SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco is set to ban homeless people from living in RVs by adopting strict new parking limits the mayor says are necessary to keep sidewalks clear and prevent trash build-up.
The policy, up for final approval by San Francisco supervisors Tuesday, targets at least 400 recreational vehicles in the city of 800,000 people. The RVs serve as shelter for people who can’t afford housing, including immigrant families with kids.
Those who live in them say they’re a necessary option in an expensive city where affordable apartments are impossible to find. But Mayor Daniel Lurie and other supporters of the policy say motor homes are not suitable for long-term living and the city has a duty to both provide shelter to those in need and clean up the streets.
“We absolutely want to serve those families, those who are in crisis across San Francisco,” said Kunal Modi, who advises the mayor on health, homelessness and family services. “We feel the responsibility to help them get to a stable solution. And at the same time, we want to make sure that that stability is somewhere indoors and not exposed in the public roadway.”
Critics of the plan, however, say that it’s cruel to force people to give up their only home in exchange for a shot at traditional housing when there is not nearly enough units for all the people who need help; the mayor is only offering additional money to help 65 households.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, says city officials are woefully behind on establishing details of an accompanying permit program, which will exempt RV residents from parking limits so long as they are working with homeless outreach staff to find housing.
“I think that there’s going to be people who lose their RVs. I think there’s going to be people who are able to get into shelter, but at the expense” of people with higher needs, like those sleeping on a sidewalk, she said.
San Francisco, like other U.S. cities, has seen an explosion in recent years of people living out of vehicles and RVs as the cost of living has risen. Banning oversized vehicles is part of Lurie’s pledge to clean up San Francisco streets, and part of a growing trend to require homeless people to accept offers of shelter or risk arrest or tows.
The proposal sets a two-hour parking limit citywide for all RVs and oversized vehicles longer than 22 feet (7 meters) or higher than 7 feet (2 meters), regardless of whether they are being used as housing.
Under the accompanying permit program, RV residents registered with the city as of May are exempt from the parking limits. In exchange, they must accept the city’s offer of temporary or longer-term housing, and get rid of their RV when it’s time to move. The city has budgeted more than half a million dollars to buy RVs from residents at $175 per foot.
The permits will last for six months. People in RVs who arrive after May will not be eligible for the permit program and must abide by the two-hour rule, which makes it impossible for a family in an RV to live within city limits.
It first cleared the Board of Supervisors last week with two of 11 supervisors voting “no.”
Carlos Perez, 55, was among RV residents who told supervisors at a hearing this month that they could not afford the city’s high rents. Perez works full-time as a produce deliveryman and supports his brother, who lives with him and is unable to work due to a disability.
“We don’t do nothing wrong. We try to keep this street clean,” he said, as he showed his RV recently to an Associated Press journalist. “It’s not easy to be in a place like this.”
Yet, Perez also loves where he lives. The green-colored RV is decorated with a homey houseplant and has a sink and a tiny stove on which Carlos simmered a bean soup on a recent afternoon.
He’s lived in San Francisco for more than 30 years, roughly a decade of which has been in the RV in the working-class Bayview neighborhood. He can walk to work and it is close to the hospital where his brother receives dialysis multiple times a week.
Zach, another RV resident who requested being identified by his first name to not jeopardize his ability to get work, started living in the vehicle a dozen years ago after realizing that no matter how hard he worked, he still struggled to pay rent.
Now he works as a ride-hail driver and pursues his love of photography. He parks near Lake Merced in the city near the Pacific Ocean and pays $35 every two to four weeks to properly dispose of waste and fill the vehicle with fresh water.
He says Lurie’s plan is short-sighted. There is not enough housing available and many prefer to live in an RV over staying at a shelter, which may have restrictive rules. For Zach, who is able-bodied, maintains a clean space and has no dependents, moving to a shelter would be a step down, he says. Still, he expects to receive a permit.
“If housing were affordable, there is a very good chance I wouldn’t be out here,” he said.
RV dwellers say San Francisco should open a safe parking lot where residents could empty trash and access electricity. But city officials shuttered an RV lot in April, saying it cost about $4 million a year to service three dozen large vehicles and it failed to transition people to more stable housing.
The mayor’s new proposal comes with more money for beefed-up RV parking enforcement — but also an additional $11 million, largely for a small number of households to move to subsidized housing for a few years.
Officials acknowledge that may not be sufficient to house all RV dwellers, but notes that the city also has hotel vouchers and other housing subsidies.
Erica Kisch, CEO of nonprofit Compass Family Services, which assists homeless families, says they do not support the punitive nature of the proposal but are grateful for the extra resources.
“It’s recognition that households should not be living in vehicles, that we need to do better for families, and for seniors and for anyone else who’s living in a vehicle,” she said. “San Francisco can do better, certainly.”