‘It’s time to wind this down’: Residents brace for closure of Bayview Vehicle Triage Center

IN AN OLD parking lot behind the site of the former Candlestick Park in San Francisco, tensions are running high.

In early December 2024, the city delivered an unexpected message to the roughly 35 people living in 31 recreational vehicles at the “safe parking” site known as the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center.

The city told them that it had made the “hard decision” to close the site even though there was nearly a year left on the lease. The city informed the residents that if they have not accepted an offer of alternative housing or shelter, they must vacate the VTC with their RVs this coming Monday, March 3.

The city said if they fail to do so, on Tuesday their RVs will be towed and impounded.

While it wasn’t a secret that the VTC would one day close, residents couldn’t understand why it was happening just weeks after the city succeeded in finally getting a permanent power connection at the facility. That had been a three-year effort that cost millions of dollars, and it would now be rendered worthless. The residents said the city’s decision made no sense, particularly because there was no place for the RVs to go except back to the streets.

The decision to close the site

It was a hard decision to close the site, and the “gut punch” was that the city had just gotten electric to the site, said Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications & legislative affairs for the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

In a Feb. 3 interview with Bay City News, Cohen discussed the impending closure of the VTC and identified several factors in the decision.

She said that her department has learned a lot over the past few years, “but the overarching thing is that we just have a lot more work to do to understand how to best serve the population of people living in their vehicles, because it’s a really different sort of situation.”

Most HSH “clients” are “sleeping rough” or in encampments and getting into shelter is their priority, and “we found a really different sort of psychology and motivation at the vehicle triage center,” Cohen said.

“There are a portion of people who live in their vehicle who would like to be left alone to live in their vehicle in a safe place,” she said.

Other factors influencing the closure were the great infrastructure expense, the fact that the state lease could not be renewed again, as well as expensive environmental litigation instituted by the neighbors. She also mentioned the challenges in making a site like the VTC accessible.

She said that the different motivations of vehicle dwellers, when combined with those issues “just added up to enough. It’s time to wind this down, rehouse people and try a different model going forward.”

She added, “I think that that’s what government is supposed to do. If something’s not working, you’re supposed to end it and move on. Like, we don’t want to just keep doing something that is demonstrating that it’s not working.”

A mixture of fear, anger… and rats

On Thursday, BCN spoke with a dozen residents of the site and asked them to explain how they felt about the city’s actions and what they were going to do on Monday.

They were uniformly scared and angry. Many did not know what they would do.

For many of the residents, the choice offered by the city — accept an offer of housing or take their RV and leave — was at best a phantom choice.

Their RVs are their homes and, for many, their most valuable asset. For the most part, the housing or shelter that they have been offered is, in their opinion, either unworkable or illusory and they would likely have to give up their RVs to accept the offer (few could pay the cost of commercial storage.)

On the other hand, even though they would rather live in their RVs, most of those are not operable and even if they can get them back to the city streets they came from, they will face ticketing and impoundment, the very things they came to the VTC to escape.

The residents blame the city and its contractors, two nonprofit corporations — Urban Alchemy and Bayview Hunters Point Foundation — that together have been paid upwards of $8 million for their work since the site’s January 2022 opening.

They also blame the rats.

Resident after resident recounted the same story. They came to the VTC after city workers told them that they would be able to park safely without fear of new tickets or impoundment. They were told the city would help get the vehicles repaired and registered. They said the city would provide power at the site to run the electric in their vehicles.

Residents say that the promises were empty. There was no power at the site for more than two years, and there was — until recently — very little repair work. However, there was a problem no one warned them about — the site was infested with rats.

Resident after resident said that they drove their RV to the site under its own power, but rats ate the insulation off the wires underneath and ruined the electrical system, so they no longer ran. They said the rats ate holes in the underside of their RVs. One resident said the rats lived in the walls and seats and dashboard of her RV. Another described using poison to kill dozens of rats in his RV.

One of the longtime residents, Mauritio Castro, 56, said that the rats in his RV were so bad that he had to sleep in his minivan.

Robert McCrory is a combat veteran who served in Libya and Grenada. He says that he has PTSD from his service. After his service, he was a sheet metal worker. His RV was fine when he came to the VTC, but it became infested with rats.

McCrory said his RV “was a luxury before, but the rats chewed up my seat. They chewed all the wires underneath.”

He said that he jacked up the vehicle to see underneath, “I see there’s holes where the rats have … ate through my dash and made it so they can come and go, which I understand; they want to survive like everything else.”

He has two dogs and a cat but that hasn’t been enough to get rid of the rats.

“You can’t catch them when they’re underneath the floorboards. And they’re in the walls because all the wires in the walls, there’s a little pathway and the rats run running through that,” he said.

The promise of repairs

Many residents felt that the city and its contractors failed to make good on the promise to fix their RVs and help get them registered so the vehicles were lawful to operate.

Henry Borrero, 56, lives at the VTC in a drivable but unregistered 2006 Ford Explorer. He also has a trailer for his belongings. He’s been at the VTC “since the beginning,” and he was expecting to live there another year, at least until the end of the city’s lease on the property.

Borrero’s car runs, but it hasn’t been registered for two years, and he doesn’t have the money to pay two years of registration fees.

“Now they’re going to kick us out and I got to take my chances on the street with no registration,” he said.

He said, “They’re throwing us out here with no registrations or no nothing to have on vehicles. So they want to take our vehicles. I don’t know why they want to take the vehicle because we have nothing to live in now.”

Mark Noti, 62, tells how he and several other VTC residents were bussed to the DMV as a first step toward getting their vehicles repaired and registered.

“I told ’em what was wrong with it. It needed a carburetor, needed a gas tank and a gas line, a starter, a battery, and tires. And the registration.”

At the DMV, he was told that he needed the VIN number to register the vehicle, so he left and returned the next day with the information.

“They said I got the stuff that I need to get it registered now … (But then) they turned around and said they had no more funding.” One day, “they chartered a bus and took us all down here (to the DMV). But the next day they ran out of money.”

Now what?

Olda M. says she bought her RV after a dark period of addiction. She got treatment and when she left the facility as a recovering addict, “I decided to buy my home, my trailer. And I worked very hard for, like, six months to (get) the money and buy my trailer.”

She was very proud of the RV. Getting it was her “biggest goal” and it has helped her stay sober for five years.

She brought it to the safe parking site because she kept getting tickets and was worried it would be impounded. She said the city told her that the site would be a safe place.

Like many of the residents, for Olda M. the question of what happens when the facility is closed is top of mind. She has been in a state of anxiety and agitation for weeks.

The city has offered some residents shelter, while others got rental vouchers.

Olda is willing to give up her RV because it does not run any longer. Like other residents, rats chewed up the electrical system and got inside the vehicle, terrifying her.

While Olda would give up her RV, she did not want — under any circumstances — to live in an SRO in the Tenderloin where she would be exposed to heavy drug use.

She had been told that she could get into a “rapid rehousing” program that would allow her to rent a small apartment with a bathroom and kitchen.

However, last week the city’s contractors told her that she was being denied rapid rehousing and all they had for her was a room in an SRO on Eddy Street in the Tenderloin.

She says that she has mental health issues — all documented with the city — and her therapist had written a detailed letter explaining that it was not safe for her to be in that situation.

When the city’s contractors told her that her only choice was an SRO, she said, “do you want to kill me? You want to kill me? You don’t have to do it. I going to do it myself.”

She was in her car where she had a cooking knife.

With them watching, she took the knife and sliced open her wrist. There was blood everywhere and chaos. The city people did not help; it was other residents who staunched the bleeding, called an ambulance, went to the hospital with her.

When she returned to the site, bandaged and with six stitches, the contractors wouldn’t let her into the site until a standoff with residents forced them to relent.

(Cohen said that she could not discuss individual residents, but said that there were numerous inaccuracies in the residents’ report about the incident.)

Olda M. does not know what she will do on Monday if she is made to leave. If it comes to it, she will get her car towed somewhere on the street and will live in it, but she knows it could be only a matter of time until she is ticketed, and her RV impounded. The thought makes her sick.

She says, “You know what I feel? I am feeling they just will take everything I have.”

Hail Marys

Many residents, like Olda M., said they did not know what they would do come Monday. Some thought there might be a reprieve that would let them stay at least for long enough for the city to carry through on the offer of repairs.

There were a few balls in the air. Ramona Mayon, founder of the Candlestick 35, the self-declared union of site residents, filed a lawsuit against the city asking for an injunction against the closing. Mayon is not a lawyer but has a long history of representing herself in court. Her suit raises a provision in the city charter that requires a public hearing before the closing of a city facility. She says no hearing was held before the city announced closure.

She says the residents deserve a hearing where they can show that the city’s stated reasons for closure are a pretext. She believes that the real reason for the closure comes from the union’s work in calling out violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act at the site. She believes the closure is retaliatory for blowing the whistle on the city and its contractors for ADA and other violations.

How well her legal arguments will work is unclear, but Mayon is not relying solely on the courts.

Mayon has also peppered the new mayor, the Board of Supervisors, and HSH leadership with emails outlining the violations she believes that she has documented. Her writing is bombastic and at times aggressive, but she prides herself on being a documentarian. She backs up her assertions with videos she has taken at the site and posted to her YouTube channel.

While there are still balls in the air, many residents fear the worst.

Andrew Kucharski, 41, is deaf and communicated with BCN by a phone program that translated his signing into speech.

Kucharski has been living at the VTC since it opened in January 2022. He lives in a 2010 Ford Econoline 3500.

“It’s broken,” he says. There’s no windshield and the catalytic converter was stolen during the time he has lived at the VTC. The vehicle also needs new tires and engine repair. “I was offered repairs several years ago, but then they said the repairs were too pricey.”

When they announced that the VTC would be closing, “I was given the option to either have my RV repaired or to accept shelter. I chose Option 1.” But he says they never repaired his vehicle.

He doesn’t want to leave the VTC site, but he expects that on Tuesday, they will try to tow his car. “I’m not sure what will happen,” he says. “If I’m in the car, can they tow it?”

On Tuesday, after the VTC is closed, he said, “I expect to be kicked out. I don’t understand why.”

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