Sixteen hundred dollars’ worth of clothing. A $170 tent. A $50 Igloo cooler.
A Tumi suitcase. A Timbuk2 backpack. A Nintendo Switch. A $400 Best Buy gift card.
Those were among the belongings that Daniel Tavake said San Francisco city workers took from him and disposed of after sweeping his Tenderloin District homeless camp in late December.
Two months later, he filed a complaint with the city alleging that his constitutional rights had been violated. He had been awakened that morning by someone shaking his tent near the Taylor and Eddy street intersection, he wrote. He stepped out and saw workers with the city’s public-works department tossing people’s tents and belongings into a garbage truck.
“I had to just watch as the city threw all my possessions and my shelter away,” he wrote, adding that he wasn’t allowed to gather his things. He felt “hopeless,” “violated,” and “like the city government did not care about me and that if they could throw me away too, they would.”
He sought $10,000 in reimbursement from the city, including $2,875 for his pain and suffering.
Less than two weeks later, another man filed a complaint with the city, an increasingly common practice in San Francisco. His complaint mirrored Tavake’s word for word. He, too, felt “hopeless” and “violated,” and like the city would throw him away if it could. His list of disposed-of belongings was identical to Tavake’s.
In late March, the city received at least two more complaints that were nearly identical to Tavake’s. One was from the same late-December sweep at Taylor and Eddy, while the other was tied to an early-December sweep at another Tenderloin District intersection.
Complaints like these are causing some San Francisco leaders to question the validity of nearly 200 similar complaints the city has received over the last three years.
In the complaints, homeless residents allege that city workers are violating their rights by conducting homeless-camp sweeps without notice and trashing their belongings rather than bagging and tagging them, per city policy.
The number of complaints has skyrocketed this year after the city agreed to settle two dozen of them late last year, incentivizing more people to give it a go. So far in 2023, the city has received more than 100 claims from homeless residents, most seeking $10,000 payouts, the maximum allowed in small-claims courts, according to an analysis by National Review.
But the review found that many of the complaints are nearly identical, and in some cases appear to have been copied word-for-word. In other cases, residents have filed multiple complaints seeking $10,000 payouts, sometimes just days apart. And in very few cases did the complainants provide any evidence to back up their alleged losses — many claimed to have high-end clothing, expensive electronics, and priceless heirlooms and art in their tents.
The uptick in claims has clearly frustrated at least some city leaders.
“The city is not an ATM for $10,000 checks,” City Attorney David Chiu told the San Francisco Chronicle in late March. Chiu vowed to “defend our city” from the apparent fraud.
This barrage of complaints is the latest flashpoint in San Francisco’s growing crisis of crime and homelessness, which is plaguing the notoriously left-wing city.
Last year, the city counted 7,754 homeless people living in the city, and more than half of them were unsheltered. Their tents line public sidewalks, which are often littered with garbage and debris. People sleep in parks, slouch in wheelchairs, and use drugs openly.
Complaints by San Francisco residents about human and animal waste on the streets and sidewalks are on the rise. A former San Francisco fire commissioner said he was recently attacked with a pipe after he asked a group of homeless men not to camp near his mother’s front porch. This week, a Whole Foods supermarket closed in downtown San Francisco due to increased drug use and deteriorating street conditions near the store.
Still, advocates for the homeless argue that city staffers are too hard on the “unhoused.”
Last year, a group called the Coalition on Homelessness and a group of homeless San Francisco residents sued the city, claiming that it regularly violates its own policies on clearing encampments, offering people shelter, and trashing homeless people’s belongings. On its website, the coalition calls the city “the biggest thief and abuser in San Francisco.”
“Sometimes it takes these kinds of actions to get them to change,” Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the coalition, told National Review of the complaints. She acknowledged that her organization is helping some homeless residents to file complaints against the city.
“If they don’t want to pay out money,” she said, “they should just start following their own policy.”
National Review obtained 188 complaints and claims filed against the city since early 2020. The majority have been filed since the first of the year. Most involve allegedly homeless residents who claim their camps were swept without notice and their belongings were trashed.
Many of the complaints appear to be implausible, and possibly fraudulent, making it difficult to identify which claims may, in fact, be legitimate.
The items they reported lost typically include common things like tents, tarps, sleeping bags, clothes, and personal-hygiene products. Some residents reported that their tools were taken, depriving them of a means to earn money. Several claimed they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of the city sweeps.
Many claimed, without providing almost any evidence, to also have had expensive, and in some cases irreplaceable, items taken, including a 14-karat gold pocket watch worth $1,200, high-end musical gear and electronics (a Les Paul Gem Series guitar, a $2,600 electric bike), Air Jordan basketball shoes, a signed Dale Earnhardt Jr. jacket worth $500, and vintage ’80s rock t-shirts worth $300. One woman claimed to have had $8,500 in cash in her tent when it was trashed.
Many also claimed to have lost “priceless” items, including baseball-card and stamp collections, journals documenting their experiences with homelessness, family photos and heirlooms, “business prototypes,” deceased loved ones’ ashes, and poetry and music they wrote.
At least two men who filed nearly the exact same complaint, claiming to be artists who sell their work online and to tourists, said that mixed-media sculptures they’d both made of Kobe Bryant ($370) and the Bionic Man ($425) had been confiscated and destroyed by the city, along with other finished and unfinished projects that they both valued at $1,650.
“My art is precious to me,” both men wrote in their complaints.
The claimants have also typically made requests for emotional distress or for their pain and suffering, claims that often far exceed the cost of their physical possessions. Those claims range from a few hundred dollars to over $9,000.
One man was clear about how he determined the value of his suffering: “As for emotional and psychological damage, I can not easily put a price on that so I calculated that number by coming up with a number to even out my claim to give me the maximum of $10,000,” he wrote.
National Review identified several cases where the list of items allegedly taken and disposed of by city workers were identical or nearly identical. In some cases, people made multiple claims looking for multiple payouts.
One man, for example, filed a $10,000 claim against the city after his encampment near some train tracks was swept in January 2020. Included in the $10,000 claim was $8,012 for emotional distress. He filed a second $10,000 claim for another sweep that occurred a week later. That second claim included another $8,811 for emotional distress. He filed both complaints on the same day in May 2020.
“I had just begun to gather up belongings, to try and rebuild my life and get back on my feet when the City came by again,” he wrote. “This sweep, like the one before it, caused me undue anxiety and stress.”
At least a couple of the complaints came from people who weren’t on the street, but whose possessions were discarded by shelter-in-place hotel staffers. One man claimed that shelter staff discarded $164,850 worth of his belongings in a trash bin, including 120 pairs of jeans, 300 shirts, five pairs of gold cufflinks, and five tuxedos.
Very few of the complaints reviewed by National Review provided any backup material — including photos or receipts — to help validate the claims of loss.
“In any claim, the burden to prove liability and damages rests on the claimant,” Jen Kwart, a spokeswoman for the City Attorney’s Office, wrote in an email. “When the City receives a claim, a claims investigator is assigned to the matter and conducts an internal and external investigation. However, in these situations where a claimant provides no evidence to support the claim, the City will almost always deny the claim.”
If the city denies a claim, the claimant can file a lawsuit in small-claims court. Last year, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Michelle Tong awarded $10,000 to a series of residents, even though most had no documentation to back up their claims. The city appealed, but ended up settling two dozen claims, paying out $132,117, with payments ranging from $500 to $10,000.
One man who received a $10,000 payout from the city claimed to have had $4,555 worth of items taken from him, including a 24-karat gold necklace worth $1,500, an $1,800 generator, and San Francisco Giants and 49ers blankets worth $150. He also claimed $5,445 in emotional damages. He doesn’t appear to have provided any documentation to back up his claim.
The city’s willingness to settle claims and to make some payments seems to have spurred more complaints and led the city to avoid further settlements.
Friedenbach, with the Coalition on Homelessness, said they advise people submitting complaints to provide as much documentation as possible to make a better case, but she said that tends to be challenging for homeless people because their phones and documents are often lost or stolen. She said she saw no issue with people pricing their emotional distress at a dollar amount to reach the $10,000 maximum for small-claims court.
“I’m sure people, if they were putting a real price tag on it, would feel like it was a lot higher, somebody losing their parents’ ashes, or something like that,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with putting the maximum amount.”
The bigger problem, she said, is that the city regularly violates its own policy, which requires staff to bag and tag unattended possessions, and to store them until they can be picked up.
Kwart said the city is abiding by its bag-and-tag policy, which allows staff to dispose of abandoned items — items that are “unaccompanied by objective indications of ownership, for example, an empty or broken tent sitting by itself on a sidewalk with no other belongings, a bag of clothes open and strewn across a sidewalk, or items that are broken, disheveled, surrounded by trash or show other signs of neglect.”
She also pointed to a section of the policy that states, “If personal belongings are co-mingled or littered with needles, human waste or other health risks, staff may dispose of the entire pile of belongings and are not required to sort through and attempt to remove the health or safety risks.”
Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for San Francisco Public Works, declined to comment for this story due to the ongoing litigation around homeless encampments.
In December, a magistrate judge overseeing the coalition’s lawsuit temporarily banned the city from clearing most homeless encampments or citing people for sleeping in public. Kwart said the city is abiding by the preliminary injunction, though media reports indicate that the city’s efforts to clean and clear homeless camps have continued.
Chiu has appealed the December ruling, calling it “untenable.”
San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman told the Chronicle that the situation is “infuriating,” and that public-works staff have “an impossible task of keeping the city clean.”
“With this population camping, or worse, storing stuff in our public spaces, it does not work,” he said, “we cannot accept that.