Kenny Cocking, his two dogs, and his RV will soon face San Francisco’s new “intensive enforcement” of parking rules that threaten to push him and hundreds of others living in mobile homes out of the city — or back onto its streets.
Kenny, 34, lives in his RV along with hundreds of other individuals and families, which for years have parked near Lake Merced on the western edge of the city behind the Stonestown Galleria mall. Replacing the flooring in his 1994 Rexhall motorhome, he describes a tacit agreement with nearby homeowners and parking authorities that has allowed him to remain in the neighborhood.
With the exception of one consistently irritated neighbor, home owners generally don’t mind the RVs as long as their owners are neat and respectful, he says. Enforcement officers ignore the four-hour parking signs, allowing him to remain in one spot for 72 hours as long as he moves his RV about 100 yards when they ask.
“At least here I can choose who I want to be around me, and I have my own space,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t like living under rules or regulations,” he adds, explaining his preference for the RV over a homeless shelter, where he was paired with a roommate who shot fentanyl. Echoing the bind of many RV owners here, Kenny can’t afford an apartment.
“If you’re not making a good amount of money, you’re not going to be able to pay for a decent place to live,” he says.
SF parking enforcers finally fully staffed
RVs have long dotted or, depending on your view, blotted, San Francisco’s landscape as a persistent reminder of its housing crunch and gentrification. They occupy a particular space in the struggle, somewhere between the destitution of homelessness on the street, and the sanctuary of an apartment.
Knocking on their doors usually reveals respectful owners struggling to keep jobs in the city, and in some cases, their children in its schools. But the hulking vehicles are also reviled by some residents who scorn rusted, dilapidated immobile homes, and their clutter spilling onto streets and sidewalks.
Despite their prevalence near Lake Merced, San Francisco’s RVs are being displaced — and disappeared. The mobile homes around Jackson Park in Potrero Hill were vanquished years ago. A group parked at Ocean Beach is gone. Last month, about 15 RV owners located on Bernal Hill were pushed out of the neighborhood.
What started out as a seemingly benign hearing earlier this week turned into an omen for RV owners, when San Francisco Transportation Director Jeffrey Tumlin announced a new “intensive enforcement” of parking rules under Mayor London Breed’s “Transportation Vision.”
Parking enforcement officers are finally at full force for the first time since the onset of the pandemic, Tumlin said. While “intense operations” will be applied citywide, he specified that next week his agency is posting four-hour parking restriction signs on Winston Drive, where many RVs are parked.
Tumlin didn’t say so explicitly, but it’d be odd if the same restrictions weren’t also enforced against the dozens more RVs lining Lake Merced Boulevard and one half mile away, where Kenny and dozens more reside.
“Enforcement Will Begin Soon,” reads a flyer the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority recently distributed to RV owners announcing the four-hour time limits.
Though the flyer says the restrictions will begin after the signs are posted, Tumlin acknowledged enforcement on Winston will be paused until the road is repaved in July.
That was of little reassurance to distrustful RV owners and housing advocates fearing what comes next. At the hearing, Tumlin heard their emotional objections to the parking restrictions that will be enforced before the city has found a long-promised safe parking site for the RVs.
Yessica Hernandez, an organizer at the Coalition on Homelessness, told Tumlin and other SFMTA directors that pushing RVs out of the city ignores the underlying problem they represent — homelessness.
“It's happening around you, and even if you close your eyes, you open them back up and it’s going to be there,” Hernandez said. “You’re not going to get rid of the problem unless you do something to solve that problem.”
While other city agencies are directly responsible for addressing homelessness, Hernandez said at the hearing, the SFMTA’s parking restrictions aggravate the problem.
“Think about whose life you're going to ruin, after all,” she said. “You're going to go home and you're going to be happy, but they're not. They’re not. We have families who live there. Humans.”
'I try to move every three or four days'
San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, or HSH, attempted in the fall to reach everyone living in vehicles in the Lake Merced area, making contact with about 100 households, the agency said in a statement.
The goal was to flag the parking changes and move people living in RVs and cars into housing. Through the winter, HSH moved 36 households into permanent housing, according to the statement, with 26 more enrolled in programs that could get them on a similar path.
But as the households moved out, newly arrived RVs and other vehicles took their parking spots, the agency said. For two years HSH has looked for, but not found, a safe parking property. The agency is evaluating two sites but a solution won’t arrive anytime soon.
Breed’s office and the SFMTA didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Ian James, a community engagement manager at GLIDE’s Center for Social Justice, says the fact that the SFMTA is being forced to engage in homelessness and housing issues reveals that San Francisco still doesn’t have the tools to mount a coordinated, inter-departmental response to the problem the RVs pose. Among many other services, GLIDE helps low-income residents pay for car or RV tows, parking tickets, and fines.
Enforcing parking restrictions against RV owners will force many of them out of San Francisco, James says, including people who have lived here for their entire lives, and have jobs and families in the city.
“If they lose their RVs they’ll lose the only shelter and stability they have,” James says.
RVs pushed out of the Lake Merced area may end up in another part of the city where they’ve been somewhat tolerated: the no-man’s land under the freeways between the Mission, South of Market, Potrero Hill, and Mission Bay.
That’s where James, 60, parks his 1999 Fleetwood Jamboree RV. After struggling with a broken lock to open his door, he explains that his sister helped him buy the vehicle for $16,000. Declining to give his last name, James says he was born and raised in Hunters Point. Like Kenny, before he moved into the RV, James says he spent years living in tents on the street.
“One of my biggest problems is being alone, because no one watches my stuff,” James says while hungrily gulping down a bacon egg wrap and a Frappuccino. He says he’s worked various jobs as a driver, roofer, and maintaining yards. He looks older and more worn than a sixty-year-old should, and says he is no longer capable of such labor.
“I try to move every three or four days but there’s no place to go so I end up here,” he says. “There’s not much you can do about my situation unless you give me some place to live.”
In District 7, where the RVs are parked near Lake Merced, homeowners’ feelings are mixed and complicated, says Jennifer Fieber, a legislative aide to Supervisor Myrna Melgar.
Some want them gone, period, no matter how quiet they are, Fieber says. Melgar’s office has heard from homeowners in other districts who fear the RVs being pushed into their neighborhoods. Students at San Francisco State University also want the parking spots, she says.
“Some of the RV dwellers have also told us stories of outright harassment by hostile neighbors, and claims of vandalism of their vehicles,” Fieber says. The number of RVs has declined, she adds, citing the HSH figures. “So we are focusing on the positive stories while we push for safe parking.”
