Yorman Roa’s nightmare came true Monday morning: His RV was towed.
For almost a year, the RV has been home for the 30-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker, partner Karla Hernandez Oviedo and their two girls. The irony was that on the morning it was towed, he was looking at a one-bedroom apartment in a complex in the Parkmerced neighborhood, offered through a city program for people living in a vehicle encampment on Zoo Road. When he came outside, the RV was gone.
“I’m tired of living like this, going from one place to another,” Roa, who speaks Spanish, said through an interpreter.
Roa retrieved his RV from the impound lot and returned Tuesday to Zoo Road, hours before a monthlong parking ban went into effect at midnight. There, the owners of a dozen vehicles were preparing to leave, packing away generators and hitching trailers to trucks. Like the Roa family, many were taking up housing offers. Problem was, the move-in date is Friday, so they all relocated once again — to spend a few more nights on city streets. But different city streets.
Roa hopes the apartment move will help his family get some stability. “We want our daughters to be safe,” he said. “We’re taking advantage of this opportunity that we’ve been given.”
His family had a haven on Winston Drive, a leafy street between Stonestown Galleria and Lake Merced, where about 100 people — mostly families from Central and South America — had created a community of 50 motor homes and trailers.
On Aug. 1, the city enforced a parking ban on Winston Drive, so Roa’s family joined two dozen others who relocated a few miles to Zoo Road, parking in front of the Pomeroy Recreation & Rehabilitation Center’s garden. Last week, San Francisco Police Department and parking control officers began an enforcement operation, towing motor homes and other vehicles over expired registrations. Over the weekend, the city put in place dozens of “no stopping” signs.
As the mayor’s office ramps up parking enforcement, it has been offering families in the encampments housing subsidy vouchers, bus tickets to locations outside San Francisco and/or spots in a San Leandro RV park or shelter.
Of the approximately 22 households living in 25 vehicles on Zoo Road, 20 agreed to enroll in city housing programs. “As of Aug. 13, eight households with minor children have signed leases for new long-term housing,” the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said. “These folks will be moving into housing over the next few days. More leases will be signed today.”
Those leases come through a partnership between the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing’s Homeless Outreach Team and Compass Family Services, which offers those from the Zoo Road community Rapid Rehousing subsidies for units in Parkmerced.
Households receiving Rapid Rehousing subsidies pay approximately 30% of their income in rent, and the subsidy makes up the difference. Participants receive rental assistance for two years, with the opportunity to extend based on their circumstances.
If those 20 households move into apartments on Friday, that’ll be a successful intervention — most of the Zoo Road encampment. But there are 30 more from the original encampment on Winston Drive that didn’t get this offer, and are now continuing the slow-motion chase to other streets around the city.
“There were 50 RVs on Winston that had kids,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “We still need safe parking for the families that are going to be moving into housing until they actually are able to move in, and then we need a safe parking site for the families who are not eligible.”
‘Families need longer than the two-year period’
The Zoo Road housing offers are a drop in the bucket of those living in vehicles. The city’s annual homeless count shows a 94% increase in family homelessness between 2022 and 2024. The number of San Franciscans living in motor homes, trailers or cars has risen to more than 1,400 in some 700 vehicles — one-third of the city’s unsheltered homeless population.
Some of those may see the streets as a more stable option. One city worker, who was not authorized to speak to the press, suspects that many in the RV community are rejecting the housing vouchers and moving back to streets near Lake Merced or to the Bayview’s industrial area.
Hope Kamer, Compass’ director of public policy and external affairs, said the city wants to extend that housing offer to gain trust from those living in vehicles. “HSH is working hard to address the subsidy portfolio for families in San Francisco to be more relevant to our current reality,” she said. “Families need longer than the traditional two-year Rapid Rehousing voucher period to stabilize in a city as expensive as San Francisco.”
With the city’ new Safer Families plan, funds from Proposition C, a business tax for homeless services, are directed toward the effort to extend two-year vouchers to up to five years for families.
Eleana Binder, a policy manager with service and advocacy nonprofit Glide, visited the Zoo Road encampment Monday.
“We want to do everything we can to help them achieve stability and access a safe parking site and housing so that they can go to their jobs, bring their children to school [and] do all the things that they’re trying to do, but which is more stressful right now, when they have this precarity and lack of stability,” Binder said.
Before midnight Tuesday, everyone was gone from Zoo Road. Roa’s family, back in their RV, left for good around 8 p.m. They moved to a street in Parkmerced, where, in a few days, they’ll move into an apartment and start a new life — but for how long, they can’t be sure.
That’s why, said Roa, they don’t plan to let the RV out of their sight.
“Since we don’t know if the city will change its word, we might have to go back,” Roa said. “We’re not going to get rid of it.”