Bay Area RV residents stuck between a sign and a hard place
Is it just me, or is the number of people living in RV’s in San Francisco growing? To answer this question, let’s start with a few facts culled from City data:
- There was a 7 percent increase in people experiencing homelessness from 2005 to 2015.
- The number of people counted as experiencing homelessness in 2015, who reported living in their vehicles, was down 9 percent from 2013. But the number reporting sleeping in their vehicles in 2013 was up 10 percent from 2011. That’s a net 1 percent increase since 2011.
- In 2013, the City doubled down on signage that limited parking for oversized vehicles in order to drive out long-term parkers.
- Oversized vehicles are defined by being over 22 feet in length or 7 feet in height (e.g., RV’s, trailers, campers, etc.)
And now, a fact from my life:
- This is my first year living in the Bay Area since 2012.
Conclusion: I have only noticed an apparent increase because I wasn’t here to witness the decrease from 2013 until now. But also, yes, there has been a slight increase in the number of people reporting living in their vehicles.
I visited the Mission, Silver Terrace, Bayview and Outer Sunset while photographing RVs for this story. I attempted to speak to some residents. Most weren’t home. Some didn’t want to speak on the record. And some, I’ll admit, I wasn’t eager to approach alone.
I wanted to find out who these people are, what they do and how they came to live in RVs. A Google search landed me on an SFGate article in which a few hipsters (I can say it; I fall in that general category) describe their #vanlife in the following terms:
“With the RV, I have a good excuse to design everything really efficiently. If I had a house, would I really put in marble counters? But here it’s like 2 feet by 2 feet, so I do,” tech entrepreneur Tynan Smith said while drinking ginger tea he’d bought at the Samovar Tea Lounge nearby. “And then there’s the way it makes my life more efficient, more thoughtful.”
“Living in a way that’s extremely conscientious about what you’re doing, and the sense of adventure without even going anywhere,” [Grace Zamora, doctoral student at UC Berkeley] said. “You feel very productive all the time because you’re so present. You feel a little bit, like, superior.”
But what about the majority of RV dwellers who, I imagine, aren’t doing it for the ‘gram? To learn more about what it really means to live in your vehicle, I spoke with Kelley Cutler, a human rights organizer and outreach worker from the advocacy group Coalition on Homelessness. Her wisdom is dropped below:
“The infrastructure of cities was developed to be able to support poor communities. So you’ve got social services, transportation, housing that’s more compact. And what happened was some people whose incomes grew began wanting to move out of the cities. Well, we’ve had a shift in our culture and so now, it’s kind of reversed. So wealthier communities have a desire to move back into the city. So the problem is that there’s no infrastructure outside of cities to support poor communities. So people are like, ‘Well, it’s so expensive to live in San Francisco. If you can’t afford it, you need to move somewhere else,’ but there is no place to go because there is no infrastructure. So we are this point where there aren’t alternatives, but housing here is so expensive and a lot of the people I speak with who are living in their vehicles — this is where they are receiving their medical and different forms of social support.”
“You always hear that people who are poor or homeless in their community, that they’re always from somewhere else, but that’s not the case. Here, they found that 71 percent of people that are homeless on the street were residents of San Francisco before they became homeless.”
“It’s a wide variety of people, really. The different folks that we’ve encountered are a lot of seniors and really, it’s not one group. It’s just a lot of different people who have been priced out. What we were finding was that a large percentage were just the working poor and that was their last escape from being on the street.”
“The ‘no oversized vehicle’ signage is just one of many tools being used. And the signage has just shuffled people around and pushed them into more residential areas… For folks who are able to actually hold onto their car, to be able to keep a vehicle, that takes quite a bit, and so that is a big feat in itself. So they’re at a bigger advantage when it comes to employment than when you are on the street because then you are really stuck.”
“It’s really challenging, because a lot of people are dealing with harassment from folks. They are having to move their vehicles. A big issue that comes up is sleep deprivation because you never know when law enforcement will show up.”
“One of the alternatives is a safer parking program. They have it in different areas; there’s one in Seattle and one in Portland. A lot of time it’s with faith communities, like where they’ll set up the parking program in their parking lot. There are different models that are actually out there, and it’s kind of a matter of actually doing it, and they haven’t [here in San Francisco]. So that is the biggest barrier — finding a location. Even if you have the funding to do it, that’s really not the hardest part. It’s just finding where you can actually do it. Even though there are faith communities that are interested in having a safe parking program, there’s always push back from the community.”
So, there you have it. Is living in an RV a quaint way to hack SF’s exorbitant rental market? I’d say yes. Liberating? Maybe. Emotionally and physically taxing? Certainly.
If you want to take the leap, here are some places to start:
- http://tynan.com/living-in-a-small-rv-introduction
- https://www.rvonthego.com/san-francisco-bay-area-rv-resorts
- http://www.cheaprvliving.com/forums/Thread-Stealth-in-the-SF-Bay-Area-east-and-north
[Thanks for reading. This story originally appeared on ripple.co. If you like what you read, please check out more of Jordan’s Ripple stories.]
