News & Commentary

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that cities can cite and arrest people simply for being homeless, San Francisco has ramped up aggressive enforcement against homeless encampments.

Governor Newsom’s so-called “CARE Court” plan would create a new court system that subjects unhoused people with mental health disabilities to involuntary treatment.

The ACLU News archive, dating back to 1945, documents the various forms of legalized housing discrimination leveled at Black people in Northern California, and also charts severe backlash to progress, whenever it was made. It provides a snapshot of the ways that businesses, the state, and individuals partnered to exclude Black people from the accumulation of wealth through dispossession and the denial of their means to secure a home.

Get out of town, or we’ll bury you in debt and seize your home - that's how Pacifica has decided to address RV dwellers.

Sometimes the trucks arrive early. Sometimes they come with no notice at all. Sometimes, while workers from the California Department of Transportation make their way down the row of tents—seizing property and cherished belongings—people have mere minutes or seconds to grab everything they can carry before their bedding, clothes, tools, bikes, medicine, food, shelter, and other property are thrown into a Caltrans trash compactor and destroyed.