The Board of Supes, by a 7-3 majority, voted today to reject the Breed Administration’s efforts to tow and seize large vehicles that have people living in them.
The San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency approved in October a policy allowing the city to tow “oversized” vehicles parked anywhere on a city street after midnight.
The End Poverty Tows Coalition appealed.
Gabriel Medina, representing the coalition, presented the appeal, saying that some 1,400 people are currently living in vehicles on the streets. He said that fewer than half of the families living on, and displaced from, Winston Drive have been connected to stable housing.
There’s no room for families in the existing shelters, he said, and those shelters are not appropriate for families. “An RV offers more to a family than that kind of shelter,” he said. “You are taking families and putting them back on the streets.”
More than 50 people showed up to testify against the SFMTA’s plan. Nobody spoke in favor of the ban.
Jennifer Friedenbach, the director of the Coalition on Homelessness, noted that the shelters are already full—and if people are forced out of their RVs and into shelters, that will mean “people who desperately need shelter and are in a bad situation on the streets will be pushed out for the RV residents.”
One speaker called it “sheer cruelty.”
In a remarkable statement, Viktoriya Wise, streets division director for the SFMTA, said that “unless there are consequences, having your vehicle towed, people don’t want to accept shelter.”
That is: Unless you are willing to give up most of your possessions, accept a congregate setting for a short period of time (most family shelters are limited to 90 days) with no guarantee of stable housing at the end, you need to be punished by losing your home.
Nobody has presented a single case where a family that is offered an apartment with a kitchen, a door that locks, and an affordable lease for more than a few weeks has turned it down to stay in an RV.
In fact, one man testified that when his family was able to move into stable housing with subsidies for two years, they immediately left their RV and life on the streets.
The city just doesn’t have enough options like that for everyone.
Sup. Dean Preston said that “we have allowed billionaires, private equity, hedge funds, and speculators to decide who gets housing,” a lot of families are left behind.
The city has made some efforts, with limited success, to set up parking areas for RVs. Sup. Myrna Melgar noted that “the city owns a lot of land,” and it ought to be possible to find space for people who are living in vehicles while they look for more stable permanent housing.
Sup. Rafael Mandelman was the only board member who spoke against the repeal. He said that while advocates say “we should allow people to take shelter where they can, on the streets and the sidewalks, that is not the position of the majority of San Franciscans … it’s not unreasonable for the public to say we will not allow camping in our public spaces.”
But as Melgar said, “we have failed as a city, we don’t have a system to get families into housing. I will support [towing] when we have a system in place which we don’t have today.”
Sups. Matt Dorsey, Joel Engardio, and Mandleman voted to uphold the tows.
