San Francisco, CA – Today, Mayor London N. Breed released the following statement on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grants Pass:
“This decision by the Supreme Court will help cities like San Francisco manage our public spaces more effectively and efficiently. San Francisco has made significant investments in shelter and housing, and we will continue to lead with offers of services from our hard-working City employees. But too often these offers are rejected, and we need to be able to enforce our laws, especially to prevent long-term encampments. This decision recognizes that cities must have more flexibility to address challenges on our streets.
“We will continue to offer shelter, but we will not allow those who reject offers of help to remain where they are. There are many people struggling on our streets with addiction and mental illness, and our outreach workers will offer access to treatment while we also work to compel those who are the sickest into care through new tools like expanded conservatorship. But those who refuse our help or those who already have shelter will not be allowed to camp on our streets. It’s not healthy, safe, or compassionate for people on the street and it’s not acceptable for our neighborhoods.
“We will now adjust our city policies to be in line with the ruling by the Supreme Court. We have been working with the City Attorney and City staff on potential outcomes prior to the ruling, and now we will review this final decision with the City Attorney’s Office before announcing and implementing our new policies.
“However, we do know that with this ruling we will be able to improve our efficiency in how our departments respond to encampments and more effectively respond to prevent re-encampments after we move people into shelter and clean up our streets. Implementing these changes will require us to train our city workforce so they understand how to do their work in compliance with any new policies. But with our tent count at its lowest level in five years and street homelessness at its lowest in ten years, we still have a lot of work to do and this will help us build on that progress to make our streets cleaner, healthier, and safer for everyone.”
San Francisco’s Homelessness Response
San Francisco has made significant investments in shelter and housing over the last five years including expanding shelter beds by over 60% and housing slots for the formerly homeless by over 50%. San Francisco has added 400 behavioral health treatment beds, and the City is in line to access new Prop 1 funds that will dramatically expand treatment and care beds in California once they become available. The Mayor’s proposed budget sustains and expands on this work, including new dedicated shelter and housing support for families in her Safer Families proposal.
San Francisco’s most recent quarterly tent count conducted at the end of April found 360 tents and structures across the City – a 41% reduction from 609 in July 2023. Of the 360 tents and structures counted, 182 were tents and 178 were structures. The average tent count rate (across two counts) in 2024 is the lowest annual rate of any year since the City started doing tent counts in 2018. Additionally, the City’s biennial homeless count showed that the number of people living on the streets of San Francisco has reached the lowest level in at least 10 years.
City encampment teams through the Healthy Streets Outreach Center (HSOC) continue to go out offering shelter and services daily. Once the City finalizes its new policies in line with the Supreme Court ruling, the City workforce will be trained to ensure they are operating correctly under this new ruling. This training will take a few weeks, once the new policies are issued.
What is Grants Pass
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass will have significant implications for San Francisco, which is in the midst of ongoing litigation about its ability to resolve tent encampments relying on precedent the Ninth Circuit set in Grants Pass.
Essentially, the Supreme Court decided that cities are allowed to enforce anti-camping laws and the enforcement of these laws is not prohibited by the Constitution. The City submitted an amicus brief in Grants Pass, which struck a balance between preserving important Eighth Amendment protections for unhoused individuals, while recognizing that the Amendment does not strip local jurisdictions of their authority to regulate use of public property or the ability to address health, safety, and welfare issues arising from encampments in public places.
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