By Thomas K. Pendergast

Improving public safety is the reason given by city officials who created the plan for angled parking to replace parallel along the Lower Great Highway between Lincoln Way and Kirkham Street, yet the impact on people living in vehicles there is obvious.

The City plans to convert the west side of those blocks from parallel to angled parking and entirely eliminate all parking on the east side.

District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio commented on the change in February.

“Outer Sunset residents and visitors to the Great Highway Park (the occasionally closed-to-traffic Upper Great Highway) are unable to access parking spaces along the Lower Great Highway,” Engardio said. “Large RVs have taken up multiple spaces permanently, not allowing for parking turnover. The curb is lined with a growing amount of debris, creating a public health hazard. The situation blocks access to much-needed parking for people who want to enjoy the Great Highway Park and patronize a nearby motel and café.

“State law and ongoing court cases limit the City’s ability to enforce posted parking regulations. Tickets can be issued, but towing is no longer allowed in most cases,” he said. “That’s why I asked the SFMTA (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency) board of directors to reconfigure Lower Great Highway from Lincoln to Kirkham from parallel to angled parking. The new parking configuration will be implemented in March.

Engardio said changing the physical design of the street was the only option available to ensure parking turnover and access for regular-sized cars and vans.

A California Court of Appeals’ decision last July reversed a previous trial court decision and, for now, it effectively bans San Francisco’s policy of towing RVs when they accrue too many parking tickets.

The Coalition on Homelessness challenged the City with a lawsuit, asserting that warrantless tows are unreasonable seizures under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

“The principal issue on appeal is whether the challenged warrantless tows are permissible under the vehicular community caretaking exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement,” the appeals court decision says. “We conclude respondents have not shown that legally parked cars with unpaid parking tickets that present no threat to ‘public safety and the efficient movement of vehicular traffic’ … may be towed under that exception. In particular, we reject respondent’s argument that their interest in deterring parking violations and nonpayment of parking fines justifies warrantless tows under the vehicular community caretaking exception. Such deterrence does not justify warrantless tows of lawfully registered and lawfully parked vehicles.”

A Feb. 21 article in the San Francisco Chronicle by reporter Rachel Swan says that city officials have combined parking restrictions with city-run lots, equipped with showers, Port-a-Potties, electrical charging stations and homelessness case managers to help participants into housing.

But problems appeared, from community opposition when the City tried to open new vehicle triage centers, to space limitations as the lots quickly filled. And some people living in mobile homes on public roads simply decline the help.

The City cannot compel anyone to accept help, but parking enforcement is often used to clear the vehicular-housed people off a given street.

Yet, as Swan reports, RVs rousted from one neighborhood “merely gravitate to another.”

Regardless of where they might go, some Sunset residents just want them gone and out of sight.

Accusations of violence, unsafe and unhealthy conditions have been made, with a laundry list of lawlessness including sexual assault, drug dealing, discarded syringes on the beach, theft and vandalism blamed on the RV dwellers who live near the Motel 6 at Lincoln and Great Highway.

From Lincoln to Kirkham, in total and at any given time, about two dozen RVs, vans, trucks and cars occupied by apparently homeless people are parked along the Lower Great Highway.

On the other hand, it seems that other housed Outer Sunset residents are perhaps as concerned with the loss of parking that will result from switching to angled parking.

SFMTA figures show that switching to angled parking on the west side of the street and eliminating all the parking on the east side along that stretch of roadway will result in a net loss of about 20 parking spaces.

Notes from a July 20, 2018 public hearing held by the agency said community members who opposed the plan focused on the proposed reduction in parking spaces.

“Some said the proposed improvements and corresponding parking reduction were unneeded, while others understood the reasoning behind the improvements but did not feel the degree of parking reduction was an acceptable tradeoff,” the agency notes say. “Overall, concerns about parking reduction were the major theme in the majority of the public hearing comments.”

The comments were enough for the agency to scale back the original proposal, which would have resulted in the loss of 40 parking spaces.

Perched on the roof of his motor home parked on the east side of Lower Great Highway and just a few spaces south of the La Playa Park bocce ball court at the intersection with Kirkham, Alexander Sack, 53, has a good view of the area as he sips a drink on an unseasonably warm, sunny day.

Looking down at the people rolling balls across the sand courts, he is not convinced that the new plan will necessarily make the public safer.

“If there’s going to be a northbound active lane of traffic where there is now parking parallel to the park flanking it, you’re going to have active traffic two feet from little kids playing in the bocce ball court and the elders playing bocce ball, while (car drivers) are looking west, the opposite direction, for 45-degree angled parking,” Sack said. “They’re going to be looking the opposite direction while two-feet from people playing with balls in a park, which I can tell you from being here is common.

“A little toddler is going to get run over at some point,” he predicts. “They’re fixing a problem that shouldn’t be fixed. It’s a safety hazard. It’s going to preclude parking for the neighbors that live here. It’s bad public policy.”

Chandra Carol gives her age as “17 until the day I die.”

She has a “rock star” dog named Bowie and sleeps in a pickup truck hooked to a trailer, where she keeps some of her possessions. It was news to her that angled parking was coming there.

She considers her options.

“I might go back onto Lincoln but it’s a freeway going in and out of the door,” Carol says. “With Fulton (Street), you’ve have a sidewalk there. I don’t like people walking along the side of my truck.

“No, I will probably do the angled.”

What about moving further south of Kirkham beyond the angled parking?

“Those neighbors don’t like it. They’re always giving me the stink eye out the window. The further south you go, the more conservative the neighborhood gets,” she said. “I’ll probably go back to Lincoln or I’ll stay here. But I kind of like it over here.”

At this point, she’s not sure what she’s going to do with the trailer, especially since it holds a lot of her stuff.

She says one of her vehicle-housed neighbors had to go to the hospital recently and while he was gone the City took away everything he had. She’s looking out for useful discarded items to give him once he gets out of the hospital.

Crystal Kelley, 54, was raking the dirt in front of her trailer with her husband but stopped to talk about her situation.

Born and raised in San Francisco, she’s an alumna of Abraham Lincoln High School.

“We don’t bother anybody,” Kelley said. “Nobody has come up to us to see what type of people we are. They just assume that we’re all drug addicts and stuff like that. Some people are, some people aren’t.

“I don’t have garbage here. I have stuff that belongs to me and we keep it clean,” she said.

“We have been trying to get housing through the Hot Team, but I’m still waiting. And my husband’s got to have a triple bypass next week and he’s going to have to come back to a sterile environment. And I’ve been asking them but nothing yet. So, I’ve just got to keep waiting,” she said.

“They asked me if I wanted a room, if it was available to me, a month and a half ago and I told them ‘yes’ but I’m still waiting.

“A friend of mine’s helping me try to get into a permanent place for me and him because of his surgery that he has to get done,” she says. “I’m not dirty. I don’t sit out here and scream. Why don’t you get to know us before you start judging?”