Bay Area

Federal Judge Refuses to Suspend Injunction Against Encampment Sweeps

Citing a misguided legal maneuver by city attorneys, a federal magistrate judge late Monday denied a motion by the city of San Francisco to suspend a preliminary injunction that prevents the city from sweeping tent encampments in the city while there is a shortage of shelter beds.

Published

3 years ago

April 6, 2023

Oakland Post

The plaintiffs argued that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments means that the city can't punish a person for sleeping on city streets while there is a shortfall of available shelter beds.

By Joe Dworetzky
Bay City News

In denying the request for a stay while the injunction is under appeal, U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu called out a legal gambit by city lawyers who, in their haste to appeal, disregarded her earlier advice about the proper procedure for raising their challenge to the injunction.

Ryu used the city’s legal strategy to support her conclusion that the city had little likelihood of success on its appeal of the preliminary injunction. She also found the city had not shown that it would be “irreparably injured” if the injunction remains in place.

The decision, and in particular her focus on the city’s legal maneuvering, seems likely to complicate the city’s chances of reversing the prohibition on sweeps in the near term.

The controversy is in a high-profile case brought against the city by the advocacy group Coalition on Homelessness and a number of individual plaintiffs, some of them unsheltered people living on city streets.

The plaintiffs argued that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments means that the city can’t punish a person for sleeping on city streets while there is a shortfall of available shelter beds.

Ryu agreed and on Dec. 23, 2022, she preliminarily enjoined the city from enforcing or threatening to enforce a variety of laws and ordinances that would “prohibit involuntarily homeless individuals from sitting, lying, or sleeping on public property.”

The order effectively barred the city from breaking up or sweeping tent encampments.

The judge based her ruling on the fact that the city’s shelter system was more than 4,000 beds short of being able to accommodate the full unsheltered portion of the city’s homeless population. Without shelter beds, she reasoned that the homeless had no place to sleep except the city’s streets. That meant that sweeping encampments was essentially punishing people for the involuntary status of being homeless.

When the preliminary injunction was issued, the city’s reaction was swift and sharp.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed said, “Mayors cannot run cities this way. We already have too few tools to deal with the mental illness we see on our streets. Now we are being told not to use another tool that helps bring people indoors and keeps our neighborhoods safe and clean for our residents.”

On Jan. 3, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu issued an unusual press release that said “the Court’s order puts San Francisco in an impossible situation, practically and legally.”

The city’s outsized reaction came from its concern over the possible scope of Ryu’s order. Tent encampments are illegal in San Francisco under existing city law and can be broken up, but only if the city gives advance notice and offers the people shelter.

The city feared that the order would be read to prevent encampment sweeps until adequate shelter was available for every unsheltered person in the city. The city believed that it should only have to provide a shelter bed for the people displaced when an encampment was swept.

The difference between those interpretations was huge.

Under the city’s reading, it needed only to find a few dozen empty shelter beds on any given day so it could accommodate the people in the particular camp being swept. Under the other reading, it would have to build or acquire thousands of beds — enough for all the unsheltered — a process that would likely take years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Apparently as a way to get that issue addressed quickly, on Jan. 3, city lawyers filed a so-called “administrative” motion to “clarify” the meaning of Ryu’s order.

Ryu was not pleased.

Despite the urgency of the city’s entreaty, at a hearing on Jan. 12, Ryu found that the city’s lawyers raised the issue improperly, trying to use a procedure for raising low-stakes administrative matters — like asking for permission to raise the page limits of a brief — to raise a clearly substantive issue.

At the hearing, Ryu admonished lawyers for the city (as well as lawyers for the plaintiffs who had followed the same procedure for one of their motions).

She told the lawyers for both sides “you know better” and warned them “not to get off on the wrong foot.”

She went on to make clear that if the city wanted to raise the issue, it should follow proper procedure for substantive motions.

The city did not take the judge up on her offer.

Instead, on Jan. 23, it filed an appeal of her preliminary injunction. A week later, on Feb. 2, it asked Ryu to stay her injunction while the appeal was pending.

In the briefing in support of the stay, city lawyers raised the same legal argument about the scope of the injunction that it had unsuccessfully tried to raise in its Jan. 3 motion to clarify.

That approach clearly bothered Ryu. In Monday’s ruling denying the stay, she emphasized that even though she had invited the city to raise the issue properly, the city had declined to do so. In her view, that approach deprived the court of an opportunity to consider the city’s argument in the context of a proper factual record.

She also found that the city had not met its burden of showing that it would suffer irreparable harm if the injunction stayed in place. For example, she pointed out that the order allows the city to require an encampment to move for the time it takes the city to clean the area. She also said the city could continue to offer those in an encampment social services and shelter options.

The finding that the city lawyers failed to follow the appropriate procedure puts the city in a difficult position.

While the city may ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to stay the injunction, the appeals court would not only need to take the relatively unusual step of intervening before reaching the merits of the appeal, but do so where there the city arguably didn’t take the proper steps to bring the issue before the court that issued the challenged injunction.

If the appeals court does not intervene, the sweep injunction will likely remain in place until a full trial in the case before Ryu. That trial is currently scheduled for April 3, 2024.

Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for City Attorney David Chiu, stated, “We continue to believe Judge Ryu’s order puts the City in an untenable situation, reaches beyond legal precedent, and exacerbates our homelessness crisis. We look forward to presenting our case on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.”

Hadley Rood, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said “The Preliminary Injunction order is narrowly tailored and only prevents the City from brutally punishing unhoused people purely because they are homeless.”

Issues involving the city’s handling of homelessness have escalated in recent months. The city’s Board of Supervisors held a hearing on March 21 to consider a plan prepared by the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing that was supposed to lay out how to shelter all unsheltered people in the city.

The department declined to do so, concluding that even if it had $1.45 billion and three years to implement, it couldn’t accomplish the requested result because of the difficulty in acquiring sites in the city and building adequate capacity.

The department’s stated inability to provide enough shelter combined with the city attorney’s difficulties in getting a stay seem likely to exacerbate the problems the mayor and board face leading the city in its recovery from the pandemic.

Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

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Activism

At the event, 16 entities signed the EIP pledge, vowing to take steps to increase public contracting opportunities in their spheres for small and historically underutilized businesses. The pledge signees included Hub International, the Port of San Francisco, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, California High-Speed Rail Authority, the Port of Oakland, Robert Graham of Webcor Builders, Holder Construction, the Weitz Company, Sky Blue Builders, Hornblower, Swinerton, Luster National, Talson Solutions, Center for Community Wealth Building, and the Construction Contractors Alliance.

Published

4 days ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Toks Omishakin, secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, was one of the speakers at the event. Photo by Shellee Fisher Photography and Design.

By Calvin Naito, Special to The Post

On June 4, a national nonprofit named the Equity in Infrastructure Project (EIP) – which aims to increase public construction contracting opportunities for small and historically underutilized businesses – held a day-long event in downtown San Francisco to rally supporters and build momentum to its cause.

It was attended by more than 100 individuals from public agencies, private firms, and other organizations committed to increasing contracting opportunities with governmental agencies, thereby creating more competition and lowering public costs.

The EIP event was held the Hyatt Regency San Francisco in conjunction with BuildIT, which aims to increase contracting opportunities for LGBT-owned businesses.

At the event, 16 entities signed the EIP pledge, vowing to take steps to increase public contracting opportunities in their spheres for small and historically underutilized businesses.

The pledge signees included Hub International, the Port of San Francisco, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, California High-Speed Rail Authority, the Port of Oakland, Robert Graham of Webcor Builders, Holder Construction, the Weitz Company, Sky Blue Builders, Hornblower, Swinerton, Luster National, Talson Solutions, Center for Community Wealth Building, and the Construction Contractors Alliance.

Following the workshop, BuildIT hosted a VIP evening reception honoring EIP, whose principals – Phil Washington, John Procari, and Rick Jacobs – accepted the award.

The event also set in motion the coalition’s efforts to implement recommendations from EIP’s “Procurement for Prosperity: A Playbook.”

The Playbook is a practical guide for public agency leaders and procurement and contracting practitioners to grow the capacity of small and first-time contractors, strengthen competition, and deliver better value for taxpayers.

Toks Omishakin, Secretary of the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA), a long-time EIP supporter, also told attendees, “This is about commitment. This has been a life’s work. This is a tailwind moment.”

The event’s presenting sponsor was Hub International, one of the largest insurance brokerages in the nation, which was joined by partners Travelers Insurance and the State Compensation Insurance Fund.

After the pledge-signing ceremony, attendees participated in a workshop in which they examined the policies, practices, and programs needed to meet EIP goals, learned from practitioners, and identified next steps toward utilizing the Playbook.

Ingrid Meriwether, formerly of Merriwether & Williams Insurance Services (MWIS) and current president of Hub International’s Aligned Risk Management, MWIS, described the hard-fought lessons she and her MWIS team have learned over the last three decades administering contractor development programs (CDPs) for the City and County of San Francisco, Alameda County, City of Los Angeles, LA Metro, and other municipalities.

The CDPs help small and local construction firms win public infrastructure contracts with these government agencies. The program provides bonding assistance, contract financing, technical support, training, and other services to underrepresented businesses funded by public agencies who seek greater contracting participation with these firms.

Merriwether said programs like these “break down systemic barriers, create greater fairness, and save taxpayers money by enabling more competition. The contractor development programs have, cumulatively, over two decades, helped contractors access over $1 billion in bonding, supporting over $380 million in awarded contracts, and maintaining a loss ratio 250 times lower than the industry average – while saving participating municipalities more than $27 million in contracting costs as a result of enabling more competition.”

Rick Jacobs, EIP co-founder and co-chair urged attendees make plans to meet again in the near future “to continue building on this work, share progress on organizational commitments, and discuss how we can collectively advance the goals of the EIP pledge.”

For more information on the EIP and to access a copy of the Playbook, go online to https://equityininfrastructure.org/

Calvin Naito is communications manager for Equity in Infrastructure Project.

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Activism

Oakland Museum Presents Landmark Retrospective Celebrating Beloved Bay Area Artist Mildred Howard

“Poetics of Memory” coincides with a year of major recognition for Howard. In 2026, she received the California Arts Council’s 50th Anniversary Award, honoring artists whose work has shaped California’s cultural and civic life, as well as the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Artist Impact Award. In 2025, she was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her transformative contributions to American cultural life.

Published

4 days ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Mildred Howard. Photo by Christine Cueto for the Oakland Museum of California, 2025.

Special to The Post

The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) opened “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory,” the first major museum survey of Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, on June 12.

The exhibition spans five decades of Howard’s influential work, bringing together immersive installations, found-object sculptures, archival materials, and new commissions that explore memory, identity, and power in American life.

Howard was born in San Francisco in 1945 and raised in the East Bay, where she went on to study Afro-Haitian dance, make and sell clothing, and experiment with collage and sculpture.

Her multimedia art practice emerged from these experiences, later becoming associated with West Coast conceptual art, San Francisco funk, and a vibrant community of artists like Oliver Jackson, Betye Saar, and Raymond Saunders. Since the 1970s, she has used found materials and family stories to explore memory—both individual and collective.

At OMCA, visitors enter “Poetics of Memory” through a series of intimate galleries featuring Howard’s early mixed-media pieces and sculptures, along with a large video projection of a number of her public artworks.

Together, they emphasize Howard’s interest in everyday objects as powerful carriers of individual and shared stories. Highlights include collages that remix images of the artist herself; found-object sculptures like The History of the United States with a few Parts Missing (2007) that address omissions in dominant narratives; and public works like “Locks and Keys for Harry Bridges” (2001) that transform urban space into a meditation on access and labor.

This culminates in a richly detailed “studio” environment, where works in progress, archival exhibition flyers, historic photographs of Howard and her community, postcards from fellow artists, and other materials offer insight into her creative process and daily life.

The exhibition then opens into a high-ceilinged, dramatically lit space that brings together Howard’s signature immersive installations. On one end, “Crossings” (1997/2026) – a field of hundreds of ceramic eggs leading to an ornate mirror – suggests cycles of birth, motherhood, and transition, while drawing on the emotional echoes of the Middle Passage. On the other end, “Blackbird in a Red Sky” (a.k.a. “Fall of the Blood House”) (2002) – a red glass shack bordered by a pond – also uses reflection and transparency to draw viewers into the work and prompt consideration of themes of identity and home.

Howard’s newest video installation, “Moving Stills” (2026), repurposes never-before-seen family footage she took as a teenager on a train trip to the American South. Projected onto cascading layers of translucent fabric that stretch across an entire gallery wall, the piece immerses viewers in a layered meditation on memory, migration, and time.

The “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory” exhibit will be on display through Oct. 11 at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland, CA 94612. Museum hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended hours on Fridays to 9 p.m.

This story is sourced from the Oakland Museum of California press office.

Oakland Post

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Alameda County

Ferry Fares to Increase July 1 as Ridership Hits Record Highs

The Oakland and Alameda routes will increase from $4.90 to $5.10, the South San Francisco route will go up from $7.40 to $7.60, and the Vallejo route will increase from $9.90 to $10.

Published

4 days ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Courtesy photo.

By Mike Aldax, The Richmond Standard

Starting July 1, the standard adult fare for the San Francisco Bay Ferry route between Richmond and San Francisco will increase to $5.20, up from the current $4.90.

Discounted fares for eligible passengers, including youth, seniors, people with disabilities, and Clipper START users, will rise to $2.60 from the current $2.40. Children under 5 will continue to ride for free.

The Oakland and Alameda routes will increase from $4.90 to $5.10, the South San Francisco route will go up from $7.40 to $7.60, and the Vallejo route will increase from $9.90 to $10.

The adjustments are part of a systemwide fare update approved by the agency’s Board of Directors, which is moving away from a flat 3% annual increase to route-specific pricing for the 2027 and 2028 fiscal years.

This fare update arrives as San Francisco Bay Ferry celebrates a historic May, transporting 301,270 passengers. The record-breaking figure represents an 8% increase over May 2025 and marks the third consecutive month of record-setting ridership.

Furthermore, it is the sixth month in a row that passenger numbers have exceeded pre-pandemic levels. Weekend travel has been a primary driver of this growth, with average weekend ridership seeing a 56% increase compared to pre-pandemic trends.

The agency states that the fare adjustments are necessary to ensure the long-term fiscal sustainability of public ferry services. By shifting to route-specific adjustments, the agency aims to offset rising operating costs while maintaining the high levels of service frequency and reliability.