To get thousands of people off the streets, San Francisco needs as many options as possible. For unhoused folks living in their vehicles — a population that has roughly doubled since early 2019 — plans are shifting into a higher gear.
First up is the conversion of a parking lot at Candlestick Point into a secure site, with sanitation and other services, for up to 150 vehicles.
Political momentum for it was clear at an Oct. 6 meeting of the Board of Supervisors budget committee, so much so that one caller opposed to the plan remarked that “it seems you’ve all made up your minds already.”
The three supervisors on the committee — Matt Haney, Gordon Mar, and Ahsha Safaí — were strongly in favor, and board president Shamann Walton, who holds extra sway because the proposed site is in his district, made a guest appearance to hammer home his support. (Walton and Mayor London Breed are cosponsors of a resolution to create the site.)
The two-year lease has a good chance for a thumbs-up from the full board, with a target date to open in December. But the Oct. 6 meeting sent an even stronger message: Another “safe site” on the other side of the city could be coming soon.
“We have two budgeted in this year’s budget,” Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) executive director Shireen McSpadden said during the meeting. “We’re definitely looking at the west side for the second one.”
More specifically, officials’ eyes are on the southwest corner of the city.
Camping out west
Anyone who’s driven to or past San Francisco State University, Lake Merced, Stonestown, or Lowell High School in recent years has probably seen dozens of inhabited vehicles, mainly RVs, lining the streets east of Lake Merced and the Harding Park golf course. It’s why District 7, much of which feels like 1950s suburbia, has the second highest count in the city, based on the latest tally in August.
That district’s supervisor, Myrna Melgar, said in an interview she’s completely in support of a vehicle site in her district, and brushed off the suggestion of backlash from her constituents. “There are a lot of folks who want to end homelessness,” she added. “I won the race and was very pro-housing. It would be shitty if, once I’m in office, I change my mind.”
Melgar was confident a site will open but declined to say when or where. Sites need easy hookups to water, sewer, and electricity, among other criteria, and “once we have the checklist we need from whatever sites we’re vetting, we’ll tell you about it,” Melgar said.
Clearly we need to make a credible case to neighbors for a vehicle center on the west side, and the need for more than one.
Sup. Gordon Mar
One spot that seems the most obvious in the district, if not the entire city, is absent from the list. The Stonestown mall, built in 1952 and refurbished in 1987, is surrounded by 30 acres of pavement for parking. It’s also been hobbled by 21st-century consumer trends, losing anchor tenants like Macy’s and Nordstrom before the pandemic struck, and much of that surrounding blacktop is now empty. It’s also (sorry) a stone’s throw from all the inhabited RVs that line nearby Lake Merced Boulevard and Winston Avenue.
But mall management has kiboshed the idea of hosting a safe vehicle site. “We have long-term commitments for our parking space,” Brookfield Properties director of public relations Lindsay Kahn wrote in an email. We asked if that meant a temporary use as a vehicle triage center was out of the question. Kahn replied that the company had nothing more to add.
Melgar confirmed that Brookfield, which is in the early stages of a dramatic makeover of Stonestown, has given the city a hard no.
The search continues. Mar, who represents District 4, said during last week’s budget committee meeting: “We need [a site] urgently on the west side.” The Sunset is also dotted with vehicle encampments, especially near the Great Highway. But Mar told The Frisc in an interview that “the Lake Merced area” was better suited than the Sunset, which has “very few large vacant parking lots and open spaces.”
He didn’t shut the door on future vehicle sites in his district, though. “Clearly we need to make a credible case to neighbors for a vehicle center on the west side, and the need for more than one,” Mar said. “But to start with the first one, we will need to address concerns they have around the existing unregulated and unmanaged vehicular homelessness crisis.”
A residents’ association near Lake Merced, as well as the property management of Parkmerced, which houses thousands of renters, did not respond to requests for comment.
When asked if the city needs to change street rules to prevent new vehicles from replacing the ones that move to sanctioned sites, Melgar would not discuss specific solutions.
’Stick and move
If officials get their way, the Candlestick Point site (7.2 acres) will be open before year’s end. Because it’s on state park land, the Board of Supervisors needs to approve the plan — with a projected cost of more than $15 million over two years — in time for a state commission to consider it next week, according to HSH’s McSpadden. “We need to get it on their agenda or else wait [to open the site] until 2022,” she said at the budget committee meeting.
People already living in vehicles nearby would get priority. The streets near Candlestick have one of the densest vehicle encampments in the city. District 10 accounted for 677 of the city’s 1,088 vehicles being used as homes, more than 60 percent, in the city’s August 2021 count. (District 7 tallied 126.)
Like many cities, San Francisco conducts a biennial count of the unhoused, a one-night snapshot of those living on sidewalks, in vehicles, and other makeshift shelters. The last full count in January 2019 of more than 8,000 unhoused people noted a 17 percent rise from 2017. Most of that increase was due to people living in vehicles.
Officials believe this segment of the unhoused population could prove less complicated to eventually move into housing, once they stabilize in a safe parking site, because they are more likely to be working already. But the city needs to learn lessons from the temporary pilot project near Balboa Park, a site that held 29 vehicles and, before closing on March 1, housed 75 people across more than a year. Roughly 20 percent of them ended up in permanent housing, according to HSH.
The city will need better strategies for the folks in vehicles, many of whom are Latinx, according to Melgar. (Notices for community meetings, hosted by the Coalition on Homelessness, have been posted near the RVs in her district in English and Spanish.)
“If all you have is this van keeping you from being in crisis on the sidewalk” and you have to give that up to get shelter, she said, “Why would you take that? We need responses to cater to that.”
