Coalition on Homelessness v. City and County of San Francisco

Criminal Law Reform, Racial Justice
Location: Northern California
Status: Ongoing
Last Update: June 12, 2025

What's at Stake

Coalition on Homelessness is a challenge to the City and County of San Francisco鈥檚 efforts to criminalize homelessness through an array of unconstitutional practices, including confiscating and destroying the personal property of unhoused people without adequate notice or due process, and citing and arresting unhoused people for sleeping in public.

Summary

In September 2022, the 桃子视频of Northern California and the Lawyers鈥� Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area filed a on behalf of the Coalition on Homelessness and several individual plaintiffs against the City and County of San Francisco and Mayor London Breed, challenging their unconstitutional treatment of unhoused San Franciscans. The lawsuit sought to end the City鈥檚 practice of unlawfully seizing and destroying unhoused people鈥檚 personal property and citing and arresting unhoused people for sleeping in public, despite having no shelter to go to.

For years, San Francisco has responded to its homelessness crisis by pushing unhoused people out of sight鈥攄estroying their survival items and arresting and jailing them for unavoidable behavior like sleeping in public. These regressive mass incarceration-era policies do nothing to address the City鈥檚 affordable housing crisis, and only perpetuate homelessness.

In December 2022, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a in the鈥�, directing San Francisco to immediately halt its unconstitutional enforcement of laws that criminalize homelessness and to stop unlawfully seizing and destroying unhoused people鈥檚 survival gear and personal property. In granting the order, the Court also acknowledged that the City鈥檚 cruel policies have made it more difficult for people to exit homelessness. In January 2024, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this order.

In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit cities from punishing unhoused people for sleeping in public, even if they have nowhere else to go. That ruling prevented the plaintiffs from pursuing similar claims in this case, but it did not affect the plaintiffs鈥� remaining claims, which focus on the City's unlawful destruction of the personal property of unhoused persons. Those claims have survived several motions for dismissal and a motion for summary judgment by the City and are headed to trial during the summer of 2025.