ACLU threatens Sebastopol with lawsuit for homelessness policies

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Disability Rights Advocates, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, and California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. filed suit against the city of Sebastopol for enacting an ordinance that prohibits vehicles “used for human habitation” from parking anywhere within city limits during the day. This action, aimed at driving the city’s most vulnerable residents out of town, follows a decades-long local and state failure to build affordable housing.

“This is part of a regional trend and it’s disturbing,” said Bill Freeman, senior counsel with the ACLU.

Unlike similar bans in other cities, the Sebastopol ordinance isn’t based on concerns about traffic safety or vehicle size. Instead, the ordinance explicitly targets vehicles designed or altered for human habitation, Freeman said.

Although the ordinance prohibits parking any vehicle in which a person could sleep, the city's ordinance will be enforced against people who are living in their vehicles or are otherwise considered undesirable, according to the complaint. Read the complaint.

“Sebastopol has not only failed to provide notice or guidelines for the police to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement; the city has made it clear that it intends to enforce the ordinance only against people who have been the subject of complaints or whom the police deem ‘undesirable,’ while giving wealthier residents a pass. This is discrimination, plain and simple.” said Alicia Roman, Staff Attorney at California Rural Legal Assistance.

The City of Sebastopol responded to the lawsuit, saying the statements made by the ACLU were untrue.

“The parking ordinance is only one part of the City’s broader efforts to balance care for the unhoused in the City with the needs of other City residents and businesses. The previous situation with unsafe, and unregulated continuous RV parking, especially on Morris Street, was untenable,” wrote City Manager and Attorney Larry McLaughlin. “The area was impacted by trash, sewage, human waste, and other public health and safety issues. Unfortunately, at least one of the residents living in an RV on Morris Street died there.”

The city says it hired an unhoused outreach coordinator who met individually with each of the persons residing in RVs in the City to offer them services and assistance to obtain more secure housing and worked with its partner Sonoma Applied Village Services (“SAVS”) to establish the Horizon Shine Village on a property within the City. The Horizon Shine Village houses 20 RVS and about 30 people who were formerly living on the City’s streets.

However, Freeman said neither Horizon Shine Village nor Elderberry Commons have enough capacity to house the number of homeless individuals living on Morris Street.

“This problem isn’t going away,” Freeman said. “You can’t just have people move from one place to the next.”

Freeman said the ACLU reached out to the City of Sebastopol prior to filing its lawsuit, inviting conversation and problem-solving.

“They said they’d defend the lawsuit,” Freeman said.

A discriminatory ordinance

In addition to being discriminatory, the ACLU noted that Sebastopol's ordinance is uniquely punitive and enacts a “one strike, you’re out” policy that calls for confiscating and impounding people’s only means of shelter with the first citation.

“It’s really disturbing when an individual community thinks they can solve the problem of homelessness by pushing people out,” Freeman said. “If someone’s vehicle is gone, they’re on the street and totally unsheltered. That’s the city having total power over someone.”

The threat of suddenly losing one’s shelter is immensely stressful to people already struggling to maintain stability in their lives, the ACLU noted.

McLaughlin noted that “ordinance does not prohibit unhoused residents from parking and sleeping on any City streets during the nighttime hours. It does, however, prohibit RVs and other defined vehicles from remaining parked on certain streets during certain hours of the day.”

That’s the heart of the issue: while the city’s ordinance allows individuals to sleep in their cars overnight on city streets, it bans them from staying on streets during most daytime hours.

“Everyone should be able to access a safe place where people can park and have access to trash disposal and city services and do what people do who live in a city,” Freeman said.

That lack of access is why the ACLU and Legal Aid finds the ordinance “worrisome” and hopes that focusing on this ordinance will prevent future similar ordinances, such as one the county is working on from coming to fruition, said Roman.

Freeman noted that there are too many people in Sonoma County and California who are one paycheck or one disaster away from being “where our plaintiffs are. We believe everyone has the right to a safe place, to access city services and to be people.”

That wasn’t the case for Michael Deegan.

“Instead of working with the homeless and providing a reasonable solution, Sebastopol came up with a draconian one, to ban homeless people living in their vehicles from the city,” said Deegan, a former resident of Sebastopol and one of the plaintiffs in the case. “As a result, I was forced to move to Santa Rosa where I have been assaulted by people and harassed by police. Sebastopol should overturn their RV Ban and find another solution that is more humane and reasonable.”

In 2021, the city council passed a resolution declaring the existence of a “homeless emergency.” According to the council, the “emergency” was not the human tragedy of community members being forced to live in vehicles. Rather, it was that the existence of these vehicularly-housed residents was “impacting adjacent property owners, neighborhood [sic], businesses… and the general public.”

Legal Aid of Sonoma County joined ACLU in working to advocate for those already displaced by the ordinance.

“Sebastopol cannot continue to pass the buck on the regional housing crisis by pushing people living in their vehicles into neighboring communities. This approach is both cruel and counterproductive. To solve homelessness, Bay Area cities must work together to facilitate housing development and provide services and safe shelter to the unhoused,” said Justin O. Milligan, Homelessness Prevention Attorney at Legal Aid of Sonoma County.

Sunny Noh, an attorney with Legal Aid of Sonoma County, added that Sonoma County’s Homelessness Point in Time Count results indicate the high need for more resources and help for the area’s homeless community.

“Even during COVID, with moratoriums and robust restrictions, our homeless population increased,” Noh said. “This is a high cost county and if we’re going to be a county that reflects a diversity of communities, experiences and people, we can’t exclude people with less resources.”

Thomas Zito, Supervising Attorney at Disability Rights Advocates added, “Sebastopol's failure to provide adequate affordable housing for its residents has disproportionate risk for our clients and others like them, who are low-income people with disabilities, who have been forced into housing of last resort – their vehicles. Living in an RV, car, or trailer is often much safer for people with disabilities than congregate shelters or living in a tent. Sebastopol cannot solve its housing crisis by driving unhoused people with disabilities out of town.”

City councilmembers did not respond to requests for comment, citing pending litigation.