The violence of towing homes

Towed to nowhere

I can’t rest 

They are sweeping me to death

One day it’s a tow

The next day my home is bouncing in the road

Then I end up in a tent 

And then they want me dead 

Then why take my RV 

When it’s us you don’t want to see

Now you’ve left us 

Exposed  

Why tow my home 

When you have nowhere for me to go

–excerpt of Towed by Tiny

“We can only hold two bags, choose one, screamed my mama to me over the shriek from a tow hitch scraping our already broken bumper against the asphalt.

“We don’t even have bags to put our stuff in,” I screamed back.

“Then grab whatever you can carry,” she motioned to my backpack and our one blanket we shared in the backseat when we slept to try to stay warm. But what about our bag of pictures, my favorite boots, her medicine, my emergency stuffy?

I watched them all clunk down the road never to be seen again. 

This moment bled into so many trauma-filled moments of our houseless life, when I heard about the SFMTA vote to implement yet more laws making it illegal to live in your Recreation (read: survival) Vehicle (Read: home) 

After a series of other anti-poor people actions like attempting to get rid of funding for life-saving harm reduction services and getting “tough” in the Tenderloin on houseless people, Mayor Daniel Lurie  proposed a terrifying and violent plan to implement a ridiculous two-hour parking limit for RVs.

To this act of violence, I ask Lurie in earnest—why tow us when you have nowhere for us to go?

RVs aren’t a long-term solution but they are a form of inside-ness. As I have often said, when we are outside we suffer the violence of exposure—our lives and trauma, our belongings and struggles now up for scrutiny from the hating public. When we have our cars and RVs, we are provided a modicum of shelter, of privacy. It’s anti-poor-people abuse to intentionally deprive us of the most minimum of a roof.

Why? Because the RVs hurt your Starbukian eyes. 

The settler myth of open road, RVs and travel is also clearly seen here. Certain RVs, the ones in over-priced “campsites,” aren’t ticketed. Their shiny new Winnebago RVs aren’t towed after two hours. Their dogs aren’t killed by bulldozers and tow trucks like so many of our houseless pets are in these violent sweeps and tows. And the reality is low-income/no-income and working-class families who clean the fancy restaurant kitchens and clean San Francisco’s homes can’t afford the insane rent in the Bay Area.

And god forbid we have a crisis and can’t work. 

“After Covid we ended up homeless, we had no money for the rent,” said Alvaro T, formerly houseless San Francisco resident, povertySkola, Danzante and janitor who is now homeful in rent-free forever, healing  housing at Homefulness after spending two years houseless in his car in San Francisco.

Homefulness is a homeless people’s solution to homelessness and currently houses 24 houseless youth, adults and elders with protocol and permission from First Nations relatives of this land. We are trying to bring this powerful vision to SF, because we as poor people have solutions, maybe they could just listen to us and stop sweeping and towing us because we are not trash. 

“We don’t need a sandwich or a navigation center we need a home,” said junebug Kealoha, formerly houseless POOR magazine poverty Skola and community health worker in the Tenderloin working with me and so many more houseless mamas to bring a Homefulness to Occupied Yelamu, aka San Francisco. 

In so-called progressive Berkeley they just operated a vicious and violent sweep of houseless relatives in west Berkeley who used to live in RVs but after the city towed them all now they are in tents being subject to violent sweeps.

Mama, where is your medicine? 

“I’m sorry, ma’am it’s time, you can collect the rest of your stuff at the tow yard. The tow hitch was dragging our home away,

“Nooooooo,” I let out a silent scream knowing that just like the other times they towed our homes, there would be nothing left in the car by the time it got to the tow yard and most importantly that we could NEVER afford to get our home back.

Our next home was a tent. Our next tow was a sweep.