Late yesterday, the Coalition on Homelessness and seven individual plaintiffs filed suit against the City and County of San Francisco and Mayor London Breed for their efforts to criminalize homelessness through an array of brutal policing practices that violate the constitutional rights of unhoused San Franciscans. The plaintiffs are also seeking a preliminary injunction to stop these practices on an emergency basis. Plaintiffs are represented by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, as well as the global law firm Latham & Watkins LLP.

For years, San Francisco has claimed that it is taking steps to address the City’s homelessness crisis. But in fact, the City is forcing unhoused people out of sight—destroying their survival belongings and citing and arresting them for sleeping in public when they have no shelter to go to. San Francisco has more laws penalizing homelessness than any other place in California, and possibly America. These regressive mass incarceration era policies only perpetuate San Francisco’s homelessness crisis and scapegoat unhoused people for the City’s egregious failure to support affordable housing for San Francisco residents.

San Francisco lacks—and has always lacked—adequate affordable housing and shelter for thousands of unhoused San Franciscans. San Francisco’s threats, citations, arrests, and removal of unhoused residents from public spaces therefore violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The City is also engaged in a practice of illegally seizing and destroying the personal belongings of unhoused residents in violation of the Fourth Amendment. These practices help San Francisco claim that it is solving the homelessness crisis—when it has actually just swept it under the rug.

San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is one of unaffordability. When longstanding residents can no longer afford to stay in their homes, they are forced out onto the street. San Francisco’s politicians have understood this for years, but they have failed to act. Instead, the City has consistently relied on tough-on-crime policies to respond to homelessness instead of addressing the root cause of the problem: the clear lack of permanent affordable housing.

This is immoral, cruel, costly, and ultimately counterproductive—not to mention unconstitutional. The City knows this because it constantly violates its own policies that purport to require a humane, services-first approach to the homelessness crisis. The reality is that unhoused San Franciscans wake up to find their survival belongings seized and destroyed as they face criminal penalties for sleeping outside even though the city has little to nothing to offer San Francisco’s unhoused residents in terms of shelter, housing, and services. This lawsuit combines massive amounts of public data with eyewitness accounts to expose the City’s unlawful conduct, which makes it almost impossible for the thousands of affected San Franciscans to exit homelessness.

Those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are disproportionately people of color due to decades of discrimination in housing, education, healthcare and the criminal justice system. Today, for example, Black people comprise 6% of San Francisco’s general population but make up 37% of the City’s unhoused population. Black renters in San Francisco still face some of the worst housing discrimination anywhere in the country. That targeted exclusion has only exacerbated the homelessness crisis for people of color.

San Franciscans deserve real solutions to homelessness. That starts and ends with the City actually investing in affordable housing. This lawsuit seeks to hold the City to account for its unconstitutional attack on unhoused San Franciscans. The City cannot punish unhoused people for a housing crisis it created.

Client statements:

Plaintiff Nathaniel Vaughn, a life-long San Franciscan who recently became unhoused, reflects: “We do not deserve to be treated like criminals and to have our belongings thrown in the trash when we are at our most vulnerable.”

Plaintiff Toro Castaño notes the impact this has on unhoused people: “The City’s sweeps [are] a dehumanizing disruption to the small ounce of stability that I was trying to build for myself during one of the hardest times of my life.”

Plaintiff Sarah Cronk says the same: “We are just trying to scrape by and build as much of a life for ourselves as possible—with both dignity and safety. The City makes that impossible for us.”

Jennifer Friedenbach, Executive Director of the Coalition on Homelessness: “San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is its affordable housing crisis. Instead of investing in permanent affordable housing, the city has spent millions of dollars to rid our neighborhoods of visible signs of homelessness. Punitive approaches make homelessness worse, as it only makes it harder for people to access already limited services, find employment and secure stable housing.”

Attorney statements:

“The City is using unhoused residents as the scapegoats for a crisis of economic and racial justice that it helped to create. San Francisco should fight to end homelessness. But the only real solution to San Francisco’s homelessness crisis is housing. Instead of solving homelessness, the City has invested in carceral policies that make the crisis worse. That’s not only unconstitutional, it’s also just bad policy. We should expect better far better from our political leaders.” – Zal Shroff, Senior Staff Attorney, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the Bay Area

“Racism is embedded in the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco as people of color are disproportionately targeted by anti-homeless ordinances. The current system is complaint-driven, allowing housed residents to dictate traumatizing enforcement against unhoused people who attempt to live in whiter, gentrifying neighborhoods. This suggests that the City is doing more to appear wealthy homeowners than it is to support the health and wellbeing of the most vulnerable with real opportunities out of homelessness. Through the lawsuit, we aim to lay bare the City’s illusory shelter options and end the racist results that criminalization produces.” – John Do, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California

The post Metropolis of San Francisco & Mayor London Breed Sued for Harassing Unhoused San Franciscans, Violating Civil Rights to Cowl Up the Metropolis’s Reasonably priced Housing Failures appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Candis Dorsch, a real estate broker in Bozeman, Mt., has spent years selling vacation homes to Bay Area residents at a healthy clip. But a few months into the pandemic, she said, demand from the Bay exploded.

“I have a vacation rental [in Bozeman],” Dorsch told The Chronicle. “It became slam-booked for the entire summer. Buyers were making phone calls, buyers were buying properties, sight unseen, to get out of the Bay Area. It really happened in the very beginning, and never really stopped.”

The data backs up Dorsch’s observations. In 2020 and 2021, moves from San Francisco to Montana increased by 140% compared to the previous two years — making Montana the state that saw the biggest increase in new San Franciscans during the pandemic.

Overall moves from the Bay Area increased by 51% during that time as well, according to data on migration patterns from the California Policy Lab, a research group based out of the University of California.

The data tracks movements of all Californian adults with active credit information. In order to analyze moves over the same time periods, we looked at data from the first seven quarters of 2020-2021 and compared them to the same period in 2018-2019.

While the SF-to-Montana increase was large in terms of percentage, the data only shows 360 total moves from San Francisco to Montana in 2020 and the first three quarters of 2021, so it’s not like the city is overwhelming Montana on its own. (Nearly 2,400 Bay Area residents moved to the state in 2020-2021, excluding Napa County, which didn’t have enough data for us to include in our analysis.)

But while San Francisco saw the biggest pandemic-era percent increase to Montana, all 10 of California’s most populous counties saw move-outs to the state increase significantly. And based on the 32 counties with enough data for us to measure, at least 13,000 Californians moved to Montana over the last two years — not a small number for a state of just over 1 million residents by the latest census count.

The reasons for this new influx of Californians to Montana are varied. One obvious one is California’s ever-more-prohibitive housing costs, which has contributed to pushing residents out-of-state at record levels during the pandemic.

For more financially secure ex-Californians who can now work remotely, like many of the tech-sector clients with whom Dorsch works, the Big Sky state’s spaciousness, scenic vistas and ample outdoor activities all contributed to its pandemic-era allure. The city of Bozeman has seen an especially large influx of Bay Area tech workers, according to Dorsch, because of its proximity to an international airport and relative connectivity compared to more rural parts of the state.

“Bozeman has kind of become a little Silicon Valley,” she said.

Not everyone is happy about the California-to-Big Sky pipeline. In the public Facebook group “Moving to Bozeman, Montana,” for instance, one user, posting a question about moving logistics in November 2021, apologized for being from California. Another user, responding to her post, warned her not to “California” her new home state.

A large share of Montanans’ frustration with incoming Californians appears to be economically based. From January 2020 through December 2021, home prices in Montana increased by 39% — the fourth-largest increase, by percentage, of any state over that time period.

“It’s insanity,” said Kelly Martin, a real estate agent at Windermere’s downtown Bozeman office. “Half the homes in Bozeman are well over a million and that’s definitely the out-of-staters coming in and paying cash…People born and raised in Montana, it’s almost like they’re completely priced out.”

He said that while the state is building homes “as fast as they can,” shortages of both homebuilding materials and construction workers have slowed the process down, further contributing to the low supply.

“There’s rows of houses that can’t be listed because they can’t get refrigerators in, or stoves. A lot of them are selling with no garage doors, just plywood [over the garages],” he said.

Dorsch agreed that out-of-staters, particularly Californians, are having an impact on the local housing market, and that this is partly what’s frustrating local Montanans.

“It’s very easy to point the finger at Californians who came from million-dollar houses that were little two-bedroom 700 square foot houses and [have helped] drive the price up,” she said.

But some of the tension is cultural, too. Dorsch, who grew up in Montana, still remembers when she moved back home from San Diego with her husband in 1993.

“And the same feeling existed then that exists now, with those who’ve been born and raised in Bozeman, for example, or Montana,” she said. “I don’t want to say they don’t like change, but when change happens, sometimes it’s challenging to embrace.”

Part of what Dorsch sees as her role, then, is to try and ease some of that tension on both sides.

“The conversation we have as realtor[s], with all our past clients and clients moving in, you’re not moving in to change the way Montanans live,” she said. “Likewise, with locals who live here, understand that change is healthy, change is good, and if we don’t have change then we might be dying from a standpoint of economy.”

Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: susie.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson

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SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) – The number of vacant homes increased during the San Francisco pandemic. Now people affected by homelessness are being put into these empty units.

It’s called Flexible Housing Subidy Pool, launched in July and has already relocated 75 people like Donald Booth.

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“Sometimes I think I’ll wake up from this dream because it’s too good to be true,” Booth said.

For the first time in more than 50 years he has keys to his own apartment.

“I went from absolutely nothing to a bedroom with a room on Nob Hill,” Booth said.

“There is a golden opportunity in the market right now,” said Andrea Evans, campaign manager and senior planner for the Tipping Point Community.

Tipping Point is a non-profit that runs the program and helps identify property owners like Wayne Huey.

“For me, it’s trying to make one change, one person, one unit at a time,” said Huey.

As an early adopter of the program, Huey has helped accommodate “nearly 30, 40 people who are given a second chance.”

Renters have to pay 30% of their income. Tipping Point is funding the rest with funds from Brilliant Corners, another non-profit organization, so property owners can continue to receive market rents.

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“It’s pretty easy, and it’s guaranteed rent, so you know, from a landlord’s point of view, why not?” Said Evans.

It’s also faster than other remodeling programs because it involves existing rooms and private dollars.

“They interviewed me on Thursday and the following Monday I got a call and she said,” I found a match, “Booth said.

The flex pool also randomly distributes tenants across the city as units become available. The organizers say this adds to the success of the program as people with homelessness, like everyone else, prefer to have a choice of which neighborhood to live in. This model also avoids that every formerly homeless person is housed in the same building with strict rules.

“You can bring people into your home at any time of the day or night, which is often not the case in many residential support structures,” said Evans.

Booth was in jail until May 2019, when he was first released, he ended up on the street. He says without this program he would likely end up in prison again and at least be housed and fed in prison.

Now he lights up and talks about his Nob Hill house. It’s an opportunity he really wants to seize.

“You gave me a chance and I’ve proven myself. I haven’t even had the hiccups and man I don’t care what it takes. I’ll do fine, “said Booth.

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Tenants in the Flex Pool program will continue to receive funding from Brilliant Corners through 2022, at which point the city will take over the payments. Mayor Breed’s goal is to expand this program to 200 units within the year and to 2,000 units later.

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