Every night before Oscar and Brandy climb back into their minivan, they plaster the windows in towels and spare blankets to hide themselves from view — though most city workers who are familiar with their faces, they say, turn a blind eye.
Technically, sleeping in a car is not legal in San Francisco — though, for now, sleeping in an RV is — as long as the vehicle’s owner is working with the city to find alternative housing. But the couple has no other choice. Oscar has been alternating between sleeping in a tent under a freeway overpass on the border between the Mission and Potrero Hill and in his girlfriend’s broken-down car ever since the mobile home they shared was towed by the city at the beginning of the month.
The couple are two of three former RV residents Mission Local interviewed who have become street homeless since San Francisco began its crackdown on people living in mobile homes on public streets, closing its last free parking site last year and implementing a two-hour parking restriction on oversize vehicles in November. But there are many more like them. In the last five months, 169 large vehicles have been towed in San Francisco, the majority of which were parked in Bayview-Hunters Point…