Karla Hernandez Oviedo, Yorman Roa, and their school-age girls finally have a place of their own.
Late Monday, after eight months of living in a recreational vehicle on San Francisco streets, the Venezuelan asylum seekers signed a lease for a third-floor apartment in one of the Parkmerced neighborhood’s pastel-colored towers. The couple, both 30, used a city-provided housing subsidy voucher that covers the first two months of rent, then requires them to pay 40% of the $2,500 lease.
“Yarmon’s anxiety has calmed down because he knows the girls will be safe,” Hernandez Oviedo said. “He’s glad to know they will have a home to go to after school.
“It gives me peace and calm too. I’m grateful,” she added.
With the paperwork signed, they can unpack their belongings, furnish the one-bedroom apartment, and begin their new lives. Victoria, 14, can invite classmates over after school. Samantha, 8, is happy to be able to take hot showers.
According to the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the family is one of about 21 that had moved into Parkmerced as of Tuesday. The road to bringing them indoors was long and winding — and a demonstration of the city’s power to marshal resources when political pressure is applied.
“I appeared at public meetings to provide information about how complicated it is to raise children without a place,” Hernandez Oviedo said. “If we hadn’t done that, they wouldn’t have paid attention to us.”
Hernandez Oviedo joined others in advocating for their needs: housing or, barring that, a safe parking site for people living in vehicles. The city has for years allocated millions of dollars for setting up such sites but has failed to do so.
All the voucher recipients had lived in vehicles on Winston Drive — a leafy street between Stonestown Galleria and Lake Merced with loose parking restrictions — as part of a longstanding group of about 50 families, most from South and Central America. City departments and nonprofit service providers offered assistance as though the encampment were a de facto shelter.
Hernandez Oviedo was spurred to political action with the help of the Coalition on Homelessness, which has worked with the Winston Drive RV community over the years to ask City Hall for a safe parking site and protest parking restrictions that would have forced them out. Lukas Illa, the coalition’s spokesperson, described the housing of 21 families as a partial victory.
“This is a win. These subsidies did not exist a month ago,” Illa said. “We’ve been lobbying for these, and we’re continuously told by the city that they don’t have the ability to create them.”
Housing conundrum
This summer, the members of the RV community made themselves heard. Aside from attending public meetings to give testimony, a group from the community blocked Winston Drive when newly instated four-hour parking restrictions would have displaced them.
When the city set a deadline this month for clearing the encampment, Hernandez Oviedo and Roa joined a caravan of about 30 RVs that broke into a San Francisco Zoo parking lot — a location once under consideration for a safe parking site. Police and park rangers quickly dispersed them; most ended up parked on Zoo Road, the L-shaped street around the Pomeroy Recreation & Rehabilitation Center.
The rec center had encountered vehicle and tent encampments before. Its leadership immediately called on Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who represents the city’s southwest side, to find a solution.
That solution was to reevaluate the families on Zoo Road for housing. All but two accepted offers. Two families are awaiting placement in permanent supportive housing. A number of voucher recipients told The Standard they had never been offered housing before, only shelter.
Illa notes that fewer than half of the families from the Winston Drive community have received housing subsidy referrals. The others remain on the streets.
“We should build as a city the diverse infrastructure to support all different types of folks who are exiting homelessness, transitioning into permanent, supportive housing or longer term, self-sufficient housing — and that does include safe parking sites,” Illa said.
About 1,400 San Franciscans live in 700 vehicles, city data show, and the numbers have grown over the last two years. Most are located in the industrial section of the Bayview, the outskirts of Showplace Square, and around Lake Merced.
One long-promised solution to where to put RVs has been the city-sponsored Bayview Vehicle Triage Center, which is on state park land. Right now, it serves people living in a few dozen vehicles. Due to issues with connecting power to the center, it has never met its capacity of hosting about 150 RVs.
Melgar said she plans to introduce legislation in a few months to set up a city-run safe parking site.
Meanwhile, Hernandez Oviedo and Roa found a place to store their RV for $150 a month in the North Bay and are working with La Raza Community Resource Center to find jobs.
Victoria’s quinceañera is in October. Hernandez Oviedo hasn’t decided where to hold the party. But she has at least one option: their new home.