Vol. I, No. 34 · San Francisco — Monday, September 7, 2026 · Price: quorum met, barely

BY GWEN OKAFOR, HOUSING DESK

On May 4, 2020, six plaintiffs led by the University of California's Hastings law school sued San Francisco in federal court. Their complaint said tents crowding the Tenderloin's sidewalks had become impassable during a pandemic. About five weeks later, the city agreed to a court-supervised settlement. It would remove 300 of the roughly 416 tents a contractor had counted in the neighborhood on June 5, about 70 percent, and it had until July 20 to do it.

San Francisco beat that target, and beat it early. The city's own daily count first fell to 115 tents on July 10, ten days ahead of the deadline and already under the settlement's 116-tent threshold. By July 17, three days before the deadline, the count had fallen further still, to 77. A federal court had forced a specific, dated promise. By its own yardstick, the city kept it ahead of schedule and by a wide margin. HSOC began moving unsheltered Tenderloin residents into shelter-in-place hotel rooms on June 10, five days into the count, and continued through the settlement window. That is how the tents came down. What happened over the following year complicates the story.

The count kept falling after the deadline passed. It bottomed out at 21 tents on October 15, 2020, a 95 percent cut from the June baseline. The Healthy Streets Operations Center, HSOC, the city's multi-department team for the neighborhood, published the number every day. Urban Alchemy, a community organization under contract with the Department of Public Works, took the actual census; city staff checked the figures before they were posted.

The number did not stay there. It climbed through the winter, back into the 60s and 70s by December, and kept climbing through the spring. By June 30, 2021, the last day of the daily count, it stood at 83 tents. That was still 80 percent below where the count began in June 2020, and about four times the October low.

Nobody announced that the counting had stopped. A judge dismissed the underlying lawsuit on October 7, 2020, but kept the court's authority to enforce the settlement's terms. The daily tally simply ends five days after that June 30 reading, with no public explanation on the file itself. This desk found no successor dataset that continues it, so whether the settlement's further promise, permanently reducing tents to zero, was ever kept cannot be checked from the public record.

A court order with a number and a date attached worked, fast. Nothing in the record suggests the discipline behind it survived past the deadline it was built for. Confidence in the settlement terms and the daily counts is high, drawn from the city's own contractor and from the case's own filings. Confidence in why the public count ends in June 2021 is low: this desk could not reach HSOC or the City Attorney's office by deadline, and no city record explains the stop.