The Bayview RV triage site that’s been dubbed the “most expensive homeless response” in SF history has been deemed a failure and will wind down operations in a few months, after blowing through $15 million and only accommodating about one-fifth of the people it was supposed to.
During the really bad days of the pandemic, San Francisco was scrambling to find safe accommodations for its homeless population, and was provided a fair amount of state funding to do this. One of these solutions was an RV triage center at Candlestick Point that opened in 2022, but it was little-used and incredibly costly.
So now, nearly three years later, the Chronicle reports that the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (DHS) is pulling the plug on the Bayview Vehicle Triage Center, and everyone will have to get their vehicles out of there by some point in March.
This is ironic, because the site just got its PG&E power hook-ups five weeks ago, after not having full power for nearly three years. On top of that, DHS is decommissioning the site a full nine months before the city’s lease on the place is up, after it was underutilized and suffered a series of logistical snafus.
“We’re really not in the business of running RV parks, and that was very clear to us in this process,” DHS executive director Shireen McSpadden told the Chronicle.
The site was originally supposed to accommodate more than 150 RVs, but fire marshall limited it to just 35. It only ended up serving about 30 vehicles at a time, with an unknown number of residents in those vehicles.
And the program blew through $15.5 million of city and state funding over this nearly three years. The Chronicle reported on a city budget report in 2023 which noted that “assuming an ongoing capacity of 35 vehicles per night, the cost per vehicle is approximately $140,000 per year, which is by far the most expensive homeless response intervention.”
Indeed, the city was spending $275 a night per RV there, whereas one night at the adjacent Candlestick RV Park costs only $145 per night.
When the program expires, the DHS hopes to transition people into permanent housing “or provide them with other support such as vehicle repairs,” according to the Chronicle. But the RV-dwelling crowd tends to resist housing support, because they do not consider themselves homeless, and are fine with their status quo. The city is also considering temporary vouchers for existing RV parks in the area, or safe parking spots at other shelter sites that are yet to open.
This is an issue, because people living in vehicles are the fastest-growing segment of the SF homeless population. The latest homeless point-in-time count showed nearly 1,500 people living in vehicles in SF, a 37% increase over the previous count.
The sad thing is that the closure of this Bayview Triage Center will put even more vehicle-dwellers out on the streets. The upside, in this case, is that there are so few people using this facility that it will not appreciably increase that population of vehicle-dwellers on the streets.
Image: Candlestick Rv Park via Yelp
