NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is alive in San Francisco as supervisors squabble about what to do with homeless RV dwellers, providing few options except for eliminating them from their individual districts.
One San Francisco supervisor is pressing the city to remove trailers and camper vans from a quiet side street in his district – a move that spurred emotional debate and divided board directors for the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
Vehicle encampments have become an increasingly common sight in a city with a gnawing homeless crisis. Some housing activists call them a last line of defense for people struggling to stay off the street. But residents and city officials say the vehicle dwellers dump garbage, take up parking and create a nuisance for people living nearby.
Supervisor Ahsha Safai said he’s received numerous complaints from constituents about people camped out on De Wolf Street and Lawrence Avenue, a stretch of road wedged between a block of single-family homes and apartments and Interstate 280 in the Outer Mission.
“Allowing a small side street to become an unofficial RV park is not the answer” to the city’s problems with homelessness, Safai wrote in a letter to the board of the SFMTA, which manages parking in the city. He said the camp’s inhabitants pile detritus on the street and cook with open flames, creating a safety hazard for 13 adjacent homes.
The RVs are causing quality of life to deteriorate in “one of the last affordable neighborhoods in San Francisco,” Safai wrote. He asked for a parking ban on any vehicle more than seven feet tall or 22 feet long from midnight to 6 a.m. each day.
But activists and an RV dweller who showed up to the SFMTA board meeting on Tuesday asked for leniency, saying the people who camp on that roadway will have nowhere else to go if the city pushes them out.
Let’s look at this problem with open eyes. I think it harsh to see these poor souls being treated in such a fashion. I think California should increase taxes on the fortunate people who have jobs. It is obvious to me that their hasn’t been enough government assistance, bestowed on their states homeless. I am appalled that the politician would even think to come down on these poor individuals. I mean after all, the climate is perfect to live in an RV on city streets. What kind of elected official would dare tell someone without a job, not to live in an RV, parked for months on end in a city street. Are these people heartless.
I think so.
Ok, I just woke up from my drunkin` stuper, let me complete this post.
Clear the rubbish off the streets, it looks aweful.
Overcrowding in RV parks.
And homeless moving into RVs in cities and being moved along.
All a symptom of the biggest problem confronting life on our planet: Human overpopulation.
Overpopulation is increasing at an exponential rate. So camping crowding will not ease up or slowly get worse. It will quickly get worse. As has traffic on your local Interstate.
America’s answer, then and now: “Not here! Go away!”
Back in the early 1900’s, Boise, Idaho had a lovely riverside park, large and tree-shaded with grassy glades and camping fields. Local families would spend summer weekends camped in “Veterans Park,” named to honor the First World War servicemen.
Then came the dust bowl disaster, and a wave of displaced family refugees, derided as Okies and Arkies, swept into the region on their way to seek jobs and survival in West Coast cities. Many families arrived in ragged clothes, driving half-broken down jalopies piled high with lashed-on household goods, bedding and cooking kits. They camped in Veterans Park for a respite from their long, exhausting flight.
Boise city officials responded in the typical conservative American fashion: they honored local fear and revulsion by running off the unwanted homeless squatters, arresting those who resisted while breaking a few heads, and chased them all west to the Oregon border.
Then they permanently closed Veterans Park to camping or any form of dusk to dawn use. To this day, it is a day-use only park. Local families are no longer allowed to pitch a weekend tent along the riverside under the sheltering trees on the grassy glades. But they did rid the city of Okies and Arkies, and succeeding generations of homeless refugees and their families.
Problem solved.
So liberal San Francisco’s residents don’t like people living on the street. Maybe they should build a wall around their neighborhood But their all for illegal immigrants what a bunch hypocrites