This Bay Area Woman's Legal Victory Challenges California's Homeless Encampment Crackdown

Over the course of two years, Evelyn Alfred built a home on vacant city-owned land in Vallejo. Using wooden beams, insulation, tarps and some experience in construction, she built a two-room structure, complete with windows and blinds, a shower, leather couches and a raised bed.

For Alfred, who is 64 years old, has several disabilities, and has been unhoused for more than two decades, her makeshift home provided shelter and stability.

But when city officials told her she had to leave in late October, her eviction seemed all but inevitable. Just a few months earlier, the Supreme Court had given cities greater leeway to remove people living in structures like hers, under threat of fines and jail time — even if no alternative shelter was available.

“All of a sudden, I got a notice, [a] lady came and said you got 72 hours notice … And I said ‘I can’t move in 72 hours,’” Alfred recalled. “There’s no way.’”

She sued. And earlier this month, a district court judge determined she could stay until the case is resolved in a victory legal advocates say is the first of its kind in the country since the Supreme Court’s order last year — and one they say could have broad implications for legal fights over homeless encampments across the nation.

People experiencing homelessness and their allies have long used the courts to fight what they see as overly aggressive tactics to remove them from city streets, but the Supreme Court’s recent decision dealt them a major blow. Now, with Alfred’s case, they’re hoping another legal strategy has gained a foothold.

“It sends a message that the courts recognize unhoused people have multiple constitutional rights that may be violated by criminalization or sweeps policies,” said Tristia Bauman, an attorney with the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley who specializes in laws related to homelessness but wasn’t involved in the case.

Not everyone, however, thinks it’s a winning argument. Ilan Wurman, an attorney who’s pioneered legal arguments brought by business owners against cities in an effort to force them to clean encampments, said the Supreme Court’s decision upheld an established legal precedent.

“The courts are going to see through it,” Wurman said. “The nub of the Supreme Court’s prior ruling was that these municipal regulations and ordinances fit comfortably within a longstanding tradition of reasonable police powers.”

But, even Wurman admitted Alfred’s case was likely to inspire new litigation.

Since last year’s Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, cities across California have moved to crackdown on encampments. By the National Homelessness Law Center’s tally, some 40 California jurisdictions have passed or strengthened laws governing homelessness, among them Fremont, which earlier this month adopted what’s believed to be one of the broadest anti-camping laws in the nation.

Vallejo has a longstanding camping ban on the books, and relied on that, its encampment policy and the state penal code and in its attempt to clear the camp.

In Alfred’s case, however, federal District Court Judge Dena Coggins found that Vallejo’s plan to raze her shelter while failing to offer Alfred any alternative and barring her from camping anywhere in the city would likely “expose her to more dangerous conditions than she currently faces” — a violation of her due process rights.

In her order, Coggins pointed out Alfred had submitted applications with multiple services providers and had reached out to more than a dozen apartment buildings, only to run into waiting lists. The city, meanwhile, had done next to nothing to connect Alfred with housing resources and had given her closer to 65 hours notice to leave, in an apparent violation of its own policies, according to the judge.

The city did not provide an interview or written statement in response to requests for comment.

In her scathing dissent on the Grants Pass ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to the due process clause as a possible avenue for challenging “anti-homelessness ordinances,” writing it “may well place constitutional limits” on such policies.

This was the legal argument Alfred’s lawyers presented to Coggins, but until her ruling, those arguments had only been successful in buying unhoused people a few extra days or weeks to pack their belongings before being forced to leave.

Attorney Andrea Henson, who has supported several unhoused people in those cases, including in Alfred’s Vallejo suit, said the Supreme Court’s decision has made it more difficult to ask judges to block encampment sweeps.

“It’s been extraordinarily hard going to court about these [sweeps] because of the environment,” Henson said.

As more cities establish new policies to crack down on encampments, Henson said she hopes they’ll look to Alfred’s legal victory as a cautionary tale.

“If you don’t offer anything, and you don’t let people camp anywhere, there’s precedent now that that can be seen as deliberate indifference,” Henson said.

Before Henson got involved, advocates with the local chapter of the California Homeless Union initially filed the lawsuit. Their win is the latest illustration of the impact of the group’s organizing efforts, which have led to lawsuits around the state filed by unhoused people and activists without formal legal schooling.

“The goal is to build leadership and build a movement,” said union member Eli Smith, who initiated the Vallejo action, though she’s not a trained lawyer.

Eli is heartened by all the new faces that showed up at the local union’s weekly meeting after their win made news.

“I am hoping that it will help not just fortify the tools we have to fight and set a legal precedent, which is incredibly significant,” Eli said, “but that it’ll also give people hope in this political landscape that is so bleak.”

Alfred said she’s now waiting to get approved for a subsidized unit in senior housing. For her, the injunction was a vindication.

“If anybody’s homeless, I just tell them to fight because they don’t have the right to do what they’re doing to us, so just fight and let everybody know that you’re human too.”