This is a critical year in San Francisco’s efforts to fight homelessness, and the city is grappling with high costs, complicated strategy, and growing calls for accountability as it struggles to find enough places for unhoused residents to live.
Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the difficulties of creating temporary shelter than the city’s efforts, at least 18 months and counting, to create a Vehicle Triage Center (VTC) — a secure parking lot and de facto home — on the west side of the city for people living in RVs and other vehicles.
In October 2021, as The Frisc reported, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) said it had room in its budget for two VTCs. The first, at Candlestick Point, opened soon after, with room for 135 vehicles.
Officials said the second would be on the west side. Gordon Mar, then the supervisor representing the Sunset District, even said at the time there should be two west side VTCs.
To date, there are zero. One option, a San Francisco State University parking lot that was floated last August, is no longer on the table. University and city officials were in conversation about the lot potentially hosting up to 50 vehicles and providing residents basic amenities, but the school’s plans to build permanent housing make a temporary VTC unfeasible, according to the parties involved.
“SF State has been supportive of the idea of collaboration to meet the needs of unhoused people in the area who are living in their cars,” HSH spokesperson Denny Machuca-Grebe told The Frisc via email. “However, this lot is not available for this purpose as the school will be moving forward with their long-term development plans for the site sooner than anticipated.”
SF State spokesperson Kent Bravo confirmed the news and said the permanent housing details “are to be determined.”
More than 830 vehicles are being used as housing citywide, according to HSH, and by this reporter’s recent count, about 100 RVs and large vans are parked along Lake Merced Blvd and Winston on the edge of SF State.
The unavailability of Lot 25, which is between Winston and the Lowell High campus, means yet more searching, and more waiting for folks like Freddy Martinez, who lives in his trailer on Winston. Martinez told The Frisc he has had no problems with the police, and not many interactions with city outreach workers during the two years he’s lived there. But he’s frustrated with the lack of a long term solution.
“The community is feeling hopeless right now. It’s been a year or two that they have been waiting for a site,” Yessica Hernandez, peer organizer with the Coalition on Homelessness, told The Frisc, adding that the Lake Merced/Winston Drive community has unique needs.
The residents range from young children who need schooling, to elderly residents who need access to senior services, to new immigrants who need help with immigration paperwork, said Hernandez. The community also needs access to a sewage and gray water dump site, and the closest ones are in Redwood City and Pacifica, according to Hernandez: “They’re literally dragging their house from one place to another just to address some of their needs.”
Where next?
The Frisc reached Sup. Myrna Melgar, whose District 7 includes SF State, Lake Merced, and the longtime cluster of RV residents, but she declined to comment. Current District 4 Sup. Joel Engardio, who beat Mar by a hair in November, also declined to comment.
Mar said there are still sites under consideration, including parking lots near Lake Merced, SF Public Utilities Commission land, and Recreation and Park land near the south end of Ocean Beach. But he cautioned that “all of these sites have logistical challenges because, given the current model of Vehicle Triage Centers, they would require plumbing and electrical work. That is the biggest challenge for all of the sites.”
”For property to be appropriate for safe parking we take into consideration the size; cost of rent; and the ability to connect to sewer, power and other utilities,” HSH spokesperson Machuca-Grebe said. “It also considers whether it can be available immediately, 24/7 and for an extended period of time.”
As supervisor, Mar advocated for VTCs on the west side but he felt District 7 was more suitable than the residentially dense neighborhoods in District 4. D4 continues to have low numbers of unhoused people relative to many areas of the city — 81 by last year’s count — but it did experience SF’s largest percent increase in that count.
The citywide tallies, known as point-in-time counts, are widely considered an undercount of the homeless population. HSH estimates that in a calendar year up to 20,000 people could experience homelessness for a given time.
Mar said he had advocated for sites where people could park off the main streets and perhaps have access to porta-potties. HSH officials ultimately disagreed and said other cities that have tried that model didn’t have much success. “HSH seems very committed to replicating the model that has been operating out of Candlestick Point, which has been very successful,” Mar said.
The Candlestick Point site has quick access to bathrooms and showers. Residents are served food and have access to city services that help get them into housing. Yet the site has also had problems. Neighbors sued over the diesel generators powering the site, claiming they violated the Clean Air Act. The city replaced the generators with solar-powered lights.
Then there’s the cost. In one year of operation, the Candlestick Point VTC spent nearly $215,000 per vehicle, according to the Bay City News. (HSH did not respond by press time to a request for comment about the cost.)
As the search drags on for a west side VTC, families and residents are at risk. A recent incident near Lake Merced Blvd. involved a car hitting an RV with a sleeping family inside, according to Hernandez of the Coalition on Homelessness. No one was injured, but it was another traumatic experience in an already trauma-filled situation.
“This is a community of families who are just trying to make a living,” Hernandez said. “But they have nowhere else to go. It’s a lot for them.”