San Francisco was cited multiple times in the opinions written by U.S. Supreme Court justices in a ruling issued Friday that will affect an ongoing lawsuit on homelessness involving The City and the ability of municipalities to address the problem in general.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, a case that effectively tested the constitutional limits cities and states face in punishing people for behaviors associated with homelessness, such as sleeping in public parks.
Gorsuch explicitly pointed to the experience documented by officials in San Francisco, which — like other cities struggling to curtail unsheltered homelessness — had filed briefs weighing in on the case prior to the court’s decision.
Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who wrote the minority opinion in the 6-3 ruling, also pointed to San Francisco as evidence of her counterparts’ misunderstanding of the case.
The Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision that found that Grants Pass — a city of about 40,000 people in Oregon — had violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment by punishing homeless people for sleeping outdoors.
Gorsuch was joined in the majority ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Sotomayor’s dissent was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
City Attorney David Chiu said he was not surprised to see San Francisco referenced in the decision.
“Every day, our city workers have been grappling with many complicated policy questions, and in this case the justices grappled with those same complicated questions,” Chiu told The Examiner.
The daily experiences of our city outreach workers, he said, “illustrates why San Francisco’s position has been that courts are not equipped to police every interaction” between The City and its homeless population.
San Francisco had asked the Supreme Court to strike a balance through a friend-of-the-court brief in which The City encouraged the justices to take up the case, but did not take a side. City leaders expressed concern that what Grants Pass sought would undermine the Constitution, but also that existing legal precedent was inscrutable and limiting.
Though they lauded the ruling, city leaders went to great lengths to distance San Francisco from Grants Pass, which at the time the lawsuit was filed had one homeless shelter that required its guests to participate in religious services.
Chiu and Mayor London Breed stressed that The City will continue to “lead with services,” even as The City is poised to use the ruling as a green light to begin more aggressively clearing encampments.
“We are setting up the appropriate capacity so that what we are offering people, we can get them off the streets,” Breed told reporters Friday. “This is about people who are refusing.”
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The City is facing its own legal challenge over the way it has addressed homelessness. A lawsuit spearheaded by the Coalition on Homelessness alleges San Francisco has violated the Constitution by clearing homeless encampments and disposing of homeless people’s property.
The advocacy group’s argument was based in part on Martin v. Boise, the same 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case that underlies the arguments addressed in the Grants Pass decision issued Friday by the Supreme Court.
Gorsuch noted that The City is operating under the terms of a temporary injunction that sets parameters on its ability to clear encampments from city streets.
“That ‘misapplication of this Court’s Eighth Amendment precedents,’ the Mayor tells us, has ‘severely constrained San Francisco’s ability to address the homelessness crisis,’” he wrote.
But Sotomayor hinted that Gorsuch was misinterpreting what San Francisco — and other cities that filed briefs in the case — actually sought.
"In so doing, the majority chooses to see only what it wants,” Sotomayor wrote. “Many of those stakeholders support the narrow rule in Martin.”
City leaders and political candidates have sought to walk a fine line in addressing homelessness, attempting to remain compassionate while keeping streets clear of encampments.
In a statement Friday, Mayor London Breed said the ruling will “help cities like San Francisco manage our public spaces more effectively and efficiently.”
“San Francisco has made significant investments in shelter and housing, and we will continue to lead with offers of services from our hard-working City employees,” Breed said. “But too often these offers are rejected, and we need to be able to enforce our laws, especially to prevent long-term encampments.”
San Francisco has long been vexed by unsheltered homelessness, with thousands of people still sleeping on its streets every night, but it has seen progress in recent years.
Two metrics often cited by city leaders — a biennial federally mandated census of the homeless population, and a quarterly count of tent encampments — have signaled a modest decline in unsheltered homelessness.
The biennial census, called the Point-in-Time Count, found 4,355 unsheltered in 2024, a 16% decrease from the 2019 survey.
The quarterly assessment tallied 360 tents and structures in April, a decline of 41% from the 609 recorded in July 2023.
