San Francisco to ban homeless people from living in RVs with new parking limit | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco to ban homeless people from living in RVs with new parking limit

abcnews.go.com

33 pointsharambae59 comments

> RV dwellers say San Francisco should open a safe parking lot where residents could empty trash and access electricity. But city officials shuttered an RV lot in April, saying it cost about $4 million a year to service three dozen large vehicles and it failed to transition people to more stable housing.

you can't transition people into housing that either doesn't exist or isn't affordable. I sure as hell wouldn't want to move into a shelter if I already had an RV. Seems like getting rid of them will just lead to more people on the streets and I'd much rather see an RV park than a tent city.

An RV is just a nicer tent, it is not a house. If people won't transition to housing, then they need to leave SF. If they can not afford SF, then they need to leave SF and live somewhere else where they can.

When properly accommodated, it's a nicer tent with electricity, AC, and an actual bed, kitchen, and bathroom. With tents you get dangerous hotplates/camping stoves and people pissing and shitting in streets instead of toilets. Some people really prefer the mobility, but most would happily transition to housing as soon it is made affordable/available. There are more vacant homes in SF than homeless people, and foreign investors buy up huge amounts of residential property and leave them empty.

I think most people wouldn't mind (as much) clean, functioning RVs. The people living like that are likely getting swept up in the backlash against the broken/unsafe RVs that cause a lot of problems for neighbors. This is anecdotal for sure, but the RVs near my neighborhood in San Jose are really rough. Missing windows, full of trash/vermin, and don't seem to have working facilities.

I don't have any idea what percentage of RVs fall into which camp, I just know that the bad ones are very visible.

Tents are safer and better in a bunch of different ways. Imagine if the tents had electrical systems like motorhomes do. Fire, environmental damage, crime, public costs, all favor cheap, safe disposable tents over motorhomes.

The answer isn’t motorhomes or tents, it’s better political leadership and a healthier less likely to fall into homelessness middle class.

> If they can not afford SF, then they need to leave SF and live somewhere else where they can.

To clarify: you believe that the cheapest available housing today should be used to determine if someone is allowed to live in SF? If not, how are you quantifying “can afford SF”?

"is not living in a tent or RV" seems like a fairly obvious bar for "can afford SF". Whether or not you support that is a different question, however.

If you won’t quantify your expectations, would you mind elaborating on what the minimum qualified definition is for you? In terms of what must be met, not what must not be met? I can agree it’s nice to not have folks living in tents and RVs.

We seem to be talking past one another for some reason. The bar is "is not living in a tent". It means living in a place that isn't a tent. We can rathole into how that wants to be defined exactly, and pick that apart, but that doesn't seems all that interesting to me but if you'd like to propose something we can iterate on specific wording as to what constitutes "living in a tent".

Still, the California building code 709b discusses sleeping and alludeds so a definition for bedroom, so going in that direction, in order to be not living in a tent, a person would need to have their own access to a legal bedroom, as defined by the building code. There is a $20k fine if people are sleeping in, eg, the twitter offices, which was not zoned for that.

No worries. I’m just wondering what you are expecting to constitute the minimum since the next logical step is to ask where the government should then draw the line on helping folks or essentially kicking them out of the city. Right now your definition lets folks lucky enough to have relatives with an extra couch stay while orphans would be gone at 18 just by dumb luck.

Oh. I wasn't the one saying we should kick people out who can't afford SF, I was just taking issue with "can afford to live in SF" as some undefinable standard. If I had my druthers, we'd subsidize and encourage building housing until the city looked like Hong Kong and everybody had places to live, but I'm not in charge of things.

Some people with money live full-time in RVs by choice.

Gatekeeping that someone must have enough money and/or privilege to buy real-estate to your liking is part of the illiberal snobbiness.

>I'd much rather see an RV park than a tent city

We aren't limited to just those two options

Why does it cost $4 million a year to service three dozen large vehicles? A huge part of the problem seems to be SF’s inability to provide services in a way that would be sustainable for low cost housing options absent immense subsidies.

My wife’s family is from Oregon and it’s full of people who don’t have any real job but live in a trailer and get by doing part time handyman work or the like. Somehow the state manages to provide them trash pickup.

Because the land is not free, people around picking up trash, maintaining electricity, and of course the massive overhead in anything city managed.

The state of Oregon does not provide trash pickup.

This move is so counter-intuitive to me. You prefer tents? You want people to have less security? You’d rather people stored their stuff in a cart that they have to push around everywhere?

You can’t abolish poverty but you can sure make it worse.

Seems pretty obvious the intention is to push them up into housing or out of the city, not into tents on the sidewalks.

Tents aren't tolerated anymore: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/28/supreme-court-homel...

And it shows. I encounter tent residents far less often now vs. last year, and there's no way those people have all moved into added RV capacity. It was already at its limit.

(I've skateboard commuted through SOMA in SF most days for coming up on 2 years)

Temporary tents seem to be more tolerated. There are a few I see every night in my area, but they aren't there during the day. Its the semipermanent encampments that are really being targeted. I see less full-time living on the sidewalk, but there are definitely people still sleeping there.

I think a big part of the problem is that if you allow large, semipermanent encampments or groups of RVs, you eventually end up with huge mounds of trash. Some of it is supposedly from other people dumping trash, but some of it is absolutely from residents hoarding, and it makes the footprint balloon out of control into sidewalks, streets, parks, and any other flat bit of space, until the area becomes pretty unusable for anyone not living there. Which makes a hands off approach politically untenable.

Yeah, but why not come out and make the actual problem - trash and fires - the issue (and it is a big issue), and not RVs more broadly. Institute a we-will-kick-you-out-if-there's-a-mountain-of-trash law and do sweeps (as they have been doing).

Because it’s faster and cheaper to prevent the problem rather than clean it up afterwards.

Sure, but somehow I don't think banning poor people from reproducing is likely to go over well, so what makes this stage the right place to stop the problem at instead of earlier/later?

The right place to stop the problem for a city/county/state government in a country with freedom of movement is different than the right place to stop for a federal government with immigration controls.

I.e. SF is never going to be able to fix the problem of people being too poor (or addicted or mentally ill or whatever), due to arbitrage opportunities.

Absolutely. The overnight tents I see are much tidier. Usually they take up a very small footprint, have a well secured tarp, and look like they get rolled up neatly every day. They aren't accompanied by a hoard of refuse.

Locally, you can abolish poverty even if you can't globally.

In other words just pushing it out of your field of view so you don't have to be bothered by it.

This is true about a lot of human activity.

The country is continuing to rapidly move to an authoritarian ideology and to illiberal hate and criminalization of poverty. Limousine neoneoliberal Democrats and far-right MAGA both display illiberal animosity towards a narrow subset of disadvantaged groups. It's about as rational and empathetic as deporting the people who pick your vegetables, make your dinner, and build your homes. But until the confluence of related problems* are address systemically, criminalization won't solve.

* Cheaper housing with greater inventory, comprehensive medical and mental healthcare, substance treatment programs that work, higher minimum wage, lower housing cost:income ratio, and tailored and helpful support and investment in people who don't have enough to magically pull themselves up by their invisible bootstraps.

>The proposal sets a two-hour parking limit citywide for all RVs and oversized vehicles longer than 22 feet (7 meters) or higher than 7 feet (2 meters), regardless of whether they are being used as housing.

Maybe I'm jaded but I see this as a way to extract revenue from commercial vehicles while sailing under the flag of screwing the homeless so that it can be marketed to residents voters.

I assume the forcing function is residents demanding the removal of the RVs, not a proposal from city hall that needs to be marketed properly. At least in San Jose there is a lot of grassroots efforts against RVs.

Whoever's forcing it to be written (which I agree is in large part the people) the people doing the writing care very deeply about city revenue and are experts in tweaking the minutia to get their pound of flesh for the city or at least reserve their right to collect it.

Like I said, maybe I'm jaded, but that's what every big city I've ever known would do.

If this was just about the problem RVs they could've easily exempted commercial trucks or put a 12 (enough to reset your logbook) or heck, 8 or 10 (a full day of work) limit on it. Yet they didn't do either of those and went with a time limit.

This seems very clearly crafted to not exempt commercial vehicle drivers who are sleeping off their logbook and/or people who are driving commercial trucks to places where they will use the contents of those trucks for their business purposes.

I understand the jaded perspective, but I’d think the only time a large commercial vehicle will be parked for that long will be on the business’s property. Otherwise it is out doing deliveries or whatever it is.

No? You go to the restaurant supply store with your oversized commercial vehicle, buy a shit ton of ingredients, go back to your restaurant, unload, then leave the vehicle parked while you use said ingredients to serve food all day.

Um, what?

You go to the restaurant with your box truck full of steam cleaning equipment and you deep clean the place. Without some sort of "being lived in" criteria law seems very clearly written to allow them to fine those people.

Or you park your semi in a reasonable seeming place after your delivery for the day or whatever and sit on your butt for 10hr because that's what the law requires

My point seems to be the same as one you're making - that commercial vehicles often stay in one place for many hours, and that this ordinance is money grab by the city against business owners.

If I am misunderstanding your point, please let me know.

I thought you were saying the truck would only be out when being used and therefore not subject to enforcement because it's at whatever its home base is most of the time.

$4m for 36 RVs seems like a pretty good deal. Why not spend $44m and handle all 400 of them?

Surely they will spend somewhere between $4m and $44m trying to effectively force this 2 hour limit which will not result in 0 RVs where they don't want them

>Surely they will spend somewhere between $4m and $44m trying to effectively force this 2 hour limit which will not result in 0 RVs where they don't want them

They'll make it back on the other end by engaging in revenue enforcement against box trucks and other legitimate business as the rule seems very clearly crafted to apply to them too.

Really great deal for the RV residents! Not so much for taxpayers.

How much for the next 400? And the 400 after that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Do that, and next year you’ll have 800.

At that rate, in 11 years more people will be living in RVs in SF than in buildings.

Have you seen SF property prices? If allowed, it could actually happen.

Market realism: if this is what the market decides, then who are we to force it to decide in a non-optimal way?

And then the next year 1600. By the late 2050s you'll have more RVs than people on Earth and by 2072 their mass will become so great as to collapse the planet into a black hole!

>The Tragedy of the Commons

https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...

To be clear, that’s trash pickup and other services for the RVs, not the cost of the RVs themselves. That’s an insane price tag.

The whole thing is a mess. I drive through a spot with a lot of RVs in Seattle. I’ve seen people come out of an RV, smash a driver’s window at a stoplight, and proceed to throw something which looked like chili powder in his face.

I don’t want people like that by me.

Yet RVs are an incredible cheap housing option. I would simultaneously advocate for opening up a space to park a bunch of RVs that these folks could live... just not by me :/

So I really don’t know what to do. Just a few bad apples can ruin public safety in a community for everyone else. I don’t know that we can both provide safety for home owners and the housing option for non home owners :/

The safety issues you are worried about would apply regardless of whether these people are allowed to continue living in their RVs.

Not allowing people to live in RVs by you seems to reduce the problem.

Same with tents or other affordable housing, though. So again, nothing really to do with RVs.

Exactly. That’s the damning thing about the issue. I want people to be able to live in RVs. I don’t want them by me because of my lived experience. I can see how that’s iterated across the population. No clear avenue for success.

I don’t think that’s true. The RVs are gone and they put huge concrete blocks in the area so they can’t park any more. It’s much safer now.

That fixed my local problem. Obviously the people moved somewhere else though.

The proportion of troublemakers is much higher in the very low socioeconomic status cohort. Heavily policing public spaces is too expensive so instead social moats are erected. House prices rise to unaffordable levels and this is cheered on by current residents and politicians. Nice neighborhoods are not connected with public transit and are inconveniently located so only residents will drive there.

In New York Columbia University Public Safety officers escort any non-community members off their campus.

They just made 5k more people homeless.

I lived on the Peninsula in a van for 9 years when/where it was legal around Palo Alto. Criminalizing homelessness and concentration camps in all but name isn't fair or moral.

Lets stack rvs up then ?

Go midwest. plenty of lots because theres space. SF like all large u.s cities is designed to fail from the start. you cant compact people and also have flat property. when its too big, go elsewhere.

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