An RV is just a nicer tent, it is not a house. If people won't transition to housing, then they need to leave SF. If they can not afford SF, then they need to leave SF and live somewhere else where they can.
When properly accommodated, it's a nicer tent with electricity, AC, and an actual bed, kitchen, and bathroom. With tents you get dangerous hotplates/camping stoves and people pissing and shitting in streets instead of toilets. Some people really prefer the mobility, but most would happily transition to housing as soon it is made affordable/available. There are more vacant homes in SF than homeless people, and foreign investors buy up huge amounts of residential property and leave them empty.
I think most people wouldn't mind (as much) clean, functioning RVs. The people living like that are likely getting swept up in the backlash against the broken/unsafe RVs that cause a lot of problems for neighbors. This is anecdotal for sure, but the RVs near my neighborhood in San Jose are really rough. Missing windows, full of trash/vermin, and don't seem to have working facilities.
I don't have any idea what percentage of RVs fall into which camp, I just know that the bad ones are very visible.
Tents are safer and better in a bunch of different ways. Imagine if the tents had electrical systems like motorhomes do. Fire, environmental damage, crime, public costs, all favor cheap, safe disposable tents over motorhomes.
The answer isn’t motorhomes or tents, it’s better political leadership and a healthier less likely to fall into homelessness middle class.
> If they can not afford SF, then they need to leave SF and live somewhere else where they can.
To clarify: you believe that the cheapest available housing today should be used to determine if someone is allowed to live in SF? If not, how are you quantifying “can afford SF”?
If you won’t quantify your expectations, would you mind elaborating on what the minimum qualified definition is for you? In terms of what must be met, not what must not be met? I can agree it’s nice to not have folks living in tents and RVs.
We seem to be talking past one another for some reason. The bar is "is not living in a tent". It means living in a place that isn't a tent. We can rathole into how that wants to be defined exactly, and pick that apart, but that doesn't seems all that interesting to me but if you'd like to propose something we can iterate on specific wording as to what constitutes "living in a tent".
Still, the California building code 709b discusses sleeping and alludeds so a definition for bedroom, so going in that direction, in order to be not living in a tent, a person would need to have their own access to a legal bedroom, as defined by the building code. There is a $20k fine if people are sleeping in, eg, the twitter offices, which was not zoned for that.
No worries. I’m just wondering what you are expecting to constitute the minimum since the next logical step is to ask where the government should then draw the line on helping folks or essentially kicking them out of the city. Right now your definition lets folks lucky enough to have relatives with an extra couch stay while orphans would be gone at 18 just by dumb luck.
Oh. I wasn't the one saying we should kick people out who can't afford SF, I was just taking issue with "can afford to live in SF" as some undefinable standard. If I had my druthers, we'd subsidize and encourage building housing until the city looked like Hong Kong and everybody had places to live, but I'm not in charge of things.
