsuit came four years after other Tenderloin residents and business owners secured an injunction that appeared to force the city to take action against increasing homelessness in the neighborhood and to reclaim the sidewalks and public spaces.
The injunction was entered as part of a settlement reached in June 2020, about a month after the lawsuit was filed.
As part of that deal, "the city agreed to: 'make all reasonable efforts to achieve the shared goal of permanently reducing the number of tents, along with all other encamping materials and related personal property, [in the Tenderloin] to zero; 'discourage additional people from erecting tents in the neighborhood'; 'take action to prevent reencampment'; and 'employ enforcement measures for those who do not accept an offer of shelter or safe sleeping sites to prevent re-encampment.'”
About four years later, in March, the plaintiffs in that action returned to federal court, asserting the persistent presence of the Tenderloin's homeless encampments and the associated criminal activity demonstrated the city had failed to live up to its agreement.
In their motion, the plaintiffs asserted there are about 300 unused homeless shelter spaces available in San Francisco, yet the city has taken no action to push homeless individuals living illegally in tents on city sidewalks to take those shelter spots instead.
The plaintiffs noted the city, in the past, had pointed to court rulings that appeared to block enforcement of anti-camping rules as unconstitutional violations of homeless individual's rights under the Eighth Amendment's ban on so-called cruel and unusual punishments.
However, the plaintiffs noted that reasoning was flatly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in a recent decision, leaving no legal excuse for the city to refuse to enforce the anti-camping rules and reclaim the public ways in the Tenderloin.
"Plaintiffs have engaged in extensive discussion with the City to address this backsliding, but these discussions have been fruitless," the plaintiffs wrote in their March motion. "The City has failed to 'make all reasonable efforts' to 'reduce the number of tents' in the Tenderloin 'to zero' or 'to prevent re-encampment,' as required by the Stipulated Injunction."
In response to the renewed motion to force the city to take action, lawyers for the city government did not dispute that they are no longer barred from enforcing the camping rules.
Rather, the city argued it was no longer bound by the injunction at all, because they said the settlement was tied entirely to the pandemic. Once San Francisco Mayor London Breed officially declared an end to the Covid-related state of emergency in San Francisco in 2023, so, too, did she effectively declare an end to the settlement deal, the city asserted.
In his decision, Judge Tigar agreed. He said he believed the language of the settlement and its structure showed that the deal was tied to the emergency declaration.
He noted, for instance, that the deal included a section which explicitly noted that the city and the plaintiffs agreed to "work together to improve living conditions in the Tenderloin for the long term."
He said this shows the rest of the deal, which obligated specific action from the city, was only ever meant to apply during the Covid emergency period.
"Consistent with this stated purpose, nearly all of the provisions of the injunction state the City's obligations during the pandemic crisis," Tigar wrote.
"... Contrary to Plaintiffs' assertion, the City's continuing obligation to make reasonable efforts to reduce the number of tents to zero was not of indefinite duration."
He ruled the deal expired in June 2023, when Breed "terminated the COVID-19 emergency proclamation."
Plaintiffs were represented in the attempted enforcement action by attorneys Michael A. Kelly, Richard H. Schoenberger and Matthew D. Davis, of the firm of Walkup Melodia Kelly & Schoenberger, of San Francisco; Shanin Specter and Alex Van Dyke, of Kline & Specter, of Philadelphia; and John K. DiPaolo, general counsel at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.
UC Law San Francisco was also a named plaintiff in the action.
The attorneys from the Walkup Melodia and Kline & Specter firms are also representing plaintiffs in the separate legal action still pending against the city concerning nuisance conditions in the Tenderloin.
San Francisco is represented by attorneys from the office of City Attorney David Chiu.