Editor’s Note: This article was first published in Street Sheet at www.streetsheet.org
Still, the new law caught many who live in large vehicles off guard
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — At the same time that advocates for San Francisco’s vehicle-dwelling residents charged the City to protect RV and large vehicle residents from displacement by a parking enforcement program, City workers were removing trailers about five miles away.
On November 5, at a plaza on 16th and Harrison streets in the Mission District, members of the End Poverty Tows Coalition, San Francisco Latino Task Force and the Coalition on Homelessness staged a press conference with the theme, “No Tows Without Homes.”
Earlier that day in the Bayview neighborhood, staff from several City departments, including police, were already at work towing large vehicles that were not enrolled in the Large Vehicle Permit Program by the November 1 deadline. The San Francisco Standard posted on X videos of a tow on Ingalls Street where a resident failed to prevent the removal.
The tows are part of a citywide two-hour RV parking ban that the Board of Supervisors approved in July. The new restriction allowed vehicle dwellers to enroll in a permit program that excuses them from being ticketed and towed for six months.
However, of the 500-some RV households that the City counted last May, the Coalition on Homelessness estimates that fewer than half registered for a permit sticker to place on their vehicles as the deadline loomed. Advocates for unhoused folk are asking that the City allow more time for the rest of the counted households to register.
These households comprise a subset of the 4,354 San Franciscans living unsheltered, according to last year’s point-in-time count of unhoused people, with 90% of homeless families living on wheels. In a city where affordable housing for working and immigrant families grows ever more scarce, vehicles offer much needed shelter, said Gabriel Medina, executive director of La Raza Community Resource Center.
“While the City targets households sheltered in RVs, thousands more are sleeping on the streets, in cars, parks, (and) school gyms,” Medina said in a news release. “The City should be setting up safe parking and RV parks, while working to get everyone indoors.”
At the press conference, Medina added that RV residents are more sustainably housed than those living on the streets.
Inadequate outreach, language barriers and bureaucracy have plagued vehicular residents, according to RV dweller Zach Bollinger, who has kept abreast of the RV ban’s legislative process throughout the year. For one thing, the City undercounted inhabited vehicles, Bollinger said—“they count 15 RVs when there would be 20 or 25 RVs on the street.” Also, he said that residents found the permitting procedure too intimidating.
“When the [Homeless Outreach Team] would go around and try to talk to people and inform them of the process, they wouldn’t answer the door because there’s no trust,” Bollinger said. “And so they would talk to me, but they wouldn’t talk to the HOT team because I’m a neighbor providing them with the information about what I know, what I have learned from the City and through a variety of City Hall meetings, through this and through the news, and they have to sit there and digest all this information processing, (and) decide how they’re going to cope with it, what they’re going to do, what they need to do.”
Bollinger added that he was educating his neighbors about the permit process and encouraging them to attend the information meetings up until the registration deadline, but found that they were still unaware of the ban soon to take effect.
“It’s like the city just kind of passed this thing and said, ‘Well, we’re going to pass this. And whatever happens, happens,’” he said.
Permit holders face an impossible choice, advocates say: They must accept any shelter offer, even if it doesn’t meet their needs, or if they refuse, lose their permit and risk towing.
It appears that the City’s supply of housing options outweighs the demand. According to the Department of Emergency Management, “To support exits from vehicles, this year’s budget added 100 new adult rapid re-housing (RRH) slots for people in large vehicles, 100 new RRH slots for transition-aged youth, and 50 hotel vouchers for adults, providing immediate relief and pathways to stability.”
Assuming these figures are accurate, that’s enough to cover the 238 RV households that already received their permit stickers as of October 28, according to estimates from the Coalition on Homelessness, the homeless advocacy organization that publishes Street Sheet. Still, that leaves the majority of counted vehicles—275—without a sticker.
“There was no pathway for people who are unable to navigate the overly bureaucratic, unnecessary process to be able to move forward,” Coalition on Homelessness director Jennifer Friedenbach said. “This is the city of St. Francis, and this policy in no way reflects the values of San Francisco.”
TJ Johnston is the editor-in-chief of Street Sheet, which is published by the Coalition on Homelessness, a San Francisco based homeless advocacy organization. He has contributed to several Bay Area publications.
