More than a year ago, in March 2024, a community member stopped by our Mission District office with a tip: A small RV community — nearly a dozen vehicles, mostly occupied by Latinx immigrants — was about to be displaced from Bernal Heights Boulevard.

I had just started as editor of El Tecolote, and this was exactly the kind of story we were built to tell. I turned to our photojournalist, Pablo Unzueta. Without missing a beat, he said: “Let’s go.”

We grabbed our gear, drove five minutes, and began documenting what would become one of the most urgent housing stories for working-class communities in San Francisco.

That first coverage led us to Winston Drive, where a much larger RV community — more than 50 Latinx families with children — was facing the same fate. Their kids were enrolled in nearby schools. Parents worked as cooks, janitors, drivers. And now, they were being pushed out.

At first, we thought it was just another case of displacement ahead of a street repaving project. But alongside investigative journalist Yesica Prado, we started pulling public records — emails, memos, policy drafts. What we uncovered was bigger: City officials weaponized parking laws and construction projects as tools to evict entire communities, with no real plan for what came next.

We created a WhatsApp group to stay in touch with families in real time. We listened to their stories, published them in English and Spanish across visual and print platforms, and filed records requests to uncover what officials were saying behind closed doors.

This week, we published Part One of our investigation — a sweeping, year-month effort based on more than a thousand pages of internal city emails and interviews with dozens of displaced residents.

We revealed how a uniquely Latinx RV community on Winston Drive was dismantled — and how that crackdown became a citywide playbook.

Just days ago, Mayor Daniel Lurie introduced legislation to impose a two-hour parking limit on RVs across San Francisco. His proposal mirrors the exact tactics we documented in our reporting — the same citations, signage, and vague promises that left dozens of working-class families displaced.

This work is urgent — especially as policy continues to evolve in real time.

Our coverage has become one of El Tecolote’s most-read series of the year. It’s been cited by The San Francisco Standard, The Chronicle, and used by housing advocates to successfully challenge unjust policies.

But more importantly, the people we covered felt seen.

“El Tecolote is the official newspaper for us,” said Angela Arostegui, who lived in an RV on Winston with her family before they were displaced.

We’re proud of this work — but we can’t do it without you.

El Tecolote is a small, bilingual newsroom powered by and for our community. Every story we publish is free to read and available in English and Spanish. We don’t have a paywall. We don’t run ads that exploit your data. And we don’t answer to corporate shareholders. We answer to you.

If you believe journalism like this should exist — and that the families we cover deserve to be seen — we invite you to support our work.

Your donation helps us:

  • Fund original investigations that hold local officials accountable
  • Pay fair wages to our small team of bilingual reporters and editors
  • Reach Spanish-speaking readers via WhatsApp, print, and in-person outreach
  • Keep our journalism free and accessible to those who need it most

Help us keep telling the stories that defend, inform and uplift our communities. Every dollar makes a difference.

Thank you for reading — and for believing in community-powered journalism.