‘Please Just Let Us Be’: San Francisco RV Crackdown Advances Despite Families’ Pleas

San Francisco’s proposed crackdown on RV parking is one step closer to reality after a key committee gave it the green light on Wednesday, despite unhoused residents and advocates’ pleas to reconsider.

The city’s Budget and Finance Committee voted unanimously to recommend policy changes limiting the amount of time RVs can park on streets citywide to two hours, sending the ordinance to the full Board of Supervisors after years of strife over the large vehicles.

During the meeting, San Franciscans who have lived in RVs for years asked board members to drop the legislation proposed by Mayor Daniel Lurie, which they said would exacerbate their housing difficulties and pose challenges for their families.

“I’m asking you to please legislate from your heart,” a woman named Lucy told the supervisors in Spanish. She was one of dozens who opposed the policy during public comment. “We feel like we were not heard. I feel personally destroyed.

“We don’t bother anybody, we’re not asking for money, please just let us be in a place where we can have our home and be at peace,” she continued, speaking through tears.

Lurie’s plan is the latest effort to reduce the number of people living in RVs in pockets of the city, estimated to total hundreds citywide. The vehicles have blocked sidewalks, caused traffic congestion and created health hazards that harm surrounding neighborhoods, Lurie’s chief of health, homelessness and family services, Kunal Modi, told the supervisors on Wednesday.

Much of the ongoing controversy has centered on the quiet westside streets around Lake Merced, where dozens of families have lived for years.

Residents parked along Winston Drive behind Stonestown Galleria were forced to move last year after the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency passed new parking restrictions for the area in 2023. The changes came amid mounting complaints from neighbors and were meant to clear space for San Francisco State students and staff to park.

When those limits briefly went into effect over the summer of 2024, RV dwellers moved to Zoo Road near Lake Merced before facing similar pushback and notices to vacate.

In the months since, oversized vehicles have shuffled around the area as then-Mayor London Breed and now Lurie proposed plans that sought to appease residents in surrounding neighborhoods while coming up with housing solutions, including promises to find new westside spaces for a safe parking site similar to one opened in the Bayview during the pandemic.

Last fall, Breed proposed a plan that would have allowed SFMTA to tow large vehicles if people living in them refused shelter and housing services. That ban on overnight parking was set to go into effect in November, but an appeal from homelessness advocates delayed it, and the Board of Supervisors later reversed it.

Modi told the board’s Budget and Finance Committee that his plan, which seems to have wider support, differs from previous attempts to restrict RV parking.

“We owe our small businesses and residents safe and clean public spaces,” he said. “People experiencing RV homelessness deserve compassion and pathways to stability. At the same time, our neighborhoods and small businesses deserve safe and clean streets. We really do believe that we can do both.”

The three-person committee — including Supervisors Connie Chan and Myrna Melgar, who had voted to overturn Breed’s policy — unanimously forwarded the proposal with a positive recommendation. It also has support from Board President Rafael Mandelman and Supervisors Stephen Sherrill, Matt Dorsey and Joel Engardio, who are co-sponsors of the ordinance.

Under the proposal, some RV dwellers who are actively pursuing housing options would be eligible to receive temporary parking permits for up to six months while they wait to relocate, Modi said.

It also includes funding to subsidize 65 rapid rehousing slots, which policy documents say would be in addition to over 300 of these subsidies added to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s annual budget for families, adults and young people this year. About 437 vehicles are currently being used as housing in San Francisco, according to city documents.

A new half-million-dollar rebate program would also allow residents to sell their vehicles back to the city — an idea some advocates believe could be valuable so long as RV owners get fair compensation, but others view as possibly coercive.

Christin Evans, co-chair of San Francisco’s Homeless Oversight Commission, warned that the ban on long-term parking might not have a significant effect on the level of street homelessness in the city, since it’s unlikely many families will agree to a communal or highly regulated housing option over their vehicles.

“That is not really a rational choice for somebody to make to switch out of a vehicle where they have privacy, a private bathroom, and move into a congregate shelter where they’re in a very crowded situation,” Evans told KQED earlier this week.

If vehicles are towed or impounded as a result of the crackdown, she said, it could increase the strain on the city’s shelters and housing resources.

“If we don’t have those resources, I don’t know that that should be our priority,” she said.

She and other homelessness advocates have urged supervisors to reconsider before the whole board is expected to hear the proposal in September.