Residents and businesses in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood have filed a lawsuit against the city, accusing officials of running a covert policy of corraling illegal drug dealing and use to their neighborhood and allowing homeless tent encampments to crowd sidewalks.
In a complaint filed on March 14 at the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, four individual plaintiffs said they fear for the safety of their families, and three businesses said the conditions on sidewalks scare away customers.
The 38-page complaint asks for no monetary damages but seeks only injunctive relief in the form of prohibiting the City of San Francisco from treating the Tenderloin neighborhood as a “containment zone for narcotic activities.”
The plaintiffs allege that San Francisco has had an unofficial policy of letting drug dealers “brazenly” sell narcotics on the streets and sidewalks in Tenderloin, with addicts living on Tenderloin streets, discarding garbage on sidewalks around them, defecating in public, and supporting their habit by stealing.
“For years, the de facto policy of the city has been to corral and confine illegal drug dealing and usage, and the associated injurious behaviors, to the Tenderloin. The city tries to keep such crimes and nuisances out of other San Francisco neighborhoods by ‘containing’ them in the Tenderloin,” the plaintiffs wrote in the complaint.
The covert policy allegedly infringes on the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, including by limiting their ability to protect their property, obtain safety and privacy, and “defend their life and liberty.”
A request for comment sent to the City Attorney of San Francisco was not returned.
“While we understand and share the frustration of Tenderloin businesses and residents, the city is making progress in reducing crime, disrupting open-air drug markets, and addressing homelessness, all while complying with the preliminary injunction issued in the Coalition on Homelessness case,” Ms. Kwart said.
‘Difficult and Scary’
The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit filed by Tenderloin residents and businesses on March 14 argue that the City of San Francisco has had a covert policy in place to keep various drug-related crimes and nuisances out of other neighborhoods by confining them to Tenderloin.“The City’s acts and omissions have harmed and damaged each plaintiff by causing the public sidewalks and spaces around their homes and businesses to become dangerous, impassable, and unsanitary,” the complaint states.
The plaintiffs don’t want any money from the city, only an order requiring that officials stop treating Tenderloin as a “containment zone” and comply with its responsibility to ensure that sidewalks and public spaces in the neighborhood are kept clean, safe, and accessible.
Fentanyl and other potent and highly addictive, deadly synthetic opiates have come to dominate the drug market in Tenderloin, the plaintiffs say, resulting in a throng of fentanyl addicts who engage in “compulsive” drug-seeking activity and associated actions, such as living on the streets and engaging in crime.
The four individual plaintiffs say they fear for the safety of their families as addicts in Tenderloin openly inject and smoke narcotics in front of children, roam the neighborhood while high or undergoing withdrawal, littering sidewalks with used drug paraphernalia and human waste, and commit crimes to support their habit.
The complaint includes dozens of dramatic photographs of homeless encampments blocking sidewalks and of people injecting drugs.
Plaintiff “Barbara Roe finds it ‘difficult and scary’ to navigate through the crowds around her residence,” the complaint reads. “People under the influence block the door to her building. When she politely asks them to move so that she can pass, she fears that they will attack her.”
“Recently, one of her neighbors was attacked and injured at the entrance to their building and had to go to the emergency room to receive stitches. There are bonfires on the sidewalk. The smoke sometimes triggers her building’s fire alarm, forcing her and her neighbors to evacuate into the threatening crowd,” the complaint states.
The three business plaintiffs, including Phoenix Hotel SF LLC, argue that the city’s covert policy of turning Tenderloin into a drug containment zone has led to people who seem like gang members openly selling fentanyl and other potent narcotics near their places of business.
“Encampments, garbage and biological hazards make it difficult or impossible for even able-bodied guests and patrons to navigate on the public walkways around the hotel,” the complaint reads.
The conditions around the Phoenix Hotel scare off potential hotel and restaurant patrons, the complaint alleges, leading current business to plummet.
‘Derelict Zombie Apocalypse’
A recent article blaming San Francisco’s problems of crime and rampant homelessness on progressive policies drew a scathing reaction from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who said that the “woke mind virus” had driven the “once beautiful and thriving” area to ruin.“What the [expletive] happened to this place?” Mr. Chappelle said during the show before mocking a situation in which a homeless person had defecated in front of a restaurant the comedian was eating at in the Bay Area earlier in the week.
In satirizing the rapid decline of San Francisco, Mr. Chappelle blamed the city’s problems on progressive local politicians, per the article, which was published by the right-leaning news outlet Rebel News and posted on X by political commentator Ian Miles Cheong.
“Rightly so,” Mr. Musk responded to Mr. Cheong’s post. “The disaster that is downtown SF, once beautiful and thriving, now a derelict zombie apocalypse.”
Mr. Musk added that the downfall of San Francisco “is due to the woke mind virus.”
The Tesla chief has on previous occasions used the term “woke mind virus” to refer to radically progressive ideologies that he said were driving society to collapse.
