San Francisco is ramping up efforts to remove the RV community parked along Winston Drive near Lake Merced, a move that will displace more than a hundred people who are primarily Latinx workers and families.

“It really is distressing news,” said Margot Sevilla, 27, who works in construction as a painter. Sevilla lives with her grandmother, two cousins and an uncle in a single RV. “They are going to remove us while we have nowhere to go.”

After several attempts to remove the RVs in the last few years, city officials put the community on notice to clear the area by July 2, ahead of a planned repavement project. Once construction is finished, SFMTA will enforce the 4-hour weekday parking limit posted along the street since April.

“There was a person who promised a space, a safe place for [RV residents],” said Sevilla, citing a visit from District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar. “And we haven’t really had any response.” Protesting what RV residents consider a broken promise, Sevilla joined more than 40 residents and organizers on June 11 to temporarily block Winston Drive during a news conference.

In a statement, District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar said that she has been working to establish safe parking sites for the RV community on the city’s west side since 2020. With the city yet to identify a suitable site, she acknowledged that the search has “failed so far,” attributing it to the city’s “bureaucratic hurdles and a seeming lack of prioritization.”

“Their only ‘crime’ is being poor while living and working in a city extremely lacking in affordable housing options,” said Melgar in the statement. “Nevertheless, use of the public right of way on Winston [Drive] for housing folks in vehicles has never been approved by the City government, and there are risks to both the people living in the vehicles and the community.”

Yet, dozens of families and workers have long depended on the fragile stability offered by Winston Drive’s open streets, quiet neighborhood and bilingual, tight-knit community.

“The majority of [us] have small children,” said Carmen Gonzalez, a recent immigrant from Honduras. “Here we feel safer … If we go to another place, we don’t know if there will be danger.”

Vehicular homelessness in San Francisco

Winston Drive is one of several streets across San Francisco that have developed informal RV communities. According to the city’s most recent Point-In-Time (PIT) count of people experiencing homelessness, there are 13% fewer people sleeping on the street or in tents since 2022, but the number of people living in vehicles (not RVs exclusively) increased by 37% to nearly 1,500 people.

The rise of RVs as shelter is not unique to San Francisco, with Los Angeles and other California cities also grappling with a spike of vehicular homelessness as the state struggles to address its housing shortage.

“Here everyone works,” said Arlen Arostegui about Winston Drive’s RV community. Arostegui said that as a trucker, he used to earn up to $4,500 a week, allowing him to buy a luxury RV for camping trips with his wife and two children. When his stable income dissolved during the pandemic, they were forced to turn their RV into a home. Now, Arostegui says, he struggles to make more than $500 a week. “Work is bad. The economy is bad. That’s the problem.”

Dozens of interviews conducted by El Tecolote revealed that a majority of RV residents parked along Winston Drive work in San Francisco’s service sector, gig economy or construction jobs. It’s a uniquely Latinx community, with Brazilans and Central Americans composing a core segment of the population. Some are new immigrants, but most have lived in San Francisco for decades.

“Having residency does not feed you,” says Arostegui, who adds that most RV residents have work permits and pay taxes. “If you’re a citizen, you won’t eat if you don’t work.”

Losing work during the pandemic pushed many of Arostegui’s neighbors, like him, out of their homes, and they haven’t been able to catch up financially since. “The choice is living literally on the street or RVs,” said Eleana Binder, the policy manager at the nonprofit GLIDE and a founding member of the End Poverty Tows Coalition. “[It] technically is homelessness, but some people don’t view themselves that way.”

Homelessness nonprofit organizers say that compared to those who live on the streets, people who live in RVs are less likely to experience severe drug addiction or mental health issues that complicate efforts to access housing. But other barriers make jobs and homelessness services more inaccessible for RV residents, especially those living in the area.

“A number of people [near Lake Merced] are Spanish-speaking or Brazilian-Portuguese speakers,” said Binder. “So [it’s] more challenging to navigate the city’s homelessness response system [and] housing system … [it’s] challenging to access jobs, or higher-paying jobs, when someone’s not speaking English.”

Sevilla, who said she had looked into a homeless shelter, expressed concern about the limited space among the family shelters available. “[RV residents] are families. They are children. They are elderly women. Disabled people,” said Sevilla. “Where are the rest of our [family members] going to stay?”

Family shelters with private rooms can serve families of different sizes; some are limited to two people, while others can shelter larger families, according to HSH. As of last week, 410 families were on the family shelter waiting list.

In search for alternate parking sites

Ahead of the changes on Winston Drive, the Department of Homelessness (HSH) said it has ramped up outreach and housing efforts in the area, helping move 36 residents living in vehicles into permanent housing and enrolling 26 people into programs that provide a pathway into housing since last fall.

“Unfortunately, as we’ve moved people out of the area and into housing, new households have taken their parking spaces,” said HSH’s Deborah Bouck.

Without access to housing, most displaced RV residents will be forced to move to other streets.

“There’s [parking] restrictions all over S.F.,” said Yessica Hernandez, an organizer with the Coalition on Homelessness (CoH) who has been working with families living on Winston Drive. “I have heard a lot of stories of RVs — well, families — parked in front of neighborhoods, and they get the police called on them.”

As streets with few or no parking restrictions like Winston Drive become increasingly rare in the city, RV residents and organizers are fighting for more city-backed solutions.

Currently, the city’s only safe parking site for residents who live in their vehicles is the “Vehicle Triage Center” (VTC) in the Bayview neighborhood, which has made headlines for its high costs, lack of electricity and poor living conditions that have sparked unionization efforts among its residents.

“The city’s safe parking sites … They treat them like shelters, so it’s not permanent. You don’t have any tenant rights,” said Carlos Wadkins, an organizer with CoH. “When [RV residents] say they want a safe parking site, some of the main things they want [are] somewhere where they can park without harassment or criminalization or having to move for street cleaning.”

El Tecolote interviewed several RV residents who said they don’t expect, or necessarily want, the city to provide services like electricity and plumbing. “We just ask for a small space where our RVs fit. Just that,” said Sevilla. “We clean the streets … Garbage we see [is] garbage we collect.”

With less than ten days left before the July 2 deadline, Bouck says HSH is still looking for an alternative parking site for the RV community. “But this program will not be operational immediately, and may not be the appropriate solution for all households,” she added.

Looming deadline, no solutions

Walter Mejia, like many of the RV residents El Tecolote spoke to, said he doesn’t plan to leave Winston Drive “until the last minute.”

After the strike on June 11, city workers posted notices for an encampment sweep along Winston Drive, even though there are no tents in the area. RV residents said they were told vehicles with expired registrations would be towed.

“If they tow my RV, I’ll go take it out, no problem,” said Mejia, a father of three who’s lived on Winston Drive for four years. “But there’s nowhere for me to go.”

RV residents on Winston Drive fear displacement will force them to join the rising numbers of families experiencing homelessness on San Francisco’s streets.

“One goes to work, and when you return, you don’t know if you’re going to find your house,” said Sevilla. “You’ll get a heart attack not knowing where to live, where to sleep.”

El Tecolote is closely following what happens to San Francisco’s RV communities. Please send your questions and tips to erika@eltecolote.org.