Bay Area cities crack down on RV living, pushing homeless residents across borders

People who live in cars and RVs throughout the Bay Area are moving between cities as crackdowns on street encampments ramp up, a trend that pushed Oakland officials to adopt a new policy speeding up tows over concerns the city is becoming a "destination" for displaced residents.

Advocates for homeless people and some experts are horrified at the regional crackdown. Margot Kushel, a physician and UC San Francisco researcher who leads the largest study of homelessness in the U.S., said Bay Area cities are competing in a "race to the bottom" to pass stronger restrictions on encampments than their neighbors.

The consequences are disastrous for those priced out of the housing market, she said. When forced to move repeatedly, residents often lose shelter, critical paperwork and medications. Outreach workers can't find their clients. And doctors lose touch with patients, driving worse health outcomes in a population already at risk.

"You would hope there would be some better way to handle this than treating people as something to throw out and push away, as opposed to our neighbors," Kushel said.

The scale of homelessness in the Bay Area is massive. The most recent estimates clocked 9,500 homeless people in Alameda County and 10,700 in Santa Clara County, most commonly living in vehicles. It's also fluid - one city's crackdown may push residents across borders.

"If we don't act, we risk becoming a destination for displacement from other cities, and that is indeed happening," Patricia Brooks, chief of staff to council President Kevin Jenkins, said at a council meeting.

Brooks said crackdowns in San Jose and San Francisco inspired Oakland's new policy, which will go into effect this summer. Mountain View led the region, adopting citywide restrictions on RVs in 2020; enforcement began two years later.

After months of intense debate, the Oakland City Council passed a new policy on April 14 to accelerate the removal of cars and RVs on city streets. In a major change, Oakland will no longer consider vehicles as encampments - allowing enforcers to tow vehicles with less notice to occupants, who will have weaker rights than people living in tents. Far more homeless people live in vehicles than in tents in the East Bay city.

The Supreme Court paved the way for the regional crackdown with a landmark 2024 decision allowing cities to pass camping bans even without shelters available. That decision is reshaping the rules in California, home to almost half of the nation's unsheltered homeless people. Gov. Gavin Newsom has pressured cities and counties to clear camps faster and find solutions to homelessness, but without regular state funding.

For Newsom and a growing chorus of local officials in the Bay Area, including the Oakland City Council, efforts are long overdue to return public spaces to community uses and better manage public health and safety issues associated with some camps.

Early adopters

In San Jose, officials passed rules to cite and arrest homeless people who decline offers of shelter and directed workers to aggressively clear camps, including an ongoing operation to dismantle the last major homeless community in the city.

Mayor Matt Mahan has also overseen efforts to break up congregations of RVs and carve no-parking zones, towing vehicles if occupants don't move by deadlines. City data shows the vast majority of people move before enforcers seize their vehicle, said Colin Heyne, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation.

The results? Some neighborhoods are getting a break from communities of vehicle-dwellers, but inhabitants have described "nightmare" scenarios of forced relocations with no place to go.

"We feel this approach has balanced the need to clean up locations and provide relief to neighborhoods while respecting the needs of unhoused residents," Heyne said.

In San Francisco, officials last fall debuted a two-hour parking limit on oversized vehicles, unless residents can prove they've lived in the city for a year.

"We had far too many RVs on our streets," Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a social media post this month. "Families living in really terrible conditions."

The city has towed more than 350 RVs since November 2025, according to El Tecolote newspaper. Most of their occupants were left without housing, the newspaper reported, but some successfully moved indoors through a city program.

Oakland's new rules

Although inspired by other cities' crackdowns, it's unclear how much Oakland will enforce its new, tougher policy. Cupid Alexander, the city's new homelessness policy chief, said in an email that the Oakland Police Department and Department of Transportation are drafting procedures. Alexander took the Oakland job this month after working as San Jose's deputy housing director.

The policy keeps some protections for people living in RVs and cars. The city must "attempt to identify" shelter space before towing away someone's home, Alexander said.

"I can understand the city wanting to thin out some of the RVs," said Kelly Thompson, 78, who has lived in a camper for years in Oakland. Many are "junkers that don't run" and clog city streets, he said, especially in the West Oakland neighborhood where he lives now, up against an industrial lot.

"But they're shelters for people," Thompson said.

In that neighborhood, near Mandela Parkway and 14th Street, dilapidated RVs line whole city blocks. Where people haven't yet set up camp, businesses block the sides of streets with tree trucks or concrete bollards to keep them away.

Around the corner from a strip of dozens of RVs, Henry, a retiree who declined to give his last name, worked in the garden of the house where he's lived for 60 years.

"I'd like to see the city just move these folks," he said.

Henry said the RVs attract drug dealing and prostitution, and when thieves steal the copper wires from the street lights in front of his home, he blames camp residents.

"No sanitation, no nothing," he said. "They can do almost anything they want, and the cops don't come. It's sick that the city is putting off policing the area."

As they wait to see what the new policy will mean for Oakland, advocates note the city has already experimented with tougher crackdowns.

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee and her predecessor, former Mayor Sheng Thao, both ramped up sweeps, temporarily clearing streets in some neighborhoods but pushing residents into others. This winter, officials admitted in an interview with this organization that two years of intensive clearings didn't reduce the number of camps.

Officials describe a city overwhelmed by need. More people become homeless in Oakland each year than those who find homes, and budget issues recently forced officials to close shelters - including one for 30 residents in RVs.

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This story was originally published May 10, 2026 at 4:19 AM.