Hundreds of Tenderloin Homeless Folks Finally to Be Moved to Hotels

Photo by Kevin N. Hume/S.F. Examiner

A couple weeks ago we reported that UC Hastings, the law school in the Tenderloin, sued the City of San Francisco demanding that the City clear the Tenderloin of its ‘homelessness encampments’ and ‘open-air drug sales’. In response a group of students at Hastings published an open letter to the dean expressing their concerns about this lawsuit. Apparently there have been some new developments in the case.

According to a press release from Hastings, The City and the university have announced a settlement regarding the Tenderloin.

“The agreement stipulates that by July 20, 2020, the City will remove up to 300 tents and encampments representing approximately 70% of those inventoried in a June 5, 2020 census. Occupants of the tents will be relocated to shelter-in-place hotel rooms, safe sleeping villages outside the Tenderloin, or off-street sites such as parking lots in the Tenderloin. The City will then work to ensure that former encampment sites do not become re-encamped. The City will continue offering free COVID-19 testing to all residents in the Tenderloin during the duration of the pandemic.”

It’s unfortunate that it took a lawsuit to make this happen, especially considering that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed emergency hotel legislation to get homeless folks indoors, back in April. Mayor London Breed  apparently didn’t give a damn and instead tried to get away with rolling out a largely unactualized eight point plan for the Tenderloin. The Tenderloin somehow managed to get worse.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The fact that the hotel rooms have been sitting empty for this long is an absolute joke and the people that enabled this should be ashamed of themselves.