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It was raining in San Francisco on Wednesday morning when volunteer Shanna Orona arrived at a homeless encampment on Erie Street surrounded by police vehicles.

As rain fell — the approach of the powerful “atmospheric river” that would slam California cities with heavy winds and flooding — city workers, including police and fire department personnel, cleared out the encampment so they could power-wash the street, Orona alleged in a court document.

The individuals at the encampment left without receiving “concrete” offers of shelter after a fire department commander threatened that police would arrive to conduct warrant checks and other city workers would throw away people’s belongings, said Orona, who volunteers with the Coalition on Homelessness, a San Francisco nonprofit. When one person from the encampment responded to the fire department commander in Spanish, the commander allegedly turned away, saying, “I don’t speak Mexican.”

The Jan. 4 sweep Orona witnessed was not only inhumane but also violated the orders of a California district court, attorneys representing the Coalition on Homelessness argued in court documents filed Thursday.

On Dec 23, the Coalition on Homelessness won a preliminary injunction in an ongoing court case against the city of San Francisco, successfully arguing that it was unconstitutional for the city to enforce certain laws penalizing unhoused individuals while the city lacks sufficient shelter space to house them. The court order forbids the city from enforcing various laws prohibiting “involuntarily homeless individuals” from sitting, lying or sleeping on public property.

But San Francisco isn’t listening, the coalition alleged last week.

The group filed statements from several staff members and volunteers, including Orona, who alleged that the city violated the injunction by conducting several sweeps of homeless encampments in late December and early January, even as the devastating storm neared.

“I was very taken back,” Orona told The Washington Post. “I was like, the city has a lot of nerves.”

A spokesperson for the city attorney’s office told The Post in a statement that the activities described by the coalition did not violate the injunction.

“The order prohibits the City from enforcing six specific laws to prevent involuntarily homeless individuals from sitting, lying, or sleeping on public property,” the city attorney’s office said in the statement. “The order does not prohibit the City from maintaining safe and healthy streets for all. The City may continue to ensure sidewalks are not obstructed, but are usable for everyone. And, the City may still ask unhoused people to move temporarily for cleaning activities.”

In court filings, attorneys for the coalition contested that characterization, alleging that individuals were still threatened with the confiscation of tents and other personal belongings, which the injunction forbids, and that city workers’ behavior — threatening warrant checks and “forcibly waking people up, standing over them, and yelling at them to move” — still constituted an enforcement threat. They also questioned why the city moved unhoused residents to power-wash a street during a storm.

The timing of the newest wave of sweeps, coming shortly after the injunction was issued and as a powerful storm prepared to batter the city, came as a shock to the coalition, executive director Jennifer Friedenbach told The Post.

“My experience is that the city kind of backs off on these things during bad weather,” Friedenbach said. “It was a bit shocking to see them continue these operations in the pouring down rain.”

John Do, an attorney representing the coalition, echoed Friedenbach’s concerns.

“Your survival gear, your personal belongings shouldn’t be taken by the city and thrown away,” Do said. “And certainly not in an atmospheric river. That is truly inhumane and cruel.”

As of Monday, 11.16 inches of rain had fallen on San Francisco in a 13-day stretch, the wettest spell since 1871. The city remains on flood watch, and residents have been advised to stay home.

Additional storms have been forecast in the coming week. In response to the weather, San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing opened four temporary shelters accepting walk-up referrals that will run until Jan. 15.

Strongest atmospheric river yet battering California with damaging floods

The allegations surrounding the pre-storm sweeps are the latest development in a months-long court case challenging San Francisco’s handling of a persistent homelessness crisis exacerbated by the pandemic. In September, the Coalition on Homelessness and seven unhoused individuals sued the city and county of San Francisco, Mayor London Breed and several city departments to stop the city from enforcing several laws that criminalize sitting, sleeping or lying on public property.

The coalition argued in a 100-page complaint that because San Francisco lacks enough shelter space to house the majority of the city’s unhoused population, sweeping encampments and displacing individuals under threat of arrest amounts to cruel and unusual punishment that violates people’s constitutional rights. The nonprofit also alleged that city workers routinely violated a “bag and tag” policy that is supposed to allow displaced individuals to retrieve belongings seized during encampment sweeps, saying workers repeatedly dispose of them instead.

In the complaint, Toro Castaño, a plaintiff with the coalition, called the city’s sweeps a “dehumanizing disruption to the small ounce of stability I was trying to build for myself during one of the hardest times of my life.”

As issued, the preliminary injunction remains effective for the duration of the case, as long as there are more homeless individuals in San Francisco than shelter beds available. San Francisco had a total capacity of 5,080 shelter beds in 2022, including around 2,000 temporary beds scheduled to be phased out by the end of that year, according to city statistics cited by the coalition, while 7,754 people were counted in the most recent survey of the city’s unhoused population.

The city filed a motion for clarification on the injunction last week, arguing that the restrictions within are unreasonable and contradicting an injunction in a separate case on homelessness that mandated the city remove unhoused individuals who’d refused offers of shelter in the city’s Tenderloin district.

“It defies logic to require that San Francisco have shelter for all persons experiencing homelessness before San Francisco may enforce these laws against any one person, even after that individual has refused adequate shelter,” the city attorney’s office told The Post. According to the city, providing the required shelter beds and services would take several years and cost an additional $1.45 billion.

In their recent filings, attorneys for the coalition asked the court to mandate the city provide additional information about sweeps and appoint a special master to monitor the city’s compliance with the preliminary injunction. The lawsuit broadly asks for the city to submit to greater oversight over sweeps and for the court to establish a similar, permanent injunction until all of San Francisco’s unhoused residents have access to shelter.

A hearing is scheduled for Thursday, when a judge may address both the coalition’s allegations and the city’s motion for clarification.

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SAN JOSE (KPIX 5) – The Little Italy neighborhood of San Jose is the newest community to face problems due to the combination of COVID and nearby homeless camps.

“People see that and then turn around and drive back in their car. We don’t want that, ”says Pino Spatola, the owner of the Paisano restaurant.

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Spatola says aggressive people living in the camps near his restaurant in Paisano have also threatened his workers.

“Outside they started chasing one of my employees. They started pounding on their car, ”Spatola said.

The restaurant is one of the pillars of San Jose’s Little Italy, a two-block community of historic Italian-American houses and shops near the SAP Center. It is also adjacent to the Guadalupe River Park, which has many camps and a large population who live on the river banks.

Squatters have set fire to empty houses in the neighborhood, and neighbors say there are always break-ins and thefts.

It is too much for an Italian language school for children. The owner posted a message on Facebook detailing the combination
of COVID and the homeless problem is “a nightmare”.

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The school is now permanently closed.

“A safe environment is very important to the school,” said Joshua Devincenzi, president of Little Italy San Jose. “We are of course sad because they were our first shop here in Little Italy.”

He said the loss of the neighborhood school and coffeehouse were recent setbacks, but the community is still making headway.

The police patrols have been strengthened, a local museum is being built and Google is helping with the move of The Poor House Bistro
the free space next to Henry’s Hi Life Restaurant.

“We are not yet finished as a district. We’re still here, we’re still open for business, ”said Devincenzi.

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“My business is doing very well,” said Mr. Spatola, who wants to stay in the neighborhood and help Little Italy grow.

The post COVID, Homeless Encampments Are Last Straws For College In San Jose’s Little Italy Neighborhood – CBS San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

More than three years and a pandemic after San Francisco created a new organization to coordinate the city’s response to homelessness, critics say the program’s promise remains largely unfulfilled.

Granted, in a way it was successful. The number of citywide registered tents fell 65% between April 2020 and April 2021, according to data from the Mayor’s London Breed office.

Tents can be cleared, but that doesn’t mean that the people who live in them will end up being housed.

When a camp is removed, residents have a choice: move or take up accommodation.

Some try a variety of urban services for a short time while others prefer to stay on the street. The reality, however, is that many San Francisco residents who are homeless find themselves on a revolving door between outreach programs and street life.

When the Healthy Streets Operations Center was founded in 2018, it was cited as the best way to solve some of these challenges.

Police officers are part of the teams that are dispatched to the scene, accompanied by medical professionals, sales representatives and street cleaning teams. Together they should offer an optimized response to tent sites, connect residents with services, better care for the most vulnerable and finally move tents off the street to create a clean passage.

‘Disbanded’ but not accommodated

When the HSOC clears a warehouse, the situation is said to be “resolved”. What happens to many people in these tents remains decidedly unexplained.

HSOC teams met 5,621 people living in tents between June 2020 and October 2021.

Even those who took protection often returned to the streets at some point.

According to Emergency Management, the teams encountered 747 people from the same period who were using tents for purposes other than living, even though they already had city-provided accommodation. These individuals were told to remove their structure and return to the residential alternative provided.

In another example, HSOC placed 650 clients in emergency shelters in 2019, but 619 of those people returned to the streets afterwards, according to documents received from the examiner. People affected by homelessness told social workers that they felt traumatized and distrusted service providers.

HSOC critics say these results show that the initiative does not address the root causes of extreme poverty and homelessness. Rather, they say it makes the homeless population – and the reality of their conditions – less visible to the public.

“The goal has always been to remove tents, and that has always been the point, a concerted and cross-departmental effort to remove tents,” said Jennifer Friedenbach of the local advocacy group, Coalition on Homelessness. “We had a problem with the concept. It should be about freeing people from homelessness, regardless of whether they have a tent or not. “

For those who do not go to temporary accommodation from a camp, the situation can be dire.

According to Emergency Management, a staggering 2,318 people encountered by HSOC teams in camps were “unwilling to accept services,” a premise questioned by lawyers and academics who have studied homeless care challenges in other cities.

Stay on the road

Skeptics of this logic say reticence is common among many who live on the streets – often for good reason.

Many people affected by homelessness have had negative experiences in emergency shelters, such as the theft of their belongings or fear that they lack privacy. Many are afraid of having to give up certain belongings or abandon a long-term partner or, after years of failure, they simply lack confidence in the system.

California Highway Patrol officials watched Caltrans workers remove barricades from a homeless campground that residents were about to evacuate in a parking lot under Interstate 80 in May. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)
A homeless man tore down a tent during an evacuation operation in May. Many homeless people continue to live on the streets after the forced relocation. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

Sometimes they just find it easier to stay on the road. Research by the journal Qualitative Social Work calls this a “socially rational decision in which individuals weigh the costs and benefits of participating in certain services based on their previous experience and personal situations”.

HSOC critics also claim that when a team is sent to a camp, the city does not always have enough accommodation available for all residents. The coalition’s latest report claims that the search will continue anyway as people are removed, and then those who remain will be classified as draft evaders.

The HSOC vehemently denies this claim, saying that teams will suspend the operation until beds are open when beds are not available.

The mixing

Whatever the reason, nearly half of the people The City encountered during the clearance process over a 16-month period were not connected to services. You were asked to move. These people’s lives become a tragic street shuffle, moving from block to block to find peace between searches.

“There is the idea that The City is a leader in services, and they are not,” said Friendenbach. “They are leaders in cleaning.”

Campsites are often made inhospitable to future residents once the city has done its job. The HSOC calls these efforts “prevention of re-storage”.

Last year the east side of Octavia Street in the Hayes Valley was the location of a large group of tents. On a few days in July, these tents were cleared and temporary guard rails were put up. Near Safeway on Market and Church streets, signs on a small concrete island remind people that camping is forbidden.

“For unoccupied parishioners, this just continues the cycle of The City being pushed around and their belongings trashed or destroyed,” the Coalition on Homelessness report reads.

The city recognizes that the tandem goal of creating clean and safe roads while providing a dignified and humane way out of poverty for the people they call home is a difficult task.

“We all want the same thing: to help people escape the crisis they are experiencing on the streets while ensuring that our public spaces are safe and accessible,” the emergency management said in a statement. “San Francisco knows there is room for improvement and disagreement about how to address these challenges.”

All of this begs the obvious question: does this have to be the case?

The right way

Many say no. Proponents point to the evacuation of a large camp on Fifth and King Streets in 2012 as evidence of an alternative way to keep public spaces clean while maintaining safety and dignity for the camp’s residents.

The city spent weeks engaging with residents, securing a church to move to temporarily, renting a storage container for belongings, and forging a path to supporting housing.

Bevan Dufty, the homeless tsar at the time, called the venture a “masterclass” of what to do – and what not to do – to strengthen the city’s struggle to better serve the homeless population.

“I learned basic and basic things about what wasn’t working in the shelter system,” he said. “A male and female couple won’t want to split up in different shelters, and the veteran who inherited two pit bulls from a friend who overdosed and died isn’t going to give up his dogs to take a shelter bed. “

Dufty later ran the first navigation center on 16th and Mission Streets, a model he thought was a direct reference to that experience. These facilities offer extensive all-round services and few barriers to entry.

However, this has yet to prove to be a panacea, especially during the pandemic when meeting places were forced to operate at reduced capacity.

The hotel option

Shelter-in-place hotels, most of which had been reimbursed by the federal government by the end of this year, were supposed to bear part of this burden and offer additional accommodation.

For a while they did so with great success and, according to Emergency Management, housed around 3,700 residents during the pandemic. That number fell to 1,271 when The City began shutting down the on-site accommodation program.

“While the SIPs have been an excellent emergency option, we must continue to focus on long-term solutions such as problem solving and permanent supportive housing,” said a statement from the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

The department believes the decision to close the temporary hotels is a long-term investment. Breed is committed to adding 6,000 shelters and permanent supportive shelters over a two-year period.

Others say it shows the city’s reluctance to take bold action.

“From the moment the program started, the greatest fear was, ‘What will we do when we run out of rooms?’ It should have said, ‘Let’s have a great influence and make it impossible for us that the federal and state governments don’t give us money for it,’ ”said Dufty. “It just seemed tepid.”

According to the logic of the city, its ability to reduce the number of tents across the city and invest heavily in more housing and permanent supportive housing units shows that the efforts of the HSOC and the broader approach it advocates are effective.

That thesis will be put to the test in January 2022 when a homeless census will be conducted in San Francisco for the first time since the pandemic. It remains to be seen whether this strategy has really resulted in an exit from homelessness or whether it has forced people living on the streets and in camps to shuffle between less and less noticeable places across the city.

cgraf@sfexaminer.com

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SAN JOSE (BCN) – The San Jose City Council decided this week to immediately resume management and control of pre-pandemic homeless camps and to investigate the idea of ​​sanctioned camps.

In essence, the pre-pandemic pandemic resumption of warehouse management vote gives the city the green light to clear or “sweep” warehouses and move recreational vehicles that are or are in public safety at risk Located near schools, daycare centers, or other places where children are taken care of.

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It also means the city has voted against guidelines from the federal agencies for Disease Control and Prevention in Camps, which recommend stopping the evacuation camps during the pandemic, as it could result in individuals losing contact with service providers or the virus spread.

However, Mayor Sam Liccardo recently wrote in a memo that the city had taken CDC guidelines “far too literally”.

“After a long push, we have tempered our strict adherence to the Public Health Guidelines to Clarify Public Rights of Way, but not enough to address many of our residents’ other fundamental public safety concerns,” Liccardo wrote. “I urge you to do so immediately.”

As of October 2020, the city has swept five warehouses: two cleared for renovation work on Coyote Creek Trail, one cleared to make way for the Felipe Bridge Housing site, and two others said RVs have right of way according to public information a memo from Assistant Director of Public Works Jon Cicirelli.

The vote passed by the city council also recommended that the city find alternative locations for unhoused people to be swept up before being removed from their camp – something the city often failed to do in clearing camps even during the pandemic.

As a result, many residents who have been forcibly removed from their camps eventually return, sometimes a few days after the search.

For this reason, Councilor Raul Peralez recommended that the city explore and set up sanctioned camps – public spaces that are partitioned off to allow legally uninhabited people to live, where services such as case management and health care are provided.

“I struggle to support any movement that does not contain an alternative location or alternative locations to which we should redirect people,” said Peralez, who was the only dissenting voice on the resumption of the camp sweepers.

He said he was in favor of resuming camp visits, especially if they pose a threat to public safety, but couldn’t help a return to the status quo getting out and shuffling people from place to place. “

“This is the opportunity to do something different … and I want to take advantage of that before we just go back,” said Peralez.

The proposal to investigate the feasibility, costs and details of sanctioned camps had only two votes against – Councilors Dev Davis and Maya Esparza – but still did not receive strong support from the Council. Some councilors who voted in favor were very reluctant to do so.

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Liccardo, who voted in favor, said he would much rather invest in finding long-term living space for people and asked staff to investigate the idea of ​​sanctioned camps as a “low-touch effort”.

“I know what it costs in San Francisco – it’s over $ 60,000 a room for one person in a sanctioned warehouse, which is way too much money to spend on people sleeping outside,” Liccardo said during the Meeting. “We should spend this money to accommodate people.”

Councilors David Cohen and Pam Foley repeated this sentiment in a memo, even though they had also voted for it.

However, other council members like Matt Mahan were more likely to support sanctioned camps, saying they would be willing to find an area in their district to do so should the council decide to go in that direction.

Shaunn Cartwright, an attorney for Santa Clara County’s unhoused population, said the mayor’s reluctance to support sanctioned camps was fair, but claimed that sanctioned camps should be set up to prevent homeless residents from being constantly evicted.

“It’s stressful for people to be moving all the time,” said Cartwright. “It’s a term called relocation stress syndrome where people actually die from the stress of moving around so often that happens a lot to our homeless community.”

Cartwright also noted that sweeps weren’t an effective strategy for clearing camps anyway, as many people return to the exact same place.

“It’s their home, what do you expect from them if you don’t give them another option,” she said. “I guarantee if you offered accommodation, 99 percent of people would take the opportunity, but they don’t have many options.”

Many councilors acknowledged that sweeps were not the best way to tackle homelessness, but noted that it is sometimes essential.

This is especially true in areas where camps are right next to school grounds or RV parks where fires are started and threaten nearby communities, Esparza said.

During the discussion on homelessness, the city council instructed city officials to raise additional funds for the expansion of temporary and temporary housing.

Council members also instructed staff to expand the SOAR program, a road service in which psychiatric clinicians and drug and alcohol abuse counselors provide services to unhodged residents and link them to interim or temporary accommodation, to large camps.

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