Judges clear way for Berkeley to close two of its largest homeless camps ...Middle East

After initially preventing Berkeley from clearing two of its largest homeless camps, judges have allowed the city to move forward with the sweeps, a sign that courts are less willing to halt encampment closures in the Bay Area since a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year granted cities broad authority to clamp down on homelessness.

Neighbors have demanded the city disband the two camps, located in Northwest Berkeley and near downtown, and city officials agree closing them is critical to address a range of health and safety concerns.

In separate rulings last month, two federal judges decided that, for the most part, those concerns outweighed any harm camp residents argued they would face if the encampments are swept.

“Plainly, elected officials in Berkeley and many other cities face very difficult policy decisions about how to balance the needs of the unhoused population, the interests of the community more broadly, and the reality that budgets are limited in the face of many worthy competing priorities,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. in one of the rulings. “There simply are no easy answers to this complex and persistent challenge.”

Last week, Gilliam ruled the city could begin clearing an encampment at Ohlone Park near downtown, a stretch of greenway with playgrounds and picnic areas that neighbors say has become littered with trash, human feces and needles. Gilliam had temporarily stopped the city from clearing the park after homeless advocates sued to stop a planned sweep in May.

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Meanwhile, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen ruled last month that the officials can finish clearing a longstanding encampment at Eighth and Harrison Streets in Northwest Berkeley. However, Chen ordered the city to assist some camp residents with disabilities in finding housing or shelter.

Previously, Chen had blocked Berkeley from shutting down the encampment for months, frustrating neighboring businesses in the city’s busy Gilman District. Once Chen’s temporary order expired in June, officials began closing the camp. But Chen immediately halted the ongoing sweep, determining that the city had failed to give camp residents sufficient notice. By that point, however, authorities had already moved most people out of the area.

City officials did not respond to questions about when both camps would be fully closed.

In recent years, homeless people and their advocates across the Bay Area had successfully sued to delay encampment closures until cities could provide shelter beds for camp residents. That includes sweeps of hundreds of people from San Jose’s Columbus Park and Wood Street in West Oakland. Most cities in the region lack enough beds for everyone living on the street.

Those cases relied primarily on a lower-court ruling that determined punishing people for sleeping on public property without offering shelter violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. But last summer, to the cheers of officials statewide under increasing pressure to deal with encampments, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority agreed to strike down that precedent.

That’s left homeless people to resort to other legal arguments to block sweeps — to varying success.

In the Berkeley cases, camp residents argued that sweeps would upend encampment communities they rely on for food, medicine and other support, putting them in greater danger and violating their right to due process under the 14th Amendment. They also claimed the city had failed to make adequate accommodations for their disabilities under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

Residents at the Harrison Street encampment won a narrow victory requiring the city to allow around a dozen people with disabilities to remain in the area while helping find shelter or housing. But now that the city has the green light to finish clearing out the other residents without offering shelter beds, it’s unclear where they could end up next.

“The bottom line is that the city of Berkeley is putting people at risk,” said Anthony Prince, an attorney representing the homeless residents.

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, federal judges have recently ruled against unhoused people who made similar claims in Oakland and Fairfax, a small city in Marin County. In Vallejo, however, encampment residents used those arguments to convince a judge to issue a preliminary injunction — a more permanent court order — to halt a planned sweep. Vallejo has appealed the injunction.

Prince, who is also representing homeless residents in the Vallejo lawsuit, said he plans to petition judges in the Berkeley cases to reconsider their rulings.

“We’ll continue fighting,” he said.

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