San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie addressed a small crowd of reporters and City Hall staff Tuesday morning after signing legislation banning RVs from parking for more than two hours on city streets.
“RV homelessness isolates families and it leaves them behind. We cannot accept that,” said Lurie as he stood behind representatives from 12 city departments, including the San Francisco Police Department, the Sheriff’s Office and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. The dozen departments he said, will assist in enforcing the law.
Lurie maintained that the ban is “led with compassion.”
Approved by the Board of Supervisors last week with a 9-2 vote, the legislation offers a “refuge permit” that gives RV dwellers six more months to remain parked on city streets.
Everything else in the bill is designed to get RV dwellers out of their RVs if they plan to stay in San Francisco. There is a a buy-back program to sell their RVs, nearly 800 housing subsidies for RV dwellers, and outreach and case management for families and adults living in their vehicles.
Opponents have expressed concerns that there aren’t enough housing subsidies to address a large-scale RV population. The 2024 Point in Time survey counted 1,442 vehicularly homeless adults and minors in San Francisco.
Funds from Proposition C, a tax on wealthy businesses passed in 2018 to fund homelessness and housing programs, will be used to provide housing subsidies for some homeless families, adults and transitional-aged youth.
“Being on the street exposes families to harm,” said District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who co-sponsored the bill along with Board President Rafael Mandelman, District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio, District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey, and District 2 Supervisor Stephen Sherrill. “We must meet people where they’re at … this is a path to success.”
The bill is a key part of Lurie’s Breaking the Cycle initiative, an ambitious plan that has since been scaled back to build nearly 1,000 new shelter beds and clear San Francisco streets of visible homelessness, ideally transferring people into shelter or housing.
“This has long felt like an intractable problem,” said Lurie on Tuesday. “But long-term RV encampments on our streets will no longer be tolerated.”
Melgar echoed this sentiment, saying that constituents who live near parked RVs in her district in the Westside have complained of pollution, waste and fears for their safety.
The plan leaves more than 600 RV dwellers in San Francisco without a guaranteed housing subsidy, forcing RV dwellers who do not qualify for a temporary permit to either sell their vehicle to the city and seek out shelter on their own, or leave San Francisco.
Some RV residents who have opposed the bill and rallied at City Hall are unwilling to part with their vehicles. They prefer the privacy and freedom of RV living to temporary shelter. All have had difficulty securing permanent housing in San Francisco.
“If you want to stay in your RV,” concluded Lurie today, “you can do so outside of San Francisco.”
Nice to see San Francisco act like a grownup city like other cities.
Now let’s see about stopping people from shooting up in public.
Quite a nice deal for the RV dwellers. They got away with illegally squatting in a world class city for years and were allowed to violate parking laws that would lead to the rest of us getting thousands of dollars in parking tickets. They get six extra months to keep living in their RVs. They have a buy back program for their trashed and barely operational RVs. They have housing subsidies and a panoply of services at their disposal. And people wonder why vagrants and junkies come to SF.
Bravo!
Uh yeah sounds really fun
Do you know what “punching down” is? Because you’ve provided an example. These people are -homeless- and doing a lot worse than you or I. A parking ticket to them is basically unpayable.
I agree with reforming the RV culture on our streets—I think that looks like providing those residents with a compelling alternative so that it’s not a choice they make, then banning it won’t have such a negative impact on them. I don’t understand why they didn’t make the numbers add up.
Get them out of here! Finally some sanity. Now make drug use illegal in public!!!! Keep going!!!! Thank you
These RVs only started popping up about 10-12 years ago. I’m guessing they got the boot from other cities and landed in SF. Time for the RV dwellers to go back to where they came from. Many interviewed are renting RVs from someone else and do not actually own the RV they are staying in. Time for these RV landlords to drump these vehicles.
Citation? That’s fucked up if true
The rental market for RV’s was more recent thing, but long-time RV dwellers have always been in certain parts of the city intermittently without causing too much of a problem besides the eyesore. A few bad actors near the Zoo, (literally one guy with mental illness did 1/2 the damage) and they cracked down on people who had been there without giving them anywhere to park sanctioned like they promised. Last I checked half of the Bayview is like big, open chain-fenced in lots that would be perfectly reasonable to buy cheap and use for the purpose while offering alternative housing programs as we now do… but the City reneged and it never happened. I don’t get the way people look down on those forced to live in their vehicles like it’s a chosen option, in this part of the world at this moment. I don’t think the alternative of throwing away all their possessions ( and pets ) to live in a crowded warehouse full of street people ( for a week? then what? Gone. ) is viable to hardly anyone. I’d like to see some of these commenters forced to spend a night in those shelters, just one.
Unless you were born on and have never left Pac Heights, you would know that RV dwellers, perpetually buffeted by the howling winds of gentrification, have been parked on the fringes of the city since long before you were hatched, with the dwellers filling the grimmest and most poorly-remunerated jobs in the city. Whenever the law gets worked up to beat down on the vehicle-dwelling underclass, it’s a solid bet that there’s a flip-in-progress property up for development.
As always, as with everything else in SF politics, it’s nothing but brutal class war all the way down.
Does this apply to the Mercedes-Benz sprinter conversions?
Here’s a thought. If you can’t afford to rent in a city you probably shouldn’t move there. The fact is they’re not planning on living in the RVs permanently. They’re establishing residency so they can qualify for a rent subsidy or a brand new condo, also known as low income housing. No income housing is more like it.
Wow, reading your comments and the others here that show hate and lack of empathy make my heart hurt. Truly deplorable.
Insert obligatory gripe about John Mayer fans clogging up blocks of fell street with their $600+ Ticketmaster Monopoly money in hand.
Rich-boy Lurie says, “RV homelessness isolates families and it leaves them behind.” Find a single RV dweller who agrees with that—not that they were consulted. He’s absconded with Prop. C housing money to open more shelter beds, a band-aid if ever there was one.
No way in hell I would trade my own RV for a shelter bed where I cannot even spend the day in.
Well, the good news is RVs are mobile and can be driven to places called RV parks where you can stay overnight and even live if you like your RV so much!
They’re all totally full even if they still exist. They are closing in the South Bay every year. People aren’t “choosing” to live in RV’s as opposed to furnished apartments either, Einstein.
You’re discriminating against type of vehicle and the people who own it. It’s very shameful. Liberal San Francisco. RVs are fantastic and if they’re on a public Street they have every right to be there. But the lawsuit begin.
What’s your address? We can send that out to the people “suffering” and you can see how you like them in front of your own house.
Why is it more restrictive than parking a car? You can park cars for four hours in some neighborhoods, and for 72 in others. Why limit to 2?
The rich in SF want to make all the poor and addicted disappear. The have no interest in housing them, they want them GONE and no tax money spent to help them get housed.
Sounds great to me, and I’m not rich! Just middle income and fed up of the antisocial moochers.
Somehow Mission Local landed in the radar of MAGA regressives lately. Or are they just Blueprint YIMBYs on the troll?
He’s displaying a lack of humanity, an inability to do math, how out of touch he is with salaries verses housing prices, that he is predictably repeating the same mistakes as predecessors, and that he is an extremist in all of this. Every time I want to give him the benefit of the doubt he proves unworthy. What a failure. He needs to go.
You cannot solve the problem of so many un-housed people by making them illegal.
Mayor Laurie is virtually telling RV Dwellers to move outside the City Limits. Thanks fir sending your problems elsewhere rather than finding a workable solution for your own City.
Signed – a concerned San Mateo County resident.
You think the unhoused currently in San Francisco are only SF’s problem? If that’s true, then by your own logic, if they move to your sleepy suburban town, then they are now YOUR residents and hence YOUR problem. Welcome to reality.
Homelessness cannot be solved at the municipal level. Not even the state level. It’s a federal problem. Until the federal government takes this seriously, and addresses economic inequality and lack of adequate social safety nets, things will only get worse.
Well done,
I consider myself and my building and my neighborhood and my City as sculpture and life is all about your view isn’t it now ?
They screwed with the feng shui.
Sounds like a Grok answer.
lol
I’ve been advocating the City build 4 thousand unit RV/Tent Campgrounds inside the City limits and make them better than any of the Commercial versions you see along our great highways.
I’ve drawn the specs and it takes around 65 acres for each SFCampgrounds I, II, Iiii and IV with two on Treasure Island and one on either side of the Westside Richmond and Sunset Districts cause it’s time they did their share.
Westside RV/Tent Campgrounds (UBI in 10 years will make them big money makers for the City as millions of Americans go on permanent vacation like me) … should go on half of Lincoln (next to the VA’s Ft. Miley Medical Complex cause we have nearly a thousand Homeless Vets) … Sunset District get’s the most beautiful Homess RV/Tent Campground on half of MSB’s Harding Golf course.
Go Niners !!
h.