by Lukas Illa
On July 22, less than a year after London Breed attempted to restrict oversized vehicles from parking overnight on certain San Francisco streets, Mayor Daniel Lurie’s plan to effectively expand the ban on recreational vehicles (RVs) citywide passed the Board of Supervisors in a 9-2 vote. The ordinance will take effect on August 28.
The legislation has been broken into two parts: a two-hour parking restriction for large vehicles and a “Large Vehicle Refuge Permit” program under the SF Municipal Transportation Agency that would exempt RV households from the ban for six months. In short, the legislation pairs a carrot of paltry shelter and housing offers with the mighty stick of enforcement that will further criminalize homelessness in the streets of San Francisco.
During the vehicles’ exemption period, the City will purportedly conduct a six-month service outreach operation, where RV residents will be offered shelter or housing. But households without a permit, including RV residents who reject service offers or violate nebulous “good neighbor policies,” will be subject to the two-hour ban. According to statements from the mayor’s office, the City will ticket and tow unpermitted vehicles.
While the City frames its proposed refuge permit as a comprehensive protection that will help RV residents transition into long-term solutions, the City’s ultimate goal is to remove all RVs from city streets. The plan allocates $1.5 million for towing expenses over the next two fiscal years, which is projected to cover the costs incurred for removing 350 RVs.
The mayor’s plan also budgets $525,000 for a vehicle buyback program. At a rebate of $175 per linear foot, households with a 22 foot RV will be offered an estimated $3,850 for their vehicle—which may have been purchased for upwards of $10,000. But the slated buyback allocation is vastly underbudgeted. Based on these calculations, fewer than 150 RVs would be offered a buyback, leaving over 300 households out of luck.
But not all vehicle residents will receive a refuge permit or, for that matter, service offers. With a severely limited housing and shelter inventory, and the concern that RV residents outside of San Francisco would flock to the city with an announcement of shelter and housing offers, the Mayor’s office has limited permit eligibility to 437 RV households that the police department recorded in a single-day count in May.
Any RV that is not recorded in the City’s database will immediately face the two-hour restriction.
The mayor’s office and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing maintain that RV households will be issued “appropriate offers” of shelter or housing, but the Mayor’s budget—which the Board of Supervisors just approved—slates only 65 housing subsidies specific to families living in RVs—less than half of up to 140 vehicle-dwelling families.
The rest of the nearly 400 San Franciscans living in RVs will be offered noncongregate “interim housing”—the City’s new term for shelter. While such shelter provides a private room, the programs include carceral restrictions such as curfews, unannounced searches or “cleanings,” as well as bans on pets, outside food and visitors.
The City’s shrinking noncongregate portfolio is another hurdle to overcome. Two Geary Street shelter sites—the Adante and Monarch hotels—are slated for closure at the end of this year, the City’s current count will plummet by almost 200 noncongregate units from its current count of 560, bringing into question whether the City will have enough shelter to house the newly permitted RV residents. Moreover, some 400 single adults are on the City’s shelter waiting list— not including those affected by new parking restrictions.
In June, vehicle residents and their advocates organized protests against the proposed RV ban, stating that the plan’s shelter provisions do not meet the needs of soon-to-be displaced residents. In response to the protests, the City defended its shelter and housing inventory, citing an additional 600 subsidies and hotel vouchers for both families and single adults.
But this system-wide tally is practically irrelevant. San Francisco’s method of assessing unhoused folks for placement in the City’s limited housing stock—a process called “Coordinated Entry”—largely deprioritizes vehicularly housed people.
Coordinated Entry prioritizes housing offers to people—often street-homeless folks—with the greatest levels of acuity. Vehicle residents, whose RVs provide greater stability, protection and privacy, are therefore denied housing offers. In other words, vehicle residents will continue to compete with all other unhoused San Franciscans and face improbable odds at securing housing placements.
Most importantly, many vehicle residents are undocumented Spanish-speaking immigrants, both family and single adults alike. As the federal government kidnaps and violently deports undocumented community members, Lurie wants to further destabilize immigrant families’ lives by threatening their homes and limited financial assets. With an outreach strategy that heavily relies on cooperation with the San Francisco Police Department, how should anyone be expected to differentiate a municipal cop from a federal agent at the door of their RV, or—based on a recent investigation into SFPD’s collaboration with ICE—trust that service acceptance will actually result in shelter placement, not incarceration in one of the Trump regime’s detention camps?
On its face, this plan is ill-conceived. It skimps on the necessary time, budgetary considerations and available infrastructure to achieve its stated goal of providing long-term housing to vehicularly housed people. But Lurie’s plan is draconian at its core. The implication of a two-hour time limit criminalizes the fastest growing contingent of homeless people in San Francisco: the vehicularly housed. This effort stems directly from the continual capitulation of the Lurie administration to vocally anti-homeless neighbors who demand that f visible homelessness be scrubbed without any care for the treatment of homeless people themselves, nor the inventory of resources the City has to offer them.
Meanwhile, the City has ignored and openly resisted proven solutions, like safe parking sites and RV parks—both of which were recommended by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative’s 2022 vehicular homelessness study in Oakland. San Francisco’s only safe parking site, which offered on-site wraparound services and case management, closed in March—10 months ahead of schedule.
The City might put itself forward as supporting immigrants and other vulnerable communities, but San Francisco’s willful ignorance of research-backed solutions, coupled with increased policing and criminalization, will not forge a path out of this crisis.
