San Francisco's ADA Appeal Could Gut Disability Rights Across Nine States

At 50 UN Plaza in San Francisco, in April 1977, more than 100 disabled people occupied a federal building for 25 days. They didn't leave until the government signed the regulations that gave Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act real teeth. The disability rights movement has deep roots in San Francisco's soil. Which makes what the City is now arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals not just legally alarming — it's historically dissonant in a way that demands attention.

The case is Kirola v. City and County of San Francisco (opens in new window), and it has been grinding through the federal courts for nearly 20 years. Ivana Kirola, a wheelchair user, filed suit in 2007 because San Francisco's parks, sidewalks, pools, and libraries were riddled with barriers that excluded people with mobility disabilities. She sued on behalf of approximately 21,000 San Franciscans in the same situation. She asked for no money. She asked the City to fix the barriers.

In September 2025, a trial judge ordered exactly that: citywide remediation, compliance checks on newly built or remodeled parks and recreation facilities, and policies ensuring future projects follow federal access rules. San Francisco appealed. In doing so, the City has advanced three legal arguments that, if accepted by the Ninth Circuit, would reshape disability rights enforcement across Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands.

Three Arguments That Would Rewrite ADA Enforcement

The City's positions deserve to be stated plainly, because the legal language can obscure what's actually being proposed.

First: Accessibility standards are negotiable. San Francisco argues that violating federal accessibility standards — the specific measurements that define how wide a doorway must be, how steep a ramp can be, how much maneuvering clearance a restroom requires — should no longer constitute a violation of the ADA (opens in new window) itself. Instead, judges would evaluate each feature individually to determine whether access is "meaningful enough."

The problem with this framing is that accessibility is a precision discipline. The difference between a ramp that a wheelchair user can navigate and one they cannot is often measured in fractions of an inch. Federal standards under 28 CFR Part 35 (opens in new window) exist precisely because "meaningful enough" is not a standard — it's a negotiation that disabled people consistently lose.

Second: Private enforcement rights don't exist. The City argues that private individuals have no right to sue over facilities built or altered in violation of accessibility standards. This is a direct challenge to the enforcement architecture of disability rights law. Private litigation is not a peripheral mechanism — it is the primary one. Federal agencies lack the resources to proactively monitor every public facility in every jurisdiction. The DOJ's own guidance (opens in new window) acknowledges that private enforcement is central to the ADA's effectiveness. Remove it, and you remove the incentive for cities to comply at all.

Third: Intent must be proven. San Francisco contends that plaintiffs must prove intentional discrimination to establish an access barrier claim. This argument misreads the statute's design. The ADA was written to cover the kind of discrimination that results from indifference and neglect — not just deliberate exclusion. Requiring proof of intent would immunize exactly the behavior the law was designed to address: the thoughtless construction of spaces that simply never accounted for disabled people.

These aren't fringe positions. They're carefully constructed legal arguments that, taken together, would hollow out the ADA's practical enforceability for millions of people.

What a Ninth Circuit Ruling Would Mean Across Nine States

The Ninth Circuit covers a vast geographic and demographic footprint. A ruling in San Francisco's favor wouldn't just affect one city's park renovation schedule. It would establish precedent that every municipality, transit authority, university, and public facility operator in nine states and two territories could immediately invoke.

Consider the downstream effects on higher education. Public universities throughout California, Washington, and Oregon are already navigating complex Title II compliance requirements across aging physical infrastructure. A ruling that federal measurements are merely advisory — that "meaningful access" is a case-by-case judicial determination — would create exactly the kind of standards fragmentation that makes systematic remediation impossible. Institutions would face a landscape where compliance means nothing certain, and litigation means everything unpredictable.

Public transit systems face a parallel risk. The ADA's physical access standards for stations, platforms, and vehicles are already difficult to enforce given the age of much transit infrastructure. Strip away private enforcement rights and measurement-based standards, and you've effectively told transit agencies that their existing barriers are legally defensible.

The Northeast ADA Center's analysis (opens in new window) of enforcement patterns consistently shows that private litigation creates the compliance pressure that voluntary commitment alone does not. This isn't a cynical observation — it's a structural reality of how civil rights law functions in practice. The Kirola case itself is evidence: 20 years of litigation to get a court order requiring San Francisco to fix what it should have fixed decades ago.

The Enforcement Gap This Would Create

Research on post-settlement implementation consistently shows that legal victories don't automatically translate into sustained accessibility improvements. Organizations often treat a settlement or court order as a compliance endpoint rather than a beginning. Now imagine that same dynamic without private enforcement rights at all — where the only path to accountability runs through federal agencies with limited investigative capacity and enormous caseloads.

San Francisco's arguments would create exactly that world. Cities would build to whatever standard their engineers and budget officers find convenient, knowing that the people most harmed by those choices have no practical legal recourse. The 21,000 San Franciscans Kirola represents — and the millions of disabled people across the Ninth Circuit — would be left with formal rights and no functional mechanism to enforce them.

What DREDF and 150+ Organizations Are Asking

On August 28, 2026, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) (opens in new window) and more than 150 disability organizations, San Francisco residents, and allies sent a letter to City Attorney David Chiu. The asks are specific:

• Meet with disabled community members before oral argument
• Withdraw the harmful legal arguments
• Commit publicly not to make them again
• Direct the City Attorney's Office not to raise them in future disability access litigation

The City was asked to respond by September 18, 2026. As of this writing, it has not.

Community response options are concrete:

• Email City Attorney Chiu at cityattorney@sfcityatty.org — a short, personal note about how inaccessible spaces affect your life carries more weight than a form letter
• Call your Supervisor and the Mayor's Office using the SF Find tool (opens in new window) and Board of Supervisors contact page (opens in new window)
• Attend oral argument when scheduled — DREDF will publicize the date, and a visible disabled presence in the courtroom matters
• Amplify through organizational letters, letters to the editor, and direct media outreach

What This Case Means for Disability Rights Enforcement

The Kirola appeal isn't primarily a story about San Francisco's parks. It's a test of whether the ADA's enforcement infrastructure survives contact with a city government that has decided the law is too inconvenient to follow as written.

San Francisco's arguments — that measurements don't matter, that private individuals can't enforce standards, that intent must be proven — aren't legally novel. Versions of these arguments have been advanced before. What makes this moment different is the venue (the Ninth Circuit's broad jurisdiction), the timing (a federal judiciary actively reconsidering civil rights enforcement scope), and the stakes (precedent affecting millions of people across a third of the country).

The ADA's Title II framework (opens in new window) was built on a clear premise: public entities must make their programs, services, and facilities accessible to disabled people, and those people must have the ability to enforce that obligation in court. San Francisco is asking the Ninth Circuit to dismantle both halves of that premise simultaneously.

The disability rights movement was born in San Francisco. The city now has a choice about what legacy it wants to carry forward from that history.