San Diego’s homeless enforcement is guided by court orders. The Supreme Court may complicate that
SAN DIEGO — The U.S. Supreme Court is now set to weigh in on a case challenging federal court rulings that have dictated how cities in the west are able to clear homeless encampments — a step that officials in San Diego begun pushing for months ago.
At the center of the case, Grants Pass v. Gloria Johnson, are Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decisions that held enforcement of laws aimed at preventing unhoused people from sleeping in public places through punishments like fines as unconstitutional when there is nowhere else for them to go.
Elected officials have long criticized the rulings, which stem from the precedent set in the 2018 case Martin v. Boise, describing them as judicial overreach that places undue limits on their ability to address issues of public health and safety.
How the Supreme Court’s homeless encampment ban case could play out
On the other hand, unhoused people and their advocates have argued that policies imposing criminal penalties on life-sustaining activities when there is not another choice available often make it more difficult for people to exit homelessness.
While some legal analysts say a ruling overturning this precedent is quite possible given the high court’s current conservative majority, the City of San Diego would not return entirely to having free reign to take whatever enforcement actions against homeless encampments that they deem fit.
Court orders set rules for San Diego’s encampment enforcement
Aside from the federal court rulings, San Diego is bound by rules established through settlement agreements in multiple legal challenges over its treatment of unhoused people, three of which predate the Martin v. Boise ruling.
Nearly two decades before the city’s unsafe camping ordinance was signed into law, San Diego would use the city’s illegal lodging ordinance as the primary mechanism for policing homeless encampments.
This practice was challenged in a 2004 lawsuit on behalf of homeless San Diegans, which argued that the city was criminalizing people for sleeping on the street when they had nowhere else to go.
The case was settled in 2011 with an agreement that allows people to bed down on the sidewalks from 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. and generally avoid illegal lodging tickets. Officers were also required to begin offering a shelter bed to each person they encounter before writing a ticket.
That same year, a separate lawsuit reached a settlement agreement that set rules for cleaning up — or abating — homeless encampments.
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This included the posting of three-hour notices before crews can clear an encampment and the requirement that, if any property appears abandoned, workers are supposed to go through each item to determine if it meets the criteria for impounding:
Valued at $100 or more
Irreplaceable personal items
Important documents
Medicine
Any items that are “saleable, usable or otherwise appear to be of value to the owner”
Not long after these settlements, however, police turned to a different city ordinance, encroachment, as a workaround. As inewsource reported in 2022, the law was intended to be used against “unauthorized solid waste or recycling dumpsters and bins” that block public access.
This practice was challenged in a 2017 lawsuit, known as Arundel v. City of San Diego. The settlement struck to resolve the suit created the “progressive enforcement model,” a four-staged method for police to use to issue tickets only when an unhoused person does not accept available shelter.
As part of the Arundel settlement, the city also agreed to open a downtown storage center with up to 500 bins for the belongings of unsheltered San Diegans.
How SCOTUS could come into play
The settlements in these cases essentially act as a binding, private contract between the two parties — whatever happens before the Supreme Court would not have any impact on the terms that they reached to resolve the legal dispute.
“When you do a settlement, they’re not based on one specific law. They’re based on a mutual agreement of the parties … and they become orders of the court. The city has to follow those,” said local attorney Scott Dreher, who was involved in all of these lawsuits. “If the city decides, ‘we don’t have to,’ they’re going to need court permission to disobey.”
FOX 5 reached out to the San Diego City Attorney’s office for comment on whether they would explore options for asking a court to re-examine these settlements after a Supreme Court ruling, but did not receive a response before publication.
What a Supreme Court decision overturning the rulings in Martin and Grants Pass could do, however, is complicate lawyers’ ability to compel the city to follow the settlement terms through future litigation, as well as make it more difficult to bring new challenges to enforcement actions that may be violating the rights of unhoused San Diegans.
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According to legal analysts, a decision in favor of Grants Pass could also open a door for San Diego officials to enact new policies around homeless encampments going forward that were previously barred, so long as they are remaining consistent with the settlements’ terms.
What those policies may look like for unhoused San Diegans — and whether it actually works to resolve the ever-growing homelessness crisis — remains an open question.
“We’re not saying the cities can’t enforce their laws and clean up the streets,” Dreher said. “You can’t arrest people for being somewhere where they have nowhere else to be. You have to either create a space for them or don’t arrest them.”
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