We forget what we don’t want to remember. While I understand that impulse, there are dangers embedded in our forgetfulness. This is especially true for anyone living in Flash Flood Alley, or what we like to call the Hill Country (a concept that softens the nature of this flood-sculpted and -scoured terrain). So I have come to believe after nearly thirty years of thinking, researching, and writing about the September 1921 flood which ravaged Central and South Texas; it killed at least 224 people, and, in its devastated epicenter, San Antonio, 80 or more perished. Yet those who survived that flood were surprised to learn that the Alamo City endured an even larger-in-size (though less fatal) inundation in 1819. There was little to no public memory. People did not die solely because of forgetfulness but because this amnesia allowed succeeding generations to erase the past and their responsibilities to the future. When they could have enacted post-flood, life-saving interventions, they chose not to act on their progeny’s behalf.

Here’s hoping that does not hold true for the most recent disaster, the swift and punishing rise of the Guadalupe River over the July Fourth weekend. It swept away well more than 100 children and adults, a horrific tally which may never be known in full. As with the 1921 flood, when public officials admitted that some bodies might not be recovered, interred as they were beneath tons of silt, gravel, rock, and other debris, so, too, with the Guadalupe. “We don’t know where they are,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly acknowledged. We don’t know how many we’ve lost.” That uncertainty intensifies the anguish even as it testifies to this flood’s catastrophic impact. (Mercifully, the official missing persons count was reduced over the past weekend from around 100 to three largely due to individuals being confirmed safe.)

But there is nothing unknown about what triggered the brutal 2025 flood and so many others dating back to the nineteenth century (when the first, if spotty, records were kept). Some of the explanation results from where the Guadalupe—like the Colorado and San Gabriel rivers to its north, and the San Antonio to its south—originate. Their tributaries rise in the rugged Edwards Plateau, the massive landform whose 24-million acres dominate and define Central Texas. Although the plateau’s elevation is modest, with its eastern sectors varying from 800 to 1200 feet above sea level, this range in height is less important than its relation to the very gulf waters against which the plateau is measured. 

Put a pin next to the source of your local (or favorite) watershed, then follow it as it streams south and east on its run to the Gulf of Mexico. Find the nearest beach, put your feet in the water. If it feels like a hot tub, you are in the right place. In mid-July, for instance, water temperatures at Port Aransas measured between 82-84°F. This heat index becomes the second datapoint essential to understanding the thunderous storms that have blown up over the Edwards for millennia. 

The third is the prevailing breezes that capture the steamy moisture rising off the gulf and, in counter-flow to the rivers, sweep north and west slowly rising with the coastal plain. It is a relatively gentle climb—San Antonio sits 650 feet above sea level, New Braunfels at 630, and Austin at 489. But almost immediately to the northwest, gentle turns steep. That’s because this wet air hits the Balcones Escarpment, a geological structure of faults that curves northeast from Del Rio to Waco. It marks a sharp increase in elevation: Though they have the Guadalupe River in common, Kerrville is 1,000 feet higher than New Braunfels. 

And what a difference the upcountry makes. As that moisture-packed airflow swirls aloft, it hits cooler temperatures and begins to condense and fall, then reheat and rise again, a cycle of convection that as it repeats can generate thunderheads. Should this volatile mixture collide with a cold front, the whole might explode. That’s how C. Terrell Bartlett, a San Antonio-based engineer, explained the 1921 flood to the annual conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers one month after it tore through South and Central Texas: “It has long been recognized that in many cases the sudden rise at the Balcones Escarpment causes intense precipitation along and just above its margin.” What they knew then, we must recall now.

United States Army soldiers assisting with search-and-rescue operations using a pontoon boat on Saint Mary’s Street by the Gunter Hotel following the 1921 flood (Coates Library Digital Collections, Trinity University, San Antonio)

We also need to recollect that the atmospheric-disturbing escarpment is key to why the Hill Country is so flood-prone. Every storm—whatever its size and power—has dumped rain that over thousands of years has carved channels into the limestone bedrock to sluice water downhill, an erosive force that has created some of the very aesthetic features—braided riverbeds, steep-walled canyons, and breathtaking views—that have drawn so many to this rough terrain. Farther downstream, the alluvial actions of these riparian systems, even at normal flow, have carried critical nutrients downstream. At flood-stage, these biotic riches have been dispersed across and built up floodplains, reenergized wetlands, and nurtured habitats. Rivers’ sustaining pulse, their dynamic and regenerative influences, are key to James Scott’s brilliant and posthumously published In Praise of Floods (2025). Its opening sentence—“Rivers, on a long view, are alive”—testifies that they are as well the life-source for all species. 

The Indigenous people of what is now Texas understood this concept full well. They knew that the dangers we associate with Flash Flood Alley were indistinguishable from the manifold benefits floodwaters bore. They were just smarter about how to live within a river’s embrace, siting their communities near springs and adjacent to fertile floodplains but always above historic high-water levels. Missing that long-lived insight were Spanish, and later Mexican and American, colonists, whether Canary Islanders, German émigrés, or white enslavers. These settlers depended on sedentary agriculture that led them to plow and dig their communities into the flood zones of the San Antonio, Guadalupe, and Colorado rivers.

Controlling floods, not shifting the pattern of settlement to safer ground, became the ambition every time San Antonio was inundated. Beginning in the 1850s, local engineers and a handful of public officials urged the construction of a flood-retention dam to bottle up the city’s eponymous river north of the downtown core. It would take seventy years and countless deadly floods for that structure to gain taxpayer approval in 1921; it would take until the 1970s, and a lot of grassroots protests on the city’s vulnerable West Side, a sector that the 1921 flood destroyed, to gain protective infrastructure. 

Austin was faster off the mark. In 1893, after years of enduring a rain-swollen Colorado jumping its banks and ravaging the community, the city, using its municipal tax and bond powers, built a sixty-foot high, 1900-foot-long, granite-block dam. The structure took advantage of the river’s historic path. “The Colorado above Austin follows in a deep cut or canyon worn in the limestone rock,” wrote UT-Austin geologist Thomas U. Taylor. “It is skirted by limestone bluffs rising often to the height of 150 feet above the bed of the river, broken by the erosion of tributary streams. No extensive meadow or bottom lands exist. This situation permits the construction of a high dam with but little damage to private property.” Under ordinary circumstances, the Colorado occupied only a small part of the channel, but in “great floods the river spreads from bluff to bluff.” In 1900, after a series of massive storms, the Colorado slammed into the structure, overtopping and undercutting it, killing dozens. Its spectacular failure, Taylor asserted, was due to ignorance of the site’s geology, poor engineering, and political interference, and one other factor: silt. The river carried so much grit downstream that it acted as a gigantic sandblaster, and the structure broke before the churning onslaught.

William L. Bray, one of Taylor’s university colleagues, wondered whether there was a human component to the speed and debris-packed floodwaters. A botanist, Bray received a contract from the U.S. Bureau of Forestry to report on the “Timber of the Edwards Plateau of Texas” (1904). Before you yawn, note that the report’s subtitle offered a more ecological analysis of woody vegetation’s “Relations to Climate, Water Supply, and Soil.” With that encompassing objective, Bray roamed the Balcones Escarpment and the wider plateau and paid close attention to how people were using axe and animals to eke out their living in the thin-soiled landscape. 

Cedar choppers were hard at work harvesting for fencing and fuel; sheep, goat, and cattle were grazing on what grasses were available. These economic activities came with considerable environmental costs, Bray argued after studying two canyons linked to the Colorado River. One of them retained its thicket of vegetation; the other had been stripped clean. Unlike the first, which acted like a sponge during rain events, the denuded slopes of the other did little to restrain precipitation from racing downhill, “to pour down as from a steep roof converging into swift streamlets which erode every vestige of organic soil.” This load, along with other heavier debris, then crashed into already roiling tributaries, the whole becoming a “mountain torrent.” The Colorado floodwaters, with their anthropogenic and natural sources, continued to run free until the 1940 completion of Austin’s Tom Miller Dam. Its funding, not incidentally, came from the New Deal’s Public Works Administration, a $2.3 million gift that the Hill Country’s native son, then-Representative Lyndon B. Johnson, had secured. 

To date, that initial investment and subsequent infrastructure projects that the Lower Colorado River Authority manages have protected communities within the larger watershed under most conditions. But what just happened on the Guadalupe—and had occurred on the San Antonio in 1921—was not “most conditions.” Let’s return then to the Gulf of Mexico and its simmering saltwater. Add to its hot-to-the-touch condition an atmosphere containing elevated levels of humidity and crucially the absence of strong, shearing winds. Overhead powerful thunderstorms might begin to form. As they do, they suck up more warm moisture into a spiraling system. The pressure begins to drop which pulls in more wind, and if these conditions hold a tropical depression might morph into a tropical storm or hurricane. Recent research connects the dots between this formative process and ocean surface temperatures: “warmer waters,” NOAA notes, “fuel more energetic storms.”

The surface and lower depths of the Gulf were not nearly as hot a century ago as they are today, a difference attributable to climate-disrupting, planetary warming; climate change is an accelerant, boosting and intensifying a pre-existing weather pattern. One of those earlier storms, a strong tropical depression that formed in the gulf in early September 1921, slowly spun towards northern Mexico, and on September 7th it came ashore south of Tampico. Over the next three days, it cycled across the Rio Grande into Webb County, then drifted along the Balcones Escarpment to rain down over Bexar, Comal, Hays, and Travis counties before pounding Williamson, Bell, and Milam. The U.S. Weather Bureau could not formally verify “the distribution of the pressure” that directed the storm’s path, yet it insisted that “the shifting winds, the progressive northeastward extension of the rainfall area, and the profound agitation of the atmosphere as evidenced by violent squalls and thunderstorms over the stricken section can hardly be ascribed to any other cause.”

San Pedro Creek near Commerce Street following the 1921 flood (Coates Library Digital Collections, Trinity University, San Antonio)

Contemporaries recorded two significant results of the 1921 deluge. Because San Antonio was the “most densely populated and most highly developed community affected by the flood,” it received “the most widespread notice in the press.” Yet its attention-grabbing devastation needed context, C.E. Ellsworth, a USGS researcher, averred. If the “rainfall in the basin of San Antonio River had been as heavy as it was in much of the basin of Little River, in Bell, Milam, and Williamson counties, the destruction at San Antonio would have been so great as to make that actually suffered there seem insignificant.” That’s why the “aggregate loss of both life and property in other areas far exceeded that at San Antonio,” though who died in the various flood zones was consistent. Most were “Mexicans who lived in poorly constructed houses, built along the low banks of the streams. Undoubtedly many others were drowned who were never reported missing,” Ellsworth wrote, and along the “Little and San Gabriel rivers bodies were found six months or more after the flood.”

Some of this analysis is hauntingly familiar. The pile-driving origin of the 2025 inundation in Kerr County was yet another tropical disturbance—dubbed Barry—that made landfall in northern Mexico and headed across the border where later it slammed into already saturated skies whirling above the Edwards Plateau. As with the 1921 storm, during which record-setting whiteout downpours hit the upper reaches of the San Antonio River and the middle stretches of the San Gabriel—39 inches fell at Thrall—some parts of the Guadalupe watershed had more than 15 inches hammer down so fast that the river itself rose 26 feet within less than an hour. That’s a predictable result of the tight confines through which escarpment rivers squeeze. 

As foreseeable, alas, is the disaster that results if this torrent powers into urban streets or a rural camp called Mystic. 

Neither flood could have been prevented. It is a river’s nature to flood. But the human-made disasters that resulted could have been mitigated. The Dallas Morning News spoke to this in a September 13, 1921, editorial, “Flood Yet to Come,” observing that “the most distressing feature of San Antonio’s disastrous flood experiences is the probability that they were avoidable. It does not seem unreasonable that foresight could have prevented the great loss of life and property” and proof that it was “preventable will come in the decision to take steps at once to prevent the recurrence of the catastrophe.” Solutions could have been proactively implemented. The state was duly forewarned: “Scarcely is there a city of any size in Texas,” the News continued, “but has within its confines one or more placid water course potentially as murderous as the beautiful San Antonio River.”

The post The San Antonio Flood of 1921 Held Lessons We Refuse to Learn appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By THALIA BEATY, Associated Press

Dawn Price signs rent checks worth about $160,000 every month for 79 people that her nonprofit helps house in Laguna Beach, California.

Usually, she logs into an online portal to withdraw enough from an account funded by a grant from the federal housing agency. But in February, she couldn’t. Access had been temporarily cut off for many housing organizations as part of the Trump administration’s cuts and funding freezes.

“That was just a sea change for us for those dollars to be so immediately at risk,” said Price, the executive director of Friendship Shelter, which started in 1987 as a community organization. Access was eventually restored but the episode took a toll.

“Government moves slowly usually, and I think what was so disorienting early on was government was moving really fast,” she said.

In the early days of his second term, President Donald Trump froze, cut or threatened to cut a huge range of social services programs from public safety to early childhood education to food assistance and services for refugee resettlement. Staffing cuts to federal agencies have also contributed to delays and uncertainty around future grant funds. Altogether, his policies are poised to upend decades of partnerships the federal government has built with nonprofits to help people in their communities.

This vast and interconnected set of programs funded by taxpayers has been significantly dismantled in just months, nonprofit leaders, researchers and funders say. And even deeper, permanent cuts are still possible. That uncertainty is also taking a toll on their staff and communities, the leaders said.

James Carey, housing director for the Friendship Shelter, gives a tour of the one of the apartments that the organization provides for homeless people, Monday, July 7, 2025, in San Clemente, Calif. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy)

In response to questions about the cuts to grant funding, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said, “Instead of government largesse that’s often riddled with corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse, the Trump administration is focused on unleashing America’s economic resurgence to fuel Americans’ individual generosity.”

He pointed to a new deduction for charitable giving included in the recently passed tax and spending law that he said encourages Americans’ “innate altruism.”

But experts say private donations will not be enough to meet the needs.

In 2021, $267 billion was granted to nonprofits from all levels of government, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute published in February. While the data includes tax-exempt organizations like local food pantries as well as universities and nonprofit hospitals, it underestimates the total funding that nonprofits receive from the government. It includes grants, but not contracts for services nor reimbursements from programs like Medicare. It also excludes the smallest nonprofits, which file a different, abbreviated tax form.

However, the figure does give a sense of the scale of the historic — and, until now, solid — relationship between the public sector and nonprofits over the last 50 years. Now, this system is at risk and leaders like Price say the cost of undoing it will be “catastrophic.”

Government funding to nonprofits reaches far and wide

The Urban Institute’s analysis shows more than half of nonprofits in every state received government grants in 2021.

In the vast majority of the country, the typical nonprofit would run a deficit without government funding. Only in two Congressional districts — one including parts of Orange County, California, and another in the suburbs west of Atlanta — would a typical nonprofit not be in the red if they lost all of their public grant funding, the analysis found.

But in Orange County, famous for its stunning beaches, mansions and extraordinary wealth, funders, nonprofits and researchers said that finding surprised them. In part, that’s because of major economic inequalities in the county and its high cost of living.

Taryn Palumbo, executive director of Orange County Grantmakers, said nonprofits are not as optimistic about their resiliency.

“They are seeing their budgets getting slashed by 50% or 40%,” she said. “Or they’re having to look to restructure programs that they are running or how they’re serving or the number of people that they’re serving.”

Last year, the local Samueli Foundation commissioned a study of nonprofit needs in part because they were significantly increasing their grantmaking from $18.8 million in 2022 to an estimated $125 million in 2025. They found local nonprofits reported problems maintaining staff, a deep lack of investment in their operations and a dearth of flexible reserve funds.

The foundation responded by opening applications for both unrestricted grants and to support investments in buildings or land. Against this $10 million in potential awards, they received 1,242 applications for more than $250 million, said Lindsey Spindle, the foundation’s president.

President of Samueli Family Philanthropies Lindsey Spindle speaks with cofounder Henry Samueli at the foundation’s offices in Corona Del Mar, Calif., Monday, July 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Zoë Meyers)

“It tells a really stark picture of how unbelievably deep and broad the need is,” Spindle said. “There is not a single part of the nonprofit sector that has not responded to these funds. Every topic you can think of: poverty, animal welfare, arts and culture, civil rights, domestic abuse… They’re telling us loud and clear that they are struggling to stay alive.”

Charitable organizations have held a special role in the U.S.

One of the founding stories of the United States is the importance of the voluntary sector, of neighbors helping neighbors and of individuals solving social problems. While other liberal democracies built strong welfare states, the U.S. has preferred to look to the charitable sector to provide a substantial part of social services.

Since the 1960s, the federal government has largely funded those social services by giving money to nonprofits, universities, hospitals and companies. Several new policies converged at that time to create this system, including the expansion of the federal income tax during World War II and the codification of tax-exempt charitable organizations in 1954. Then, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations started to fund nonprofits directly with federal money as part of urban renewal and Great Society programs.

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“It was a key approach of midcentury liberalism of addressing issues of poverty, sort of making a reference to civil rights and racial inequality, but not growing the size of government,” said Claire Dunning, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Conservatives also tended to support working through local, private, nonprofit organizations, though for different reasons than liberals, she said.

With various expansions and cuts during different presidencies, the federal government has continued to fund nonprofits at significant levels, essentially hiding the government in plain sight, Dunning said. The size and importance of the nonprofit apparatus became suddenly visible in January when the Trump administration sought to freeze federal grants and loans.

Dunning said the speed, hostility and scale of the proposed cuts broke with the long legacy of bipartisan support for nonprofits.

“People had no idea that the public health information or services they are receiving, their Meals on Wheels program, their afterschool tutoring program, the local park cleanup were actually enabled by public government dollars,” she said.

A coalition of nonprofits challenged the freeze in court in a case that is ongoing, but in the six months since, the administration has cut, paused or discontinued a vast array of programs and grants. The impacts of some of those policy changes have been felt immediately, but many will not hit the ground until current grant funding runs out, which could be in months or years depending on the programs.

Private donations can’t replace scale of government support

Friendship Shelter in Laguna Beach has an annual budget of about $15 million, $11.5 million of which comes from government sources. Price said the government funding is “braided” in complex ways to house and support 330 people. They’ve already lost a rental reimbursement grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But the Samueli Foundation stepped in to backfill those lost funds for three years.

That kind of support is extremely unusual, she said.

“We don’t know of any large-scale private philanthropy response to keeping people housed because it’s a forever commitment,” Price said. “That person is in housing and is going to need the subsidy for the rest of their lives. These are seriously disabled people with multiple issues that they’re facing that they need help with.”

She also believes that even in a wealthy place like Orange County, private donors are not prepared to give five, six or eight times as much as they do currently. Donors already subsidize their government grants, which she said pay for 69% of the actual program costs.

“We are providing this service to our government at a loss, at a business loss, and then making up that loss with these Medicaid dollars and also the private fundraising,” she said.

She said her organization has discussed having to put people out of housing back on to the streets if the government funding is cut further.

“That would be, I think, a signal to me that something is deeply, deeply wrong with how we’re looking at these issues,” said Price, adding, “If I was placing a bet, I would bet that we have enough good still in government to prevent that.”

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

By DIDI TANG, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump plans to host Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Tuesday at the White House, as the two countries are seeking closer security and economic ties in the face of shifting geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific region.

Marcos, who met Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday, is set to become the first Southeast Asian leader to hold talks with Trump in his second term.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., left, speaks during a meeting with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, right, at the Pentagon, Monday, July 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Marcos’ three-day visit shows the importance of the alliance between the treaty partners at a time when China is increasingly assertive in the South China Sea, where Manila and Beijing have clashed over the hotly contested Scarborough Shoal.

Washington sees Beijing, the world’s No. 2 economy, as its biggest competitor, and consecutive presidential administrations have sought to shift U.S. military and economic focus to the Asia-Pacific in a bid to counter China. Trump, like others before him, has been distracted by efforts to broker peace in a range of conflicts, from Ukraine to Gaza.

Tariffs also are expected to be on the agenda. Trump has threatened to impose 20% tariffs on Filipino goods on Aug. 1 unless the two sides can strike a deal.

Philippine and U.S. flags are displayed during a meeting between Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the Pentagon, Monday, July 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

“I intend to convey to President Trump and his Cabinet officials that the Philippines is ready to negotiate a bilateral trade deal that will ensure strong, mutually beneficial and future-oriented collaborations that only the United States and the Philippines will be able to take advantage of,” Marcos said Sunday when he was departing for Washington, according to his office.

Manila is open to offering zero tariffs on some U.S. goods to strike a deal with Trump, finance chief Ralph Recto told local journalists.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt hinted that a trade agreement with the Philippines was in the works. “Perhaps this will be a topic of discussion,” she told reporters Monday when asked about tariff negotiations.

The White House said Trump will discuss with Marcos the shared commitment to upholding a free, open, prosperous and secure Indo-Pacific.

Before a meeting with Marcos at the Pentagon, Hegseth reiterated America’s commitment to “achieving peace through strength” in the region.

“Our storied alliance has never been stronger or more essential than it is today, and together we remain committed to the mutual defense treaty,” Hegseth said Monday. “And this pact extends to armed attacks on our armed forces, aircraft or public vessels, including our Coast Guard anywhere in the Pacific, including the South China Sea.”

Marcos, whose country is one of the oldest U.S. treaty allies in the Pacific region, told Hegseth that the assurance to come to each other’s mutual defense “continues to be the cornerstone of that relationship, especially when it comes to defense and security cooperation.”

He said the cooperation has deepened since Hegseth’s March visit to Manila, including joint exercises and U.S. support in modernizing the Philippines’ armed forces. Marcos thanked the U.S. for support “that we need in the face of the threats that we, our country, is facing.”

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China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have been involved in long-unresolved territorial conflicts in the South China Sea, a busy shipping passage for global trade.

The Chinese coast guard has repeatedly used water cannon to hit Filipino boats in the South China Sea. China accused those vessels of entering the waters illegally or encroaching on its territory.

Hegseth told a security forum in Singapore in May that China poses a threat and the U.S. is “reorienting toward deterring aggression by Communist China.”

During Marcos’ meeting Monday with Rubio, the two reaffirmed the alliance “to maintain peace and stability” in the region and discussed closer economic ties, including boosting supply chains, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said.

The U.S. has endeavored to keep communication open with Beijing. Rubio and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met this month on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations regional forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They agreed to explore “areas of potential cooperation” and stressed the importance of managing differences.

Associated Press writer Chris Megerian contributed to this report.

By JANIE HAR and TERRY CHEA, Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco is set to ban homeless people from living in RVs by adopting strict new parking limits the mayor says are necessary to keep sidewalks clear and prevent trash buildup.

The policy, up for final approval by San Francisco supervisors Tuesday, targets at least 400 recreational vehicles in the city of 800,000 people. The RVs serve as shelter for people who can’t afford housing, including immigrant families with kids.

Those who live in them say they’re a necessary option in an expensive city where affordable apartments are impossible to find. But Mayor Daniel Lurie and other supporters of the policy say motor homes are not suitable for long-term living and the city has a duty to both provide shelter to those in need and clean up the streets.

Carlos Perez stands inside an RV, where he lives with his brother, Selvin, left, in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, Monday, July 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Terry Chea)

“We absolutely want to serve those families, those who are in crisis across San Francisco,” said Kunal Modi, who advises the mayor on health, homelessness and family services. “We feel the responsibility to help them get to a stable solution. And at the same time, we want to make sure that that stability is somewhere indoors and not exposed in the public roadway.”

Critics of the plan, however, say that it’s cruel to force people to give up their only home in exchange for a shot at traditional housing when there is not nearly enough units for all the people who need help; the mayor is only offering additional money to help 65 households.

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, says city officials are woefully behind on establishing details of an accompanying permit program, which will exempt RV residents from parking limits so long as they are working with homeless outreach staff to find housing.

“I think that there’s going to be people who lose their RVs. I think there’s going to be people who are able to get into shelter, but at the expense” of people with higher needs, like those sleeping on a sidewalk, she said.

San Francisco, like other U.S. cities, has seen an explosion in recent years of people living out of vehicles and RVs as the cost of living has risen. Banning oversized vehicles is part of Lurie’s pledge to clean up San Francisco streets, and part of a growing trend to require homeless people to accept offers of shelter or risk arrest or tows.

Strict new rules

The proposal sets a two-hour parking limit citywide for all RVs and oversized vehicles longer than 22 feet or higher than 7 feet, regardless of whether they are being used as housing.

Parked RVs are seen on Lake Merced Boulevard in San Francisco, Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Under the accompanying permit program, RV residents registered with the city as of May are exempt from the parking limits. In exchange, they must accept the city’s offer of temporary or longer-term housing, and get rid of their RV when it’s time to move. The city has budgeted more than half a million dollars to buy RVs from residents at $175 per foot.

The permits will last for six months. People in RVs who arrive after May will not be eligible for the permit program and must abide by the two-hour rule, which makes it impossible for a family in an RV to live within city limits.

It first cleared the Board of Supervisors last week with two of 11 supervisors voting “no.”

RV dwellers can’t afford rent

Carlos Perez, 55, was among RV residents who told supervisors at a hearing this month that they could not afford the city’s high rents. Perez works full-time as a produce deliveryman and supports his brother, who lives with him and is unable to work due to a disability.

Carlos Perez poses for a photo outside his RV, where he lives, in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, Monday, July 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Terry Chea)

“We don’t do nothing wrong. We try to keep this street clean,” he said, as he showed his RV recently to an Associated Press journalist. “It’s not easy to be in a place like this.”

Yet, Perez also loves where he lives. The green-colored RV is decorated with a homey houseplant and has a sink and a tiny stove on which Carlos simmered a bean soup on a recent afternoon.

He’s lived in San Francisco for more than 30 years, roughly a decade of which has been in the RV in the working-class Bayview neighborhood. He can walk to work and it is close to the hospital where his brother receives dialysis multiple times a week.

Motorists travel past RVs parked on Lake Merced Boulevard in San Francisco, Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Zach, another RV resident who requested being identified by his first name to not jeopardize his ability to get work, started living in the vehicle a dozen years ago after realizing that no matter how hard he worked, he still struggled to pay rent.

Now he works as a ride-hail driver and pursues his love of photography. He parks near Lake Merced in the city near the Pacific Ocean and pays $35 every two to four weeks to properly dispose of waste and fill the vehicle with fresh water.

He says Lurie’s plan is shortsighted. There is not enough housing available and many prefer to live in an RV over staying at a shelter, which may have restrictive rules. For Zach, who is able-bodied, maintains a clean space and has no dependents, moving to a shelter would be a step down, he says. Still, he expects to receive a permit.

“If housing were affordable, there is a very good chance I wouldn’t be out here,” he said.

City recently closed its only RV lot

RV dwellers say San Francisco should open a safe parking lot where residents could empty trash and access electricity. But city officials shuttered an RV lot in April, saying it cost about $4 million a year to service three dozen large vehicles and it failed to transition people to more stable housing.

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The mayor’s new proposal comes with more money for beefed-up RV parking enforcement — but also an additional $11 million, largely for a small number of households to move to subsidized housing for a few years.

Officials acknowledge that may not be sufficient to house all RV dwellers, but notes that the city also has hotel vouchers and other housing subsidies.

Erica Kisch, CEO of nonprofit Compass Family Services, which assists homeless families, says they do not support the punitive nature of the proposal but are grateful for the extra resources.

“It’s recognition that households should not be living in vehicles, that we need to do better for families, and for seniors and for anyone else who’s living in a vehicle,” she said. “San Francisco can do better, certainly.”