Tell the Board of Supervisors: Oppose the RV Ban
If you’d rather take action from home…
Call your supervisor and tell them you are opposed to the ban.
“My name is _____, I live in your district, and I’m a member of Indivisible SF. I ask the Supervisor to oppose this RV ban. This will harm people across our city and increase homelessness.”
Email your public comment to clerk, brent.jalipa@sfgov.org, with the subject “Public Comment on Agenda Item 250655” (talking points are below). Be advised that your name and email address will become public record.
If you can visit City Hall in person…
Make a public comment (1-2 minutes) in opposition to the RV Parking Ban at the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee at City Hall (Room 250), Wednesday, July 9th, starting at 10 am.
Also please mark Tuesday, July 15th on your calendar. If it passes the committee, it will likely be heard by the full board.
Talking points and background
These talking points came to us via ACLU of Northern California.
Public comment is always best when it’s in your own words—reading or copying these passages verbatim will lose effectiveness. Use these facts to flesh out your comment.
We do not have enough shelter and housing resources for people who are already homeless. Why would we add to that population by evicting people from their RVs?
The 2024 Point-In-Time Count found that 90% of families experiencing homelessness live in their vehicles. There is not enough affordable housing to begin with, which is why many individuals and families end up living in RVs.
There are currently 872 people on the family shelter waitlist and 471 people on the adult shelter waitlist. This means the demand for housing already dramatically exceeds the available supply. This ban will significantly increase that demand, further bottlenecking the system and leaving more people on the streets and in shelters without options, ultimately increasing street homelessness.
This will increase the number of unhoused people on our streets. Once an RV is towed, it is very difficult and expensive to get it back, which means many people will have nowhere to go but the street.
This is a wasteful measure that will hurt immigrant communities.
Most people living in RVs are immigrants. At a time when immigrant communities are under attack from federal authorities, we should not pass laws that further criminalize their existence and subject them to further harassment from law enforcement.
This proposal would waste resources while the SFMTA is suffering financially. At a time when we are trying to avoid cuts to services, the SFMTA shouldn’t be spending money and staff time on such harmful, counterproductive enforcement. This proposal would spend $3 million on signage and enforcement from the SFMTA’s already tight budget.
The true purpose of the RV ban is a shameful one: to move people in RVs from county to county.
This ban isn’t meant to help people living in RVs at all. It’s to pressure them to leave and become another county’s problem. But people living in RVs have lives just like everyone else: they have families and work and community here. To forcibly uproot San Francisco residents because other residents with houses don’t like seeing RVs is cruel.
San Francisco is a sanctuary city. Pressuring people in RVs, most of whom are immigrants, to go elsewhere risks exposing them to harassment and deportation.
RV bans are a waste of time and money—a short-sighted and ultimately ineffective answer to the problems of houselessness and inequality. If one county passes an RV ban, it only puts the problems on its neighborhoods, then the next county will follow suit, until people formerly housed in RVs are all on the street. This is already happening! San Francisco should be a county with the courage and moral decency to break the cycle.
References
SFMTA approves rules that would evict most people living in RVs