Tenderloin residents, businesses sue SF over drug use, encampments

The new lawsuit by Tenderloin residents, which includes numerous photographs of people engaged in allegedly illegal activities, charged The City with allowing grotesque behavior in the Tenderloin that it would not allow in other neighborhoods — specifically narcotics activities and associated problems such as violence, street encampments and public defecation.

“For years, the Tenderloin has been treated as The City’s de facto containment zone for dangerous, unsanitary, and illegal behavior,” read a statement provided by Matt Davis, an attorney for the plaintiffs, who included a man, four women, a Best Western hotel operator, the Phoenix Hotel and the Chambers Eat + Drink restaurant in the hotel.

“The residents, families, and small businesses in this historically diverse neighborhood will no longer tolerate this discriminatory treatment,” Davis said. “They demand an end to the rampant illegal street vending, and from the squalor and misery that exists throughout their neighborhood because The City has decided that people in the throes of addiction can live and die on the Tenderloin’s streets.”

Among other things, the lawsuit charges that The City has deprived the plaintiffs of equal protection of the law. Two of the plaintiffs are disabled and have been deprived of access to sidewalks in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, it reads.

The plaintiffs say they know of no written city policy document, but it is clear that The City has a “de facto policy to corral and confine illegal drug dealing and usage, and the associated injurious behaviors, to the Tenderloin,” according to the complaint.

Mayor London Breed on Thursday touted The City’s efforts to address street issues in the Tenderloin during the day, but acknowledged The City still has work to do to make it safer at night. In partnership with the Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and California Highway Patrol, The City has directed additional resources to the Tenderloin on some — but not all — evenings.

“We know it’s not enough, especially in the evening times, and we’re going to continue to do everything we can to work as aggressively as we can to focus our resources and attention on the Tenderloin,” Breed told reporters Thursday.

Breed argued that the Tenderloin has long had its challenges and that her administration’s efforts to improve it have paradoxically drawn more attention to the neighborhood.

“There are blocks that used to be filled with encampments, that used to be filled with problems, including very close to City Hall,” Breed said.

As evidence of progress in addressing unsheltered homelessness, Breed’s administration has touted a recent census that found the number of tents on city streets has declined by 37% since last July. The number of tents counted in February was the lowest since early 2021.

However, the Tenderloin continues to be an epicenter of homelessness, with maps published by The City showing a concentration of tents in and around the Tenderloin and Civic Center.

The new lawsuit says conditions have worsened over the last six years as fentanyl and other highly addictive and deadly synthetic opiates have come to dominate the local narcotics market, and residents face an “existential crisis.”

The lawsuit says fentanyl addicts live on the streets, act erratically, go about partially clothed, rummage through trash, ignore serious medical problems and relieve themselves in public. It says they routinely steal and sell stolen merchandise on the sidewalks, and that there is also violence between drug dealers, including murders, stabbings and gun battles.

The burden has fallen on a district filled with people, including many families, seeking a relatively affordable place to live in The City, according to the lawsuit.

There are more than 3,000 children in the Tenderloin, among the highest concentrations in The City, states the complaint, which recalled a scene of communal drug use near the Tenderloin Community Elementary School.

One anonymous plaintiff, referred to by the pseudonym Jane Roe, was described as an immigrant who works full-time as a housekeeper and lives in an apartment on Ellis Street between Hyde and Larkin streets with her husband — also an immigrant and a cook — nd their two daughters, 9 and 5 years old.

Speaking little English, the woman must navigate past open-air drug deals on the sidewalk in front of her building at all hours of the day and night, as well as “users openly injecting or smoking narcotics, and people lying on the sidewalk who appear unconscious or dead,” the lawsuit said. Used syringes and feces litter the sidewalk and unleashed dogs growl amid the tents and stolen goods displayed for sale, the lawsuit claims.

The woman alleged in the claim that she had been threatened with having her throat cut and being assaulted with knives and hammers or being killed when she asked that fires not be burned in front of her building because the smoke inflamed her daughter’s asthma.

UC Law’s motion seeks to compel The City to adhere to the terms of a 2020 court settlement in a federal lawsuit the school filed in which The City agreed to clear encampments from the Tenderloin. The City initially reduced the number of tents from 448 to 22, but the number of tents rebounded to 71 in February, the motion states.

David Faigman, UC Law’s chancellor and dean, called it necessary “to push The City to take sustained and effective action to ensure the residents and businesses of the Tenderloin are provided the safety and peace that we all deserve” in a prepared statement.

“Unfortunately, despite promises of progress and reform, the conditions in our neighborhood, particularly with open-air drug markets and tent encampments, persist,” Faigman said. “What happens daily in the Tenderloin wouldn’t be tolerated in any other neighborhood in San Francisco.”

The new court filings come as The City spars in court with advocates for the homeless, who have argued The City’s sweeps of encampments violate the constitutional rights of those living in them.

That lawsuit has resulted in a temporary injunction that has forced The City to strictly comply with its policies of offering shelter to homeless people before conducting a sweep and “tagging” and storing their belongings.

The City’s attorneys have argued in court that the injunction granted to advocates for the homeless is at odds with the agreement it reached with the law school to promptly address street conditions on and around its campus. That argument has not proven successful; the lawsuit brought by the Coalition on Homelessness remains active and appears headed for trial.

Jen Kwart, a spokeswoman for the City Attorney’s Office, issued a statement expressing sympathy for Tenderloin residents but called the timing of the lawsuit “odd” because the U.S. Supreme Court in a matter of months is expected to issue a decision in a case out of Grants Pass, Ore., “potentially altering the legal landscape in homelessness cases.”