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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Oakland Post: Week of November 5 – 11, 2025

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of November 5 – 11, 2025

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Oakland Post: Week of October 29 – November 4, 2025

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 29 – November 4, 2025

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November 3, 2025

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Past, Present, Possible! Oakland Residents Invited to Reimagine the 980 Freeway

Organizers ask attendees coming to 1233 Preservation Park Way to think of the event as a “time portal”—a walkable journey through the Past (harm and flourishing), Present (community conditions and resilience), and Future (collective visioning).

Published

2 weeks ago

October 27, 2025

Oakland Post

Hundreds of residents in West Oakland were forced out by eminent domain before construction began on the 980 freeway in 1968. Courtesy photo.

By Randolph Belle
Special to The Post

Join EVOAK!, a nonprofit addressing the historical harm to West Oakland since construction of the 980 freeway began in 1968, will hold a block party on Oct. 25 at Preservation Park for a day of imagination and community-building from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Organizers ask attendees coming to 1233 Preservation Park Way to think of the event as a “time portal”—a walkable journey through the Past (harm and flourishing), Present (community conditions and resilience), and Future (collective visioning).

Activities include:

Interactive Visioning: Site mapping, 3-D/digital modeling, and design activities to reimagine housing, parks, culture, enterprise, and mobility.
Story & Memory: Oral history circles capturing life before the freeway, the rupture it caused, and visions for repair.
Data & Policy: Exhibits on health, environment, wealth impacts, and policy discussions.
Culture & Reflection: Films, installations, and performances honoring Oakland’s creativity and civic power.

The site of the party – Preservation Park – itself tells part of the story of the impact on the community. Its stately Victorians were uprooted and relocated to the site decades ago to make way for the I-980 freeway, which displaced hundreds of Black families and severed the heart of West Oakland. Now, in that same space, attendees will gather to reckon with past harms, honor the resilience that carried the community forward, and co-create an equitable and inclusive future.

A Legacy of Resistance

In 1979, Paul Cobb, publisher of the Post News Group and then a 36-year-old civil-rights organizer, defiantly planted himself in front of a bulldozer on Brush Street to prevent another historic Victorian home from being flattened for the long-delayed I-980 Freeway. Refusing to move, Cobb was arrested and hauled off in handcuffs—a moment that landed him on the front page of the Oakland Tribune.

Cobb and his family had a long history of fighting for their community, particularly around infrastructure projects in West Oakland. In 1954, his family was part of an NAACP lawsuit challenging the U.S. Post Office’s decision to place its main facility in the neighborhood, which wiped out an entire community of Black residents.

In 1964, they opposed the BART line down Seventh Street—the “Harlem of the West.” Later, Cobb was deeply involved in successfully rerouting the Cypress Freeway out of the neighborhood after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The 980 Freeway, a 1.6-mile stretch, created an ominous barrier severing West Oakland from Downtown. Opposition stemmed from its very existence and the national practice of plowing freeways through Black communities with little input from residents and no regard for health, economic, or social impacts. By the time Cobb stood before the bulldozer, construction was inevitable, and his fight shifted toward jobs and economic opportunity.

Fast-forward 45 years: Cobb recalled the story at a convening of “Super OGs” organized to gather input from legacy residents on reimagining the corridor. He quickly retrieved his framed Tribune front page, adding a new dimension to the conversation about the dedication required to make change. Themes of harm repair and restoration surfaced again and again, grounded in memories of a thriving, cohesive Black neighborhood before the freeway.

The Lasting Scar

The 980 Freeway was touted as a road to prosperity—funneling economic opportunity into the City Center, igniting downtown commerce, and creating jobs. Instead, it cut a gash through the city, erasing 503 homes, four churches, 22 businesses, and hundreds of dreams. A promised second approach to the Bay Bridge never materialized.

Planning began in the late 1940s, bulldozers arrived in 1968, and after years of delays and opposition, the freeway opened in 1985. By then, Oakland’s economic engines had shifted, leaving behind a 600-foot-wide wound that resulted in fewer jobs, poorer health outcomes, and a divided neighborhood. The harm of displacement and loss of generational wealth was compounded through redlining, disinvestment, drugs, and the police state. Many residents fled to outlying cities, while those who stayed carried forward the spirit of perseverance.

The Big Picture

At stake now is up to 67 acres of new, buildable land in Downtown West Oakland. This time, we must not repeat the institutional wrongs of the past. Instead, we must be as deliberate in building a collective, equitable vision as planners once were in destroying communities.

EVOAK!’s strategy is rooted in four pillars: health, housing, economic development, and cultural preservation. These were the very foundations stripped away, and they are what they aim to reclaim. West Oakland continues to suffer among the worst social determinants of health in the region, much of it linked to the three freeways cutting through the neighborhood.

The harms of urban planning also decimated cultural life, reinforced oppressive public safety policies, underfunded education, and fueled poverty and blight.

Healing the Wound

West Oakland was once the center of Black culture during the Great Migration—the birthplace of the Black Panther Party and home to the “School of Champions,” the mighty Warriors of McClymonds High. Drawing on that legacy, we must channel the community’s proud past into a bold, community-led future that restores connection, sparks innovation, and uplifts every resident.

Two years ago, Caltrans won a federal Reconnecting Communities grant to fund Vision 980, a community-driven study co-led by local partners. Phase 1 launched in Spring 2024 with surveys and outreach; Phase 2, a feasibility study, begins in 2026. Over 4,000 surveys have already been completed. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity could transform the corridor into a blank slate—making way for accessible housing, open space, cultural facilities, and economic opportunity for West Oakland and the entire region.

Leading with Community

In parallel, EVOAK! is advancing a community-led process to complement Caltrans’ work. EVOAK! is developing a framework for community power-building, quantifying harm, exploring policy and legislative repair strategies, structuring community governance, and hosting arts activations to spark collective imagination. The goal: a spirit of co-creation and true collaboration.

What EVOAK! Learned So Far

Through surveys, interviews, and gatherings, residents have voiced their priorities: a healthy environment, stable housing, and opportunities to thrive. Elders with decades in the neighborhood shared stories of resilience, community bonds, and visions of what repair should look like.

They heard from folks like Ezra Payton, whose family home was destroyed at Eighth and Brush streets; Ernestine Nettles, still a pillar of civic life and activism; Tom Bowden, a blues man who performed on Seventh Street as a child 70 years ago; Queen Thurston, whose family moved to West Oakland in 1942; Leo Bazille who served on the Oakland City Council from 1983 to 1993; Herman Brown, still organizing in the community today; Greg Bridges, whose family’s home was picked up and moved in the construction process; Martha Carpenter Peterson, who has a vivid memory of better times in West Oakland; Sharon Graves, who experienced both the challenges and the triumphs of the neighborhood; Lionel Wilson, Jr., whose family were anchors of pre-freeway North Oakland; Dorothy Lazard, a resident of 13th Street in the ’60s and font of historical knowledge; Bishop Henry Williams, whose simple request is to “tell the truth,” James Moree, affectionately known as “Jimmy”; the Flippin twins, still anchored in the community; and Maxine Ussery, whose father was a business and land owner before redlining.

EVOAK! will continue to capture these stories and invites the public to share theirs as well.

Beyond the Block Party

The 980 Block Party is just the beginning. Beyond this one-day event, EVOAK! Is building a long-term process to ensure West Oakland’s future is shaped by those who lived its past. To succeed, EVOAK! Is seeking partners across the community—residents, neighborhood associations, faith groups, and organizations—to help connect with legacy residents and host conversations.

980 Block Party Event Details
Saturday, Oct. 25
10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Preservation Park, 1233 Preservation Park Way, Oakland, CA 94612
980BlockParty.org
info@evoak.org