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In September 2022, the ³Ô¹ÏÖ±²¥ of Northern California and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area filed a on behalf of the Coalition on Homelessness and several individual plaintiffs against the City and County of San Francisco and Mayor London Breed, challenging their unconstitutional treatment of unhoused San Franciscans. The lawsuit sought to end the City’s practice of unlawfully seizing and destroying unhoused people’s personal property and citing and arresting unhoused people for sleeping in public, despite having no shelter to go to.

For years, San Francisco has responded to its homelessness crisis by pushing unhoused people out of sight—destroying their survival items and arresting and jailing them for unavoidable behavior like sleeping in public. These regressive mass incarceration-era policies do nothing to address the City’s affordable housing crisis, and only perpetuate homelessness.

In December 2022, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a in the , directing San Francisco to immediately halt its unconstitutional enforcement of laws that criminalize homelessness and to stop unlawfully seizing and destroying unhoused people’s survival gear and personal property. In granting the order, the Court also acknowledged that the City’s cruel policies have made it more difficult for people to exit homelessness. In January 2024, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this order.

In June 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit cities from punishing unhoused people for sleeping in public, even if they have nowhere else to go. That ruling prevented the plaintiffs from pursuing similar claims in this case, but it did not affect the plaintiffs’ remaining claims, which focus on the City's unlawful destruction of the personal property of unhoused persons. Those claims have survived several motions for dismissal by the City and are headed to trial during the summer of 2025.