The Vehicularily Housed Beat

pstrongVehicularily housed beat reporter chronicles police harassment, citations and the struggles of people who live in their cars./strong/p pDIV align="left" TABLE cellpadding="5"TR VALIGN="TOP"TDIMG SRC= "../sites/default/files/arch_img/410/photo_1_supplement.jpg" //td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TD/td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TDTR VALIGN="TOP"TD pby Vlad Pogorelov/Vehicularily Housed Beat Reporter/p pI woke up this morning to the sound of someone banging on the walls and windows of my house. My dog Marina did not like it, of course, and started barking violently at the intruder. I got dressed and walked outside, ready to face a teenage prankster, a street hoodlum or worse. To my surprise, I saw a policeman in a white motorcycle helmet writing down my license plate number. “How can I help you?” I asked him. /p p“You’ve got to move,” he replied angrily, and proceeded in filling out a “red tag”—a notice informing me I was parked illegally and would have to move or risk a $53 fine as well as having my motorhome towed. /p p“But I just moved here yesterday,” I told him. /p p“Too bad,” said the policeman. “The captain wants everyone out of here. You’ve got to move,” he repeated, marking my tires with yellow chalk. Then he slapped a pink sheet of paper on my windshield, got into his police car and drove away. /p pI had a sour taste in my mouth as I studied the official document issued by Bayview Police Station. Despite beautiful spring weather, my mood was low. I had a new headache now, as I needed to find a new parking space for my 25-foot motorhome./p pTo be clear, I am not a stranger to those “red tags” which can be issued by the Police Department and DPT to any vehicle which, in their opinion, appears abandoned or broken down, or is not moving for an extensive amount of time. /p pHowever, there is another category of vehicles being systematically targeted by police, regardless of how often they move or change parking spots on the streets of San Francisco. These are vehicles that serve as houses. Such are the motorhomes, the RV’s, the school buses, the trailers and other vehicles which have been converted to mobile residences. These types of vehicles are considered enemies by police, and every effort is being made by the city to ticket and tow vehicular houses making it impossible for those who live in them to remain in San Francisco. /p pDespite police efforts to chase the vehicularily housed away, many more such citizens continue to arrive. And it’s not surprising.br / I am a vehicularily housed resident of San Francisco. I started living in a motorhome about a year ago after being evicted from my home on Potrero Hill by the Sheriff’s Department. Unable to find any suitable living space that I could afford, I had no other way of remaining in San Francisco except living in my car. Since then I have been parking my house mainly in the China Basin area. /p pSince the 1960’s, vehicular housing has been an established tradition in China Basin and Central Basin. According to Joe Ann, a construction worker who has lived in her motorhome in the Dog Patch area of Bayview District for the last 20 years, and raised two daughters on the street, there were hundreds if not thousands of vehicularly housed residents living in that area. Jack, a writer, is another vehicular resident of Dog Patch, there since the late 60’s, had the same opinion. “It was really easy to be here. It was such a funky neighborhood back then!”, he recalls, a nostalgic look in his eyes. /p pBecause of massive gentrification of Potrero Hill, Dog Patch and surrounding light industrial areas of Central Basin, the habitat of vehicularily housed residents is being destroyed. Within the last 2 months I have been “red tagged” more than 10 times, sometimes receiving an official threat of “house expropriation” immediately upon arrival to my new parking spot. /p pThe threat of being towed by the police is not an empty one. On a daily basis I see police towing away motorhomes, school buses, trailers and vans for a variety of bogus charges. Frequently, there is an anonymous complainer from the nearby neighborhood of expensive live-work lofts which sprang-up during the dot-com boom. It seems that the dot-com era has gone by, yet many of those live-work lofts are still under construction. The transformation of a semi-industrial area, which had many streets available for parking of vehicularly housed , into an upscale neighborhood for the rich is progressing at full speed. /p pAnd it’s not just an issue of Bayview Police Station versus vehicularly house residents. Because of increasingly gentrified environment the poor people who live in their run down vehicles end up situated next to the luxury Porsches and Alfa Romeos that belong to new loft residents. As a result, vehicularly housed people are being targeted by those who inhibit expensive lofts as well. /p pRecently a neighbor of mine who lives in his van and works on the ferry which transports people across the San Francisco Bay brought me a big poster which he pulled off a nearby electric poll on 23rd and Indiana. A 2x3 ft sheet of paper stated “Homeless people have more rights than you do!”. And then it accused those of us who live in vehicles in being a nuisance and encouraged everyone to call Bayview Police Station and complain. /p p An aim of such an attack against vehicularly housed is clear—it takes only one anonymous complaint to displace dozens of people from the neighborhood in which many of them lived for years, if not decades, without any due process. The gentrification of Dog Patch and Central Basin area is a clear cause of it. Developers have invested millions of dollars there, and now in order to attract the tenants into the expensive lofts they would like to eradicate the poor from the area. A number of loft buildings were built along 3rd Street and a few more are being built on Indiana, Mississippi Streets, as well as along other streets in that area. /p pIt seems that the opposite process of what is happening in the Mission is taking place. I would call such practices the “Vehicularly Housed Eradication Project”. A division has been drawn and the opposing forces, though completely unequal are facing each other before the final battle. While thinking of this sad situation, I remembered the words which were said by a Russian soldier facing the Nazi tanks during the battle of Moscow, “Russia is big. But we have nowhere to retreat — Moscow is behind us!” To paraphrase it is to say, “The Bay Area is big. But here, we have nowhere to go as we are being pushed over into the Bay.” We have to fight for our right to stay here or to disappear and let the forces global markets defeat us to the point of non-existent”./p p This week, a number of vehicles used as residences were “red-tagged” on 24th Street near Illinois Street. The inhabitants of those vehicles appeared to be very poor with very little resources to gas or a replacement tire which frequently needed in order to move to a new location. It is possible that some of them will not be able to move and will loose their houses to the City Tow which is located only two blocks away./p pRecently, I was driving by one of the lofts in Dog Patch near 3rd Street. I saw a message spray painted on the wall: “Bust the live work racket!” Well, not everyone is passively accepting the current situation, I thought. Some people are ready to fight back. It’s made me hopeful about the future, the fate of those who call our vehicles — home. Our struggles were the inspiration for this new beat report on PNN and column b They towed my home.. /b./p p PS: I would appreciate your feedback, your thoughts, suggestions, questions and stories. The struggle of vehicularly housed people is not limited to San Francisco. So, please e-mail your comments to: a href="mailto:nuthamsun@onebox.com"nuthamsun@onebox.com/a or contact POOR magazine: (415)863-6306. Peace and Love to you all!br / /p/td/tr/td/tr/table/div/p