Editor:

On Dec. 10, 2024, the SF Board of Supervisors had a review of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s decisions on overnight RV parking restrictions and have decided to reverse the decision made in October to ban or limit overnight parking. 

Upon viewing the on-line video of the meeting, I noticed the only people who were in attendance were from nonprofits or the RV people. This meeting was not well publicized considering its importance; therefore, the citizen’s voice went unheard. 

Item 52: RV ban discussion starts at minute 2:00 hours through 4:30 hours.   

The first dozen RV owners seemed respectful to the neighborhood, but rapidly things got out of control.  I spoke with the local city gardener who maintained the berm. She mentioned that she befriended several of the women and brought them supplies and removed their trash, but shortly thereafter she realized that it was just too dangerous. 

The RV women disclosed that some of the new members of their enclave were raping them. She found gun casings, hypodermic needles, they were dumping their toilets in the street and it was reported that one of the people was chasing after another member of the group with an ax. Unfortunately, one of the drug dealers or pimps assaulted the gardener and gave her a brain injury.  

Several of the RV people had hoarding impulses and would strew their treasures and waste into the streets. Some of the more aggressive members would stand in the street with their pit pulls and try to intimidate people from coming into their self-proclaimed area. And then came the marauding drug dealers and pimps in their fancy cars.   

One of the RV people got mad at another RV person and committed arson to the RV. My next-door neighbor’s house was broken into and she had to lock herself in the bathroom until the cops arrived as he had a knife. I now sleep with a knife near my bed and have feared going to work as the RVs were parked right in front of my home.  

District 4 Supervisor Gordon Mar planned to create a 100+ RV triage center at the Zoo near the children’s Pomeroy Rehabilitation Center. Gordon couldn’t manage 10 RVs, let alone 100. Our district was renamed “Tenderloin West” under his watch. We only successfully got some of the inhabitants removed when it was uncovered that some of them weren’t allowed near children or a school. 

It isn’t right that our city applies the laws differently to different groups of people and depending on whether the neighborhood is wealthy or not. 

If the City/Bay Area truly cared, the RVs could have been temporarily housed at the abandoned movie theater lot at Stonestown instead of on Winston Drive, or purchased the 800-acre plot near a BART station in the East Bay for $5 million, which is significantly cheaper than $140,000 per parking spot at Candlestick Point, and then use the savings for water, sewer, trash removal, etc.

Let’s make the streets in front of the supervisor’s homes dedicated RV overnight zones until they come up with a rational and humane solution.

Michael Nohr