Another SF Plan to Help the Homeless Turned Into an Expensive Disaster

Three years ago, SF Mayor London Breed announced the opening of the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center. This was literally a parking lot in Candlestick State Recreation Area that was being opened up for homeless people living in RVs.

“We must take advantage of every opportunity we get, and all do our part to ensure that our unhoused residents have a safe place to sleep and regular access to stabilizing services,” said Mayor Breed. “As we continue to move forward with our Homelessness Recovery Plan, we must find solutions for people living in their RVs or their cars and provide them with a path out of homelessness.”…

“With the Bayview VTC, we continue to develop innovative approaches to the growing issue of vehicular homelessness in our community,” said Shireen McSpadden, Executive Director, San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. “The purpose of the Bayview VTC is to offer stability to individuals and families and to provide a transition from living in vehicles to housing and services that offer an end to their homelessness.”

As you can see, the focus was on transitioning people out of their RVs into some kind of more permanent housing. But just over three years later, the site was shut down on Monday. Everyone involved admits the site was an expensive failure. In fact, given the relatively few people it helped, it may be the most expensive homeless boondoggle per capita in city history.

The biggest problem from the very start of this plan was that the site had no electricity. That meant there was nowhere to plug in the RVs and also no way to provide meals to residents. Propane tanks, which frequently lead to fires in homeless camps, were also forbidden at the site. So homeless people living in RVs initially just refused to go there at all because there would be no way for them to cook or stay warm.

The city would eventually spend $7.1 million electrifying the parking lot but as with everything in SF, the project to electrify the parking lot took years to complete. In the meantime, the city paid to bring in diesel generators.

The city initially attempted to power the site with diesel generators before switching to rented portable batteries — but even then, for many months, residents only received electricity for eight hours a day…

Because the site didn’t have access to adequate power, the city had to contract with meal providers to prepare food offsite — a significant additional expense. Residents complained that the food was inedible and of other poor living conditions, including a rat infestation and a wider failure to accommodate people with disabilities — prompting an investigation by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

When the city tried to provide power to the site with generators, neighbors sued, arguing in an ongoing lawsuit that San Francisco was violating clean air standards.

All of this was necessary because PG&E seemingly couldn’t get it in gear to connect the site to the grid.

The city and PG&E have gone back and forth for nearly three years negotiating permit issues, construction timelines and costs.

The dispute boiled over last year, during a meeting at the Board of Supervisors, where Supervisors Shamann Walton and Hillary Ronen called PG&E “evil” and “a big part of the problem.”

The site was finally connected to power on October 28, 2024, just shy of three years after it opened.

On top of all these other problems, the fire marshal limited the capacity of the lot. Instead of 78 initial parking spaces with room to increase to 150 over time, the site was limited to 35 spaces with the potential to increase to 69 over time.

Two city contractors were put in charge of monitoring and running the site at a cost of $3.5 million per year. The city didn’t renegotiate the cost once it became clear the site would hold about half as many people as initially planned. It’s only money seems to be SF’s unofficial motto.

So by the time the site shut down Monday, the city had spent a total of $18 million to provide space and services to 132 “households.” Working that out, the city spent about $278 per night per RV, which is more than the cost of some hotel rooms in the city and about double the $142 per night that the RV park in Candlestick State Recreation Area charges. 

As for the plan to transition people into permanent housing, that was also a total failure. Fewer than 20% of the 132 “households” at the site over time moved into housing. Of the 35 or so RVs that were there Monday when the site was closed, only 2 people accepted the city’s housing offer. The rest had to quickly call tow trucks to have their non-running RVs towed out of the lot.

Many didn’t go far either. On Tuesday morning, more than a dozen RVs, trailers and other vehicles were stopped on either side of Gilman Avenue, a quarter-mile from the shuttered site.

“It’s horrible,” said Olda Madera, who paid $100 to get her broken down RV towed onto the nearby street. “When you’re parked on the street, you don’t feel safe.”

It may have been horrible for the residents getting kicked out on short notice but it’s arguably worse for the people who own homes in the neighborhood.

Violet Moyer, who lives in a townhouse on Gilman Avenue, said she was frustrated, but not surprised, when she woke up Tuesday morning to see the cluster of new RVs parked along the road.

“In our neighborhood, there’s no enforcement and there’s no accountability,” she said. “This would not happen in richer neighborhoods.… And now we’re in a situation where not only do we not have a vehicle triage center for these folks to have access to water, power and sewage, but they are now living next to our community park and elementary school, without a way for the police to enforce bad behavior that often comes with the unsanitary conditions of living on the street.”

The number of homeless living in tents in his same area has roughly doubled over the past two years so the RVs are really a small part of a much larger problem. All in all another great effort by San Francisco. To call this a boondoggle is probably understating what a tremendous waste it was.