With former Bayview RV facility now closed, displaced residents literally left by the curb

NO CAVALRY ARRIVED Monday to save the remaining residents of the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center in San Francisco from closure of the “safe parking” site.

The site was a place where people living in their vehicles could park and receive services without fear of tickets or impoundment. In December 2024, the city gave notice to the residents that the site was closing and they needed to exit by Monday or their vehicles would be impounded.

Approximately 23 people exited the site with their vehicles on Monday, according to a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and, as of midday Tuesday, nine remained on site. According to HSH, all were expected to leave by the day’s end.

The department estimated that five RVs will remain, and they will be towed to the city impound lot.

Ramona Mayon, the founder and leader of the Candlestick 35, the self-declared union representing the site residents, was one of those who left.

On Monday night she watched her 28-year-old, 27-foot Gulfstream RV being towed from the former parking lot where she has lived since August of 2022. Her RV wasn’t taken by the city; Mayon arranged the tow with a private tow truck and exited the VTC hours before the city’s deadline. She feared that if she did not, the city would impound the RV which has been her home for 13 years.

But Mayon was not towed off into the sunset; at her request, the tow truck left her RV on the roadside of Hunters Point Expressway, perhaps 100 yards from the entrance road to the VTC.

By midday on Tuesday there were nine other RVs from the VTC also parked near her on the roadside.

The location is not legal for parking. Red signs on both sides of the street say, “TOW-AWAY NO STOPPING ANY TIME.”

And there is no immunity from the city’s parking laws for former VTC Residents. HSH’s spokesperson advised that “Any vehicles parked on City streets are subject to parking regulations and enforcement — nothing about previous enrollment at the VTC would change that.”

Given the work that the city has done on Hunters Point Expressway to clear it (and keep it cleared) of people living in their vehicles, it seems likely that that the former VTC residents will soon be asked to move, and if they don’t, they will be ticketed and ultimately towed to the city impound lot.

Wherever you go, there you are

For an RV dweller with a non-operable RV, the situation is bleak. There are few legal places to park an RV in San Francisco other than on private property. If an RV is operable, it has options but many of the RVs — like Mayon’s — are not operable.

According to HSH, this is not the department’s problem. It said, “HSH offered housing, rapid rehousing, problem solving, shelter, and/or relocation options to all guests. Guests who left the site in an operable vehicle did so by choice and are responsible for finding legal parking options.”

HSH makes much of its “offers” to residents of the VTC, but when compared to living in their RV homes, some of the residents thought the offers were ridiculous.

For example, Robert McCrory, a veteran who has been living in the VTC, reported that even though he has a dog and a hernia that requires surgery he was offered shelter in a congregate facility with bunk beds in a dormitory.

“They gave me a top bunk,” he said. “How can I climb on the top bunk? Dogs (are) supposed to be on the bunk. He’s 125 pounds.”

Ironies were everywhere. The city spent more than $15 million dollars to create and operate the VTC, an enterprise that kept 35 vehicles in the old boat launch parking lot in Candlestick Point State Recreation Area for more than three years. The city spent hundreds of dollars per day for every person on the site. And yet three years later, the residents were returning to the street, many in inoperable vehicles.

HSH’s initial plan had been to transition the vehicle dwellers to housing. But after years of only minor successes in that endeavor, city officials began to realize that many of the residents did not want housing, they just wanted to stay in their vehicles without being ticketed or impounded.

A program to do that — to provide safe housing — would be far cheaper than what HSH was providing. But the VTC program wasn’t designed for that, according to Emily Cohen, HSH’s deputy director for communications and legislative affairs. Because of that and coupled with the lawsuits by neighbors, accessibility issues on the site, and the fact that the lease to the site could not be extended, the city decided to close the VTC nine months before the existing lease expired, even though only a month before the city had finally succeeded in getting permanent electric power to the site.

By that time, many of the vehicles were not operable. Some had never been operable; others had driven in on their own power but the passage of time and the ravages of rats that ate the insulation on the wiring of the electrical systems, made them inoperable.

Motor home improvements

Realizing that a closed site and inoperable vehicles would be a serious problem, HSH stepped-up efforts to do something that residents say it had promised from the very beginning: it began to repair the residents’ vehicles.

There were many problems with those efforts. More than half of the original funding was used for “rodent-proofing” and weatherization, not vehicle repair. (Mayon said it was the city’s contractor’s job to keep the site free of rats and the contractor should not have used the repair money to address what it had been paid to do.)

There were other issues. The city found it challenging to find competent mobile mechanics who would work at the site. Repairs were more extensive and expensive than expected. And to make a vehicle “street legal” so it could drive to — and be allowed to enter — a private campground outside of the city, an RV needed a valid registration, smog check, and relief from prior unpaid tickets.

In theory most of those issues were solvable (though some of the RVs were too far gone to be repaired). But the mixture of city bureaucracy, outside contractors with little experience running such a program, and residents who sometimes proved difficult, made for slow and erratic efforts.

On Tuesday, HSH was not able to identify the number of vehicles it had succeeded in getting to a street legal condition. But whatever the number, on Tuesday morning there were 10 RVs parked on Hunters Point Expressway, waiting for the other shoe to fall.

Mayon was one of them. She had tried to get repairs to her RV and though she had gotten some, her vehicle was not in a condition to drive on city streets.

She was hand-lettering a sign with her white husky “Squeezer” leaning out the passenger window keeping an eye on her.

The sign she was penning was taped to her Gulfstream.

It said, in large letters, “In Crisis! Waiting on Lease. Have mercy.”