Nearly a week after city officials forced them to leave Zoo Road, the tight-knit Latinx RV community that had formed along Winston Drive is now dispersed across the Bay Area. While some families have secured city-backed housing, others are urgently searching for a safe place to park their vehicles.
Faced with a deadline on August 1 to clear Winston Drive, the RV community formed a caravan on July 29, taking over an empty lot at the San Francisco Zoo in a desperate bid to secure a safe, alternate parking site. When police temporarily moved the caravan to Zoo Road later that night, RV residents hoped the new location could become a viable, long-term alternative site to park their vehicles.
“I think we’re much better here,” said Yorman Roa, 30, on August 2. At the time, Roa lived in his RV with his wife and two daughters. “Cars aren’t speeding by, and there aren’t many people around… I think this place is a little safer and quieter,” Roa said.
However, hopes for a long-term solution quickly faded as their new location on Zoo Road became an exhausting, weeks-long saga of parking tickets and fear of towing as city workers enforced a 72-hour parking rule in the area.
“In many instances, we had to wake up at 4 a.m. to move the RVs,” said Roa, whose unregistered RV was towed on August 12. “We had to spend that night inside our car, because they left us with nothing … all of our belongings were in our RV.” With the help of friends, Roa was able to recuperate his mobile home the following day.
On Tuesday, August 13, city workers posted ‘No Stopping’ signs along Zoo Road, citing street cleaning and pavement striping. This forced the remaining RV residents to scramble for another location by midnight, under threat of immediate towing.
Ahead of the deadline to clear Zoo Road, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) said they reached out to 22 families, 20 of whom agreed to enroll in the city’s rapid re-housing program. These residents will have to pay approximately 30% of their income towards rent, an amount that will gradually increase over time.
Angela Arostegui, another resident living in an RV with her husband and two children, said relentless pressure from city workers left the families exhausted and feeling coerced into signing housing contracts they would have otherwise avoided.
“The city has us at the brink of the abyss. They have persecuted us a lot,” said Arostegui. “First in Winston [Drive] they gave us 4-hour [parking rules], and [on Zoo Road] there hasn’t been a single day that they haven’t given us tickets, saying that we can’t be here.”
Both the Roa and Arostegui families were among those offered and who accepted city housing contracts. Several of the now-former RV residents said they plan to sell their mobile homes, while others are looking for a place to store them — “just in case”.
“Thank God the pain and sacrifice were worth something,” said Roa. He said he signed a housing contract the day he retrieved his RV, with a move in-date set for Friday, August 16. “Now we are going to be able to sleep peacefully; we are going to be able to rest.”
As several families leave their RVs and move into subsidized rentals at Parkmerced, other RV residents from Winston Drive remain uncertain about where they will park next.
“The city did nothing for us,” said Marcivon Oliviera, 46, an Uber and Lyft driver from Brazil. He said about twenty other RV residents from Winston Drive are now parking in Palo Alto, forced to move every 72 hours in a continuous search for a new street on which to park.