Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Life-Course Epidemiology and Social Inequalities in Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1516105
This article is part of the Research Topic Exploring the Multidimensional Impact of Homelessness on Health and Social Inclusion View all 9 articles

Geospatial Evaluation of San Francisco, California's Homeless Encampment Sweeps Injunction

Provisionally accepted
Sean Gregory Young Sean Gregory Young 1*Vincent Truong Vincent Truong 1William P. Watson William P. Watson 2Cari A. Bogulski Cari A. Bogulski 2
  • 1 University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, United States
  • 2 University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Homelessness remains a pervasive issue in many communities within the United States. "Sit-lie" policies restrict where individuals can sit or lie down in public places and are frequently passed and cited to forcibly re-locate individuals experiencing homelessness. In December 2022, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction of San Francisco, California's sit-lie policy, due to a pending lawsuit arguing that the enforcement of such policies when shelter cannot be offered is a violation of the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution. To examine the effects of this preliminary injunction, we spatially examined data from San Francisco's 311 reporting system to identify encampment report hot spots. Overall, we found spatial shifting of encampment reporting, but fewer reports overall during the preliminary injunction period, relative to one year prior. Future work should examine the effect of the reversal of the injunction following a recent Supreme Court decision and subsequent ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

    Keywords: Homelessness, Encampments, Public Policy, 311 data, Cluster detection, Hot spot analysis

    Received: 23 Oct 2024; Accepted: 10 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Young, Truong, Watson and Bogulski. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Sean Gregory Young, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.