On Tuesday December 10th, GLIDE’s Center for Social Justice (CSJ) and its coalition partners successfully urged the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to overturn the RV overnight parking ban passed by the SFMTA Board of Directors in October. Heartfelt community voices led to the unjust RV ban being overturned in a 7-3 vote! Thank you GLIDE community!
With 90% of unsheltered families living in vehicles and the family shelter waitlist being 530 families-long, taking family’s RV dwellings, towing them, and forcing them into temporary shelter would be a heartless move. That’s why dozens of San Francisans, including many GLIDE staffers and community members, took the mic to share their heartfelt stories with supervisors. The supervisors were blown away by our arguments!
Gabriel Medina from the La Raza Community Resource Center, speaking for the End Poverty Tows Coalition GLIDE helps lead, said that of the families living in RVs who were pushed out of Winston Drive due to parking restrictions, “Less than half of these families were eventually housed. Those who were housed were only able to get housing because of sustained advocacy and time.”
He described a family of four who the End Poverty Tows Coalition worked with who were forced to live in their RV when the breadwinner lost his job during the pandemic. The family was then displaced from Winston Drive and Zoo Road before eventually being housed due to GLIDE and the Coalition’s advocacy. “I cried a lot when the city asked us to leave,” he quoted the mom of the family. “We weren’t asking for anything for free, just a safe place to live that we could afford.”
David Elliot Lewis, a co-chair of the Tenderloin People’s Congress, pointed out that affluent neighbors are just uncomfortable with the sight of people struggling with poverty, and want to push them out of sight. He added, “Banning RVs does not end homelessness, it just creates more human misery.”
Sarah Miles, a nurse volunteer with UCSF’s Roving Community Health Initiative, contributed to the discussion, “The health of people living in RVs is significantly better than the health of people living in the streets or in shelters. RVs help people hold onto their medications, and provide stability and safety for women and children living in RVs.”
Rebecca Jackson, Co-Chair of Women’s Housing Coalition, added, “As a mother who experienced homelessness with children, my vehicle was the only safe space for us to sleep… If we’re going to sweep people away, we must have a place for them to go.”
Lukas Illa from Coalition on Homelessness had a real mic drop moment when they declared, “Purposeful disinvestment in infrastructure is a way to justify criminalization of poverty…. This trickles down into attitudes of housed San Fanciscans, giving them license to intimidate some of our most vulnerable residents.” They shared stories of people’s children being threatened and their mirrors knocked off cars.
CSJ’s Eleana Binder speaking to the SF Board of Supervisors on RV ban
GLIDE’s own Eleana Binder, Policy Manager in the Center for Social Justice, delivered the rebuttal for the End Poverty Tows Coalition at the end of the hearing and made the point that “Rather than implementing a punitive policy before we have sufficient services, we should devote time and funding to establishing safe parking sites and getting people in RVs assessed for and connected to appropriate housing.”
A sanctuary city is not a city where we threaten immigrant families and make them feel like they don’t belong, simply because they are too poor to afford better housing than an RV. We even heard first-hand during the public comment from an RV dweller whose mirrors and windows were broken, a heartbreaking tale.
We’re so grateful our GLIDE community advocates for people to escape the cycle of poverty and have safe places to stay. People deserve every tool at their disposal to break the cycle of poverty.
We won a major victory this month, but we still need to keep fighting for shelter for homeless families; we’d love for you to join our letter-writing about that here.