Calls for help in the Bayview often lead nowhere. The neighborhood with the largest share of RV encampments also has the city’s slowest response time to complaints about the issue.
So when Mayor Daniel Lurie visited the site of a persistent encampment on Gilman Avenue last week, many residents felt it was a promising development. Lurie, joined by 12 department heads, posted footage of the visit to social media, pledging to be more responsive in the area.
“In some of these unincorporated parts out here at Candlestick Point, there’s a lot of illegal dumping. There are RVs parked all over. You see trash everywhere,” Lurie told his Instagram followers. “We wouldn’t allow this in other parts of our city. The message to all the departments is, we got to do better.”
Sure enough, the day after Lurie’s visit, a police officer came by the encampment and told its occupants to move. But the rationale he gave — in an encounter caught on video by one of the RV dwellers — lent substance to the argument that the mayor’s handling of the homelessness problem is driven by optics, rather than outcomes.
“If you guys just moved, then I can take a little pretty picture and send it to the mayor,” the officer is heard saying in the video. “Then he’ll be happy, maybe.”
Tracy McCray, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, said the officer — whose actions were described to her by The Standard — likely didn’t want to be in that situation.
“He probably would have rather been doing something else,” McCray said. “People feel safer with the police around; I understand that. But it’s more of a societal issue. … There are probably people better suited to work with people who are suffering from homelessness.”
The RV dwellers obliged the officer, moving their encampment a few blocks away in a pattern that’s become familiar since the city closed the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center early last month.
Ramona Mayon, who took the video, criticized the mayor’s treatment of the RV community, calling it “Trumpian.” Mayon lived in the Vehicle Triage Center before it closed March 3.
“You just threw us out on the street. OK, fine,” said Mayon, who has stage-four cancer. “But then you come back along and tell the police to clear us? This guy Lurie isn’t going to have any compassion.”
Lukas Illa, an organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness, said the officer’s comments in the video illuminate the “backward stupidity” of the mayor’s approach.
“I commend this officer for trying their best. It sounds like he understands the nuance,” Illa said. “This constant pushing of people from block to block with no services that actually meet their needs is not only pointless, it’s cruel.”
The San Francisco Police Department said its “officers are out every day working hard to ensure our streets are clean and the public is safe.”
The video came to light as Lurie feuds with Bayview Supervisor Shamann Walton over the neighborhood’s homelessness crisis. Walton has criticized the mayor for “lying to the community” by removing 20 sanctioned parking spots at a newly opened shelter called Jerrold Commons.
“The mayor does not have a plan to address people living in vehicles,” Walton said.
Lurie spokesperson Charles Lutvak said the mayor’s “north star” is to offer people living in vehicles “a better option.” Though the city removed the sanctioned parking spots, it’s expanding overall capacity at the site — some of which is reserved for RV dwellers.
“It’s clear the city’s previous attempts have not solved this challenge — that’s why we have already added bed capacity specifically for people living in RVs and are developing a more robust, multi-pronged strategy for getting families on the path to long-term stability,” Lutvak said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing our work across city departments and with the Board of Supervisors to finally make progress for the families living in vehicles and for communities across the city.”
The city’s response to encampments in the Bayview was nearly 10 times slower than in any other part of the city last year. Officials blamed this disparity on the “complexity” of the neighborhood’s encampments. But the revelation infuriated residents, who say the historically Black community has always stood last in line for services due to institutional racism.
The Vehicle Triage Center, where 42 people lived in RVs and had access to showers, bathrooms, and three meals a day, closed last month as scrutiny grew over its $17 million price tag. The city moved 12 of the site’s occupants into housing and five to shelter.
Since the video was taken, Mayon has moved roughly five blocks away. Any time she leaves her vehicle, which contains her husband’s ashes, she fears it will be towed.
“Simply give us a place to pull in an RV,” Mayon said. “The homeless people are getting shitted on, as usual.”