In September, outgoing Mayor London Breed announced a sweeping policy to crack down on people parking their RVs overnight around San Francisco.
The plan would have required RV dwellers to accept offers of shelter from city workers or otherwise have their vehicles towed and impounded — a move that was roundly decried by homeless advocates, who say that the vehicles are a last resort for people who would otherwise be on the street.
On Tuesday, however, the Board of Supervisors voted to send the policy back to the drawing board, criticizing the details of the plan, a lack of coordination between city departments, and the toll it could take on some of the city’s most vulnerable residents. Only three members of the board — moderate supervisors Matt Dorsey, Joel Engardio, and Rafael Mandelman — voted to uphold the ban.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency adopted the initial plan in October, empowering the department to create RV-free zones and install ban signage en masse, rather than on a case-by-case basis, at a cost of about $230,000 a year. But major pushback from advocates and RV residents led to a formal appeal, which the board voted on Tuesday night.
“I think it said something that there was nobody in public comment on Tuesday supporting the RV ban,” Hans Ege Wegner, an advocate for homeless issues who organizes with the Democratic Socialists of America, told Gazetteer SF.
With the ban overturned, police will only have the authority to give citations to RVs parked overnight in restricted areas. The city has said it will continue outreach to residents, to offer shelter and services.
The fight over RVs comes amid further cutbacks by the city on resources for unhoused people. Last month, the city revealed that it is implementing new limits on how long a homeless family can stay in city-run shelters. Then there’s the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center, a safe parking site for people living in cars and RVs at Candlestick Park that is slated to close in March. Operations at the center have been messy over its three-year lifespan; city officials only connected the site to reliable electrical power in October this year.
The center cost $15.5 million to create, but only served around 35 vehicles a night, according to the city. The city claims there was little interest from people who received services there in transitioning to permanent housing.
Research suggests that living on the street can substantially worsen outcomes compared to people who are unhoused but in some form of shelter. The city has substantially increased sweeps of unhoused people this year, including in Bayview and Hunters Point, where Gazetteer reported mass dumping of personal property and people getting detained by police.
The number of people living in vehicles around San Francisco has increased by 37% between 2022 and 2024, according to this year’s homelessness count. Of the 130 families experiencing unsheltered homelessness who were counted in the survey, 90% were sleeping in vehicles.
The phenomenon is especially acute in District 10, which spans from Potrero Hill to Candlestick. The area has seen a 78% increase in unsheltered homelessness in the last two years, mostly due to more people living in vehicles.