San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 7-3 on December 10 to overturn the city’s overnight towing policy, delivering a significant victory for RV residents and advocates fighting escalating crackdowns on vehicles used as shelter.
The rescinded policy, proposed by Mayor London Breed and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), gave SFMTA’s director unilateral authority to impose overnight parking bans for RVs and other oversized vehicles without community input. It also permitted city agencies to tow RVs parked on streets with existing bans if residents declined shelter offers.
The SFMTA argued the policy was a necessary “tool of last resort” to keep city streets clean and accessible, but critics said it lacked transparency and unfairly targeted vulnerable families.
Approved by the SFMTA’s Board of Directors on Oct. 1, the policy was set to take effect on Nov. 1. However, an appeal filed by the End Poverty Tows Coalition on Oct. 29 delayed its implementation until the city’s Board of Supervisors reviewed it on December 10.
With the policy overturned, SFMTA’s ability to clear RV communities from streets remains limited. Enforcement is restricted to issuing citations for parking infractions, including expired registration and breaking parking rules. Towing is restricted to emergencies or cases of blocked circulation, and it requires police intervention.
If the SFMTA wants to create new overnight parking bans on specific streets, it must seek board approval and go through public comment — a process that has become increasingly politically fraught.
A year of RV crackdowns and displacement
The vote comes amid San Francisco’s rise of vehicular homelessness. According to the city’s most recent Point-In-Time Count, more than 1,400 people live in vehicles in San Francisco — an increase of 37% since 2022. The RV population includes over 117 families, many of them Latinx, including newcomers from Latin America and established immigrants who turned to living in their vehicles after struggling with the city’s high cost of living.
RV communities began forming during the pandemic, after the SFMTA issued a temporary suspension of parking tickets and a moratorium on towing vehicles for non-emergency reasons. When enforcement resumed in 2021, complaints from neighbors and business owners pressured the SFMTA to remove these new RVs from nearby streets, often turning these communities into political battlegrounds.
In 2023, the SFMTA’s efforts to remove RV communities became more difficult when the First District Court of Appeal ruled in favor of an End Poverty Tows Coalition lawsuit, stating that SFMTA’s practice of towing legally parked cars for unpaid parking tickets was a “significant intrusion on property rights that may seriously impact the lives of the owners.”
Despite this obstacle, the SFMTA leveraged existing parking codes and construction projects to displace several RV communities on a street-by-street basis. In the past year, El Tecolote documented some of these efforts:
- Bernal Heights Boulevard: A neighbor’s complaint led to the discovery of a decades-old parking ban, prompting the city to install “no parking” signs and forcing about a dozen RV residents to relocate to nearby streets.
- Winston Drive: Political pressure led the SFMTA to use a planned repaving project to displace a large community of primarily working-class Latinx families living on the street.
- Zoo Road: Many of these displaced residents from Winston Drive moved to Zoo Road, another street without existing overnight parking restrictions. These residents were soon forced to move again for curb painting. Amid public outcry, the city enrolled some of the families living on Zoo Road into its rapid rehousing program.
A failed attempt to ban RVs citywide
Weeks after the city pushed to displace more than 120 vehicles from the Lake Merced area, public records obtained by El Tecolote show Mayor London Breed accelerated a citywide ban on residential RVs in September. Facing major logistical and ethical hurdles, the final, approved policy was scaled back to apply only to certain streets.
But with more than 500 families already on San Francisco’s permanent shelter waitlist, the policy’s aim to threaten towing to push RV residents out of informal but independent living arrangements into what would often be temporary, city-funded programs proved controversial.
“This policy is hanging us out to dry. We have no shelter beds left. We have no housing vouchers left,” said Hope Kamer, director of strategic initiatives at Compass SF, which connects homeless families to city services. “To force families from fragile stability into situations of unsheltered homelessness while failing to add any money to the shelter system is lazy policymaking. It’s cruel and uncreative.”
At the December 10 board hearing, Supervisor Ahsha Safai called the policy “political theater” and urged a “more thoughtful and timely” approach to addressing vehicular homelessness.
Supervisor Myrna Melgar, whose district oversaw the displacement of RVs in the Lake Merced area, said the city needed to invest in sustainable solutions for RV residents before enforcing parking rules, including creating safe parking programs.
“You don’t do the punitive measures first and then figure out a system,” Melgar said. “Eventually I will support the parking restrictions when we have a plan to deal with them, which I don’t think we have today.”
During public comment, RV residents, advocates and nonprofit representatives spoke against the policy, citing its potential to worsen street homelessness and strain the city’s limited shelter resources. With unanimous opposition to the ban, many called for investments in safe parking sites and permanent housing solutions.
“Losing [my RV] is losing everything, and it’s the only option we have at the moment,” said Carlos Perez, a Guatemalan immigrant who has lived in San Francisco for 32 years and works to support himself and his disabled brother. “I’d like to have more luck, to be able to find an apartment and pay for it, but haven’t had that [yet].”
In a city that was defined by an aggressive crackdown on street homelessness this year, advocates say the successful overturn of SFMTA’s towing policy is a small victory in their fight against policies that criminalize some of San Francisco’s most marginalized communities.
“To the families affected by this ban: we stand wholeheartedly with you,” La Raza Community Resource Center said in a joint statement with other Coalition partners on Instagram. “Our fight for dignity, safety and security in San Francisco doesn’t end here.”
Correction: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article stated that the rescinded policy permitted city agencies to tow RVs parked on streets with existing overnight bans if residents declined temporary shelter offers. The policy allowed towing if residents declined shelter offers in general, not specifically temporary shelter offers.