Mayor Lurie’s new effort to get many RVs off SF streets with a two-hour parking limit is now in effect, except the actual two-hour parking limit does not kick in until November. And the city will offer cash in an RV buyback program.

This has been a big week for Mayor Daniel Lurie’s plans to reduce San Francisco homelessness, or at least, visible San Francisco homelessness. On Tuesday, Lurie ordered encampment sweeps on Sixth Street. Then came Wednesday’s announcement that the city struck a deal with Caltrans to clear encampments around highway overpasses.

Now NBC Bay Area reports that today will be the first day of Lurie’s two-hour parking limit enforcement for RVs that seem camped permanently along city streets. Lurie announced the limit in June, and it launches today.

Well, sort of. It’s a multi-phased “progressive enforcement” plan where the two-hour limit will not actually be fully enforced until November.

“Our message is clear: oversized vehicles can no longer be stored on city streets,” the SF Department of Emergency Management said in a statement, per NBC Bay Area. "We are pairing that expectation with real pathways to safe, stable housing, followed by consistent enforcement.”

Right now we’re going into the initial September phase, which is described as “service first outreach.” In the words of Lurie’s press release last month, that means “outreach teams trained to work with people living in large vehicles, with language skills and trauma-informed care.”

In October, they plan to make housing offers, though we seem to never have enough beds and shelter for these people. But there’s also a novel idea in which the city will buy back people’s RVs, or in the words of that release, “the city will offer cash incentives to residents living in large vehicles in San Francisco as of May 2025 to relinquish their large vehicles.” It is not mentioned how much cash, but this may be an effective strategy.

And it won’t be until November that the two-hour parking limit for large vehicles actually gets enforced. But Lurie’s office says that the two-hour limit will be in effect all over the city, and at all hours, seven days a week.

The city knows where all these RVs are, and they count them every three months or so (they are the green dots on the map above). The latest June count showed 612 vehicles with people living in them, and that’s up from 549 in March. So technically, the number of people living in vehicles has increased slightly under the Lurie administration. But that’s before this initiative has launched, and before Lurie starts offering people cash to get rid of their RVs.

Related: SFMTA Votes to Tow RVs Parked Overnight on Streets If Campers Refuse Offers of Shelter [SFist]

Image: Google Street View