A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
Time was running out for a pair of families who were faced with being kicked out of the St. Joseph’s Family Shelter in San Francisco when their request for an extended stay was denied.
Those unhoused families—one, a Honduran couple with two children, and the other, a Peruvian single mother with one—were informed last week by the Mission District shelter that they must leave by 5 p.m. on March 10, or the shelter will call the police on them.
35 years ago in 1989: San Francisco was in its first decade of mass homelessness since the Depression era.
The City opened emergency congregate shelters a few years earlier, but it would later turn away already homeless people to accommodate housed people displaced by the Loma Prieta earthquake.
That same year, Street Sheet printed its first issue. The newsletter—originally an internal memo for members of the advocacy organization Coalition on Homelessness—was printed on 8½” x 11” paper,
The 2024 election is likely to be recorded in history as the year of the billionaires. Their money has influenced this year’s ballot from presidential contests to state and local races.
But even people with ten-figure net worth didn’t get everything they wanted.
Daniel Lurie prevailed in San Francisco’s mayoral race. Lurie is an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, and spent over $8 million in his largely self-financed campaign.
San Francisco elected Daniel Lurie mayor. On January 3, 2025, he will assume office and inherit a homelessness crisis that has long bedeviled previous administrations.
The City’s approach to homelessness was a key issue of Lurie’s campaign—as well as those of his opponents. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling on Grants Pass v. Johnson, incumbent Mayor London Breed called for a “get tough” approach—or get even tougher,
The board that monitors the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) will draft a statement demanding that the City of San Francisco stop illegally seizing unhoused people’s property and dwellings.
On September 5, the Homelessness Oversight Commission agreed to come up with such a resolution by their next meeting in October to present to officials at multiple City agencies. These departments include those that comprise the Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC) including the Homelessness,
Arresting and ticketing people for sleeping outdoors, even when no shelter is available, is not unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 28.
In doing so, the court’s conservative majority overturned previous decisions maintaining that Martin v. Boise, a case that removed such criminal penalties for acts of homelessness in the absence of shelter and protected unhoused people’s constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment.
So does that mean the arguments made by the Coalition on Homelessness and seven unhoused plaintiffs in their lawsuit against the City and County of San Francisco are gone,
A coalition of current and former San Francisco officials and civic organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in advance of a hearing on whether cities could penalize existing while homeless even when no shelter is available. Members of the coalition and their counsel, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, announced the filing in a press conference on Zoom.
Separately,
Proposition F, the measure that requires welfare recipients to be referred to drug screening if suspected of drug use, was approved by 58% of San Francisco voters in the March 5 primary election.
Prop. F passed with less than half of the City’s registered voters casting a ballot, and did so despite opposition from various political and advocacy organizations, medical providers, media outlets and labor unions.
Two days after the election,
The Coalition on Homelessness’s lawsuit may be put on hold after the City of San Francisco filed a motion to pause the ongoing case. The City Attorney’s office announced its request to the federal district court for a stay days after the U.S. Supreme Court said on January 12 it will review an Oregon case, which has close parallels to the homeless advocacy organization’s ongoing lawsuit.
The Supreme Court will decide whether it should be illegal to arrest and cite unhoused people for unauthorized lodging without offering immediate available shelter.
San Francisco’s response to unsheltered homelessness has long been on the radar of local and national media, and it’s pinging more frequently, partly because of a lawsuit that the Coalition on Homelessness has filed against the City.
Last year, a federal judge ruled that the City can not arrest or issue citations to people in homeless encampments without a real and specific offer of shelter while the case is in litigation.
