California Governor Gavin Newsom (center) and Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg (second from right) meet tour rooms at the the Henry Robinson Multi-Service Center before a press conference announcing a newly created state-level homeless commission alongside Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and other Alameda County and state officials in Oakland in 2019.

In the Tenderloin, it was UC Hastings College of the Law that sued the city of San Francisco over “abandoning” the neighborhood to tents and open drug dealing. In Venice Beach, a couple with two kids filed suit against Los Angeles over the tent city outside their front door. From Phoenix to Portland, Ore., other cases brought by residents fed up with what they see as the ill effects of homeless encampments are also winding through the courts.

Now, a Sacramento city ballot measure will ask voters to go a step farther: Measure O, officially called the “Emergency Shelter and Enforcement Act of 2022,” would create a new public nuisance process for private citizens to take legal action against the city over encampments.

Supporters say the proposal is an outgrowth of years of government inaction as housing prices skyrocketed and homelessness soared 67% in the past three years alone, to a record 9,278 people identified in a February county survey. But it’s a tactic also spurring comparisons to what civil liberties groups call “bounty hunting” laws in Texas and California, which essentially deputized private citizens to sue medical providers over abortion or gunmakers over firearm violence.

“That’s the trend,” said Mark Merin, a Sacramento attorney who unsuccessfully sued to block Measure O in Sacramento. “It’s a new way of providing disseminated enforcement powers.”

In the context of homelessness, adding ways for citizens to sue is a prospect that advocates say could supercharge the number of lawsuits flying over encampments — and in the process, create complications for both unhoused people and public coffers.

The expanded process for encampment disputes outlined in the Nov. 8 ballot measure, which is funded by real estate firms and executives from businesses including the Sacramento Kings, would be one part of a broader shift in city homelessness policy. Measure O would also allow for more encampment sweeps through enforcement of local anti-camping measures. The clearings would be allowed only if Sacramento can initially add 605 new emergency shelter spaces — whether outdoor or indoor, congregate or individual — in a city with an unsheltered population at least eight times that size.

Some unhoused residents and their advocates see the effort as an example of cities seeking new ways around a landmark court case, Martin v. Boise, which held that it violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment to prohibit people from sleeping outside if there is no alternative.

“Using lawsuits to solve homelessness through constructive policies is not an aim,” said Tristia Bauman, a senior attorney with the National Homelessness Law Center. “These lawsuits are aimed at removing visibly homeless people.”

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who voted along with the City Council to put Measure O on the ballot earlier this year, emphasized that any citizens who file legal claims over encampments would still have to go through the justice system.

“It just gives the people of the city a voice,” Steinberg said. “They still would have to go to court, and the standard would be the standard.”

Bitter court cases over housing policy are nothing new in California. Earlier this year, a lawsuit filed by Berkeley homeowners over student housing at the city’s famous public university got so heated that lawmakers had to intervene to avoid slashing enrollment by more than 2,000 students.

From Oakland to Sausalito to San Jose, unhoused people have also increasingly filed their own civil rights lawsuits with the help of groups like the California Homeless Union. Some have won temporary delays of encampment sweeps, restitution for destroyed property or cash settlements paid in exchange for closing a sanctioned tent city.

But with the new Sacramento ballot measure, homeless advocates fear that a trend toward endowing citizens with more power to bring vigilante-style lawsuits could make life harder for the city’s most vulnerable residents.

The first such law was a 2021 Texas abortion ban that deputized citizens to sue any doctor or clinics that “aids or abets” patients in seeking the medical procedure more than six weeks into a pregnancy. The approach was then adapted to California’s gun control debate by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fierce critic of the Texas law, when he proposed and signed a bill to allow concerned citizens to sue makers of illegal assault weapons and ghost guns.

“This bill creates a ‘bounty-hunter’ scheme,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a May letter opposing the California gun control measure, “that authorizes private individuals to bring costly and harassing lawsuits designed and intended to intimidate people.”

In Sacramento, Measure O would create a new legal process for “any resident harmed by a violation” of anti-camping laws on city-owned property to first file a nuisance notice, starting a 45-day clock for the city to inspect and abate any violations. If the nuisance remains, residents may file a legal appeal to argue the case in front of a hearing examiner, and “the resident shall be entitled to recover from the city their costs and reasonable attorney’s fees incurred.”

The lobbyist who brought Measure O to Sacramento and sees promise in replicating it elsewhere said the idea is to use the legal system to extend long-standing nuisance laws for private property to city-owned land.

“The real innovation is this public nuisance piece,” said Daniel Conway, chair of campaign committee Sacramentans for Safe and Clean Streets and Parks. “You have to maintain public property in the same way a private property owner has to maintain private property.”

For critics of Measure O, the concern is twofold. First, they fear that the measure would merely push unhoused people out of sight, rather than addressing an underlying lack of permanent housing. City officials who oppose the measure also worry that new encampment lawsuits could prove hugely expensive, taking time and money away from housing solutions.

Sacramento City Council Member Katie Valenzuela opposes Measure O and represents a downtown corridor where development interests and housing needs often collide. She worries that the provision exposes the city to an unknown number of citizen lawsuits that could clog courts and quickly exceed a $5 million-a-year general fund cap outlined for “commitments, obligations and liabilities” created by the measure.

“We can’t tell a court, ‘Hey, sorry, we hit our $5 million cap,’” said Valenzuela, who wrote the official rebuttal to Measure O. “It’s going to become all we do responding to these cases.”

Homeless advocate Bob Erlenbusch said he thinks the city should prepare for that reality. The executive director of Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, which catalogs the rising number of homeless deaths in the county, also opposes Measure O but thinks frustrated residents will vote for it.

Still, the political path forward is murky. Even if voters approve the ballot measure, it can go into effect only if the city and county enter into a formal agreement to create as many as 2,420 new shelter spots in the city during the measure’s first year. No such agreement had been reached as of Sept. 22 over what kind of shelter slots that might include, who would provide the funding, what social services might be offered or other fundamental details from public officials.

“I think it’s sort of a veiled admission that they failed,” Erlenbusch said. “Because they have failed. I mean, the county hasn’t done s—.”

While debate rages in Sacramento and other cities struggling to respond to rapid increases in homelessness, those living the reality say backlash is already palpable.

Eureka, a 31-year-old from the Midwest with blue eyes and bookish glasses, pondered the new Sacramento measure on a sweltering recent morning after an ugly run-in with two teenagers. One of them, he said, “hocked a loogie” at him as he searched for a morning cup of coffee.

“You’re punishing people for being the most spat-on part of society,” said Eureka, who declined to give his full name due to fear of retribution.

Stereotypes rehashed in recent city meetings and reports add to the tension, painting encampments as hotbeds of criminal activity, disease and hazardous waste. Or, as Council Member Jeff Harris put it last month, “a lot of crime, a lot of filth.” The narratives often overtake statistical realities, like a recent state water study that showed birds — not unhoused people — were responsible for high levels of E. coli in the Lower American River.

A city staff report on Measure O also acknowledged a Catch-22 underlying the political gridlock. Housing is the solution to homelessness, most sides agree, but that solution is still far off.

Bauman of the National Homelessness Law Center said similar conversations are playing out all over the country as housing costs surge. Tennessee lawmakers, for instance, recently voted to make it a felony for homeless people to camp outside. In San Francisco and other cities, police are investigating outbursts of violence against unhoused people, including the case of a 43-year-old man killed in the Mission District when his sleeping bag was lit on fire.

Often, Bauman said, public frustration appears to be more focused on breakdowns in civil services, like public safety or trash collection, rather than people sleeping or surviving outside.

“They can’t disappear,” Bauman said. “They do need to live somewhere.”

For Eureka, who left home at 18 and has been mostly homeless in the 13 years since, the road across the country — through more outwardly hostile places in the heartland to supposedly more permissive California — was long, traumatic and “weird.” There was one time in Indianapolis, he remembers, when he jolted awake in an encampment under a bridge to people in black tactical gear slashing tents open and firing pepperballs. During a sandstorm in Palm Springs, he recalled taking shelter in a car wash, only to be chased off by a black Mustang.

Through it all, Eureka said he’s been able to purchase just momentary spells of stability. His longest stretch in housing was three years in an apartment in Cleveland. Back in Bloomington, Ind., he held a factory job for a year, until he said a PTSD break led to him being fired.

Standing near the entrance of the city library in Sacramento this fall, his mind drifted to what might come next. It felt like the city was done with him, and the feeling had become mutual.

“Honestly,” he said, “I’m gonna be here just long enough to get enough money for a bus ticket out.”

Lauren Hepler and Raheem Hosseini are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: lauren.hepler@sfchronicle.com, raheem.hosseini@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LAHepler, @raheemfh

Lauren Hepler covers housing and neighborhood retail for The San Francisco Chronicle's race and equity team. Her past stories on housing, labor and climate issues have been published by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian, among others. She was previously a staff economic reporter at CalMatters, Protocol and the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Lauren grew up in Ohio, studied U.S. history at George Washington University and has a master's degree from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Before joining The Chronicle to be its race and equity editor in February 2021, Raheem Hosseini served as editor of the Amador Ledger-Dispatch and spent more than eight years writing and editing stories for his hometown alternative weekly, the Sacramento News & Review, the last several as its news editor. Raheem has also reported stories for The Guardian, CalMatters and Capital Public Radio, among others, and his work's been credited or cited by The Atlantic, The New York Times, Washington Post and ProPublica. He has a bachelor's degree in contemporary literature from UC Berkeley.