By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt
Four-hour parking rules would mean eviction. Why isn’t Breed pushing the obvious solution?
An item described as “various routine parking and traffic modifications” doesn’t usually generate hours of powerful testimony from homeless people and their advocates at the Municipal Transportation Agency.
But this week’s meeting involved a plan to create four-hour parking rules on streets near Lake Merced—which would amount to eviction notices for a community of recreational vehicle dwellers who have been living there for several years…
But there’s actually a pretty simple, easy solution: The city could provide a safe parking space in the area, a lot where the RV dwellers could remain until there’s decent, acceptable affordable housing for them.
Melgar told me she’s been working on this for more than two years. There’s money in the budget for it.
But the Mayor’s Office has been delaying and delaying and bringing up obstacle after obstacle. “There’s no reason we can’t do this quickly,” Melgar said. “We did it during Covid.”
For more than an hour, people who lived in the RVs (mostly Spanish speakers) and a long list of advocates asked the panel not to evict the residents. As Erick Arguello, who works at Glide’s Center for Social Justice, said, “this is the only thing they have.”…(more)
We heard from people in District 11, how well the safe parking project worked when the neighborhood groups became involved at the CSFN September Town Hall.
Vehicle Triage Center
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