No excuses #3: SF perspective on Grant's Pass decision
Image by Wikimedia Commons
The suburb to the north's Grow SF Report on the impact of SCOTUS decision on the city most damaged by homelessness issues. Main point: No immediate change, as SF will still link encampment cleanups to shelter bed availability.
In practical terms, it won’t change anything about how San Francisco deals with homeless encampments. But if the ruling had gone the other way, San Francisco would have been blocked from clearing any encampments, so this is definitely a win for the City.
San Francisco already has the power to clear encampments, it just needs to offer the homeless people living there a shelter bed first (editor’s note: this was temporarily blocked due to a lawsuit brought by the Coalition on Homelessness, but that was already resolved in SF’s favor). Section 169(d) of the San Francisco Police Code states that “Prior to ordering a person to remove an Encampment or prior to removing the Encampment, the City officer or employee enforcing subsection (c) shall offer Housing or Shelter to all residents of the Encampment […] The City shall not enforce the prohibition of subsection (c) unless there is available Housing or Shelter for the person or persons residing in the Encampment.”
The Grants Pass ruling does not change our laws. San Francisco will still take the compassionate path of connecting the homeless with services before cleaning up an encampment. And encampments will remain until City Hall builds more shelters.
So if the City already has the authority to clear encampments and move people indoors, why is it not doing it? Yes, our shortage of shelter beds is a problem — we only have about 3,500 beds for 8,000+ homeless. But the real problem is that City Hall isn’t building more shelters.
Read the whole thing here.
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