The two-hour parking limit that cleared most of San Francisco's RV dwellers off the streets sailed through the Board of Supervisors on a 9-2 vote last year. But in District 10 — the southeast sector where the majority of those vehicles were towed — not one of the three leading candidates running to succeed termed-out Supervisor Shamann Walton will say they'd have voted for it.

In a Mission Local candidate questionnaire published Aug. 20, the D10 front-runners — moderate favorite Theo Ellington, progressive Dion-Jay "DJ" Brookter, and Potrero Hill's J.R. Eppler — each declined to endorse the RV crackdown outright. The unanimity is striking because these candidates otherwise sit across the city's ideological divide, and because the ban is Mayor Daniel Lurie's signature street-conditions win. In the district that absorbed most of the enforcement, the policy has no defenders on the ballot.

San Francisco began enforcing its oversized-vehicle ordinance on Nov. 1, 2025, capping RVs and vehicles longer than 22 feet or taller than 7 feet at two hours of parking anywhere in the city, around the clock, with $108 fines and towing for violators (KQED (external source, opens in a new tab)). The Board of Supervisors gave it initial approval 9-2; only Jackie Fielder and Walton, D10's own supervisor, dissented (San Francisco Chronicle (external source, opens in a new tab)). Lurie paired enforcement with a $12.9 million package — 165 rapid-rehousing vouchers, a vehicle buyback worth $3,000 to $7,000, and roughly 270 six-month permits meant to shield existing dwellers from tows while caseworkers looked for housing (ABC7 (external source, opens in a new tab)).

That is the record the candidates were handed. Their answers, given to Mission Local (external source, opens in a new tab) in 100 words or fewer, ran from grudging to hostile — never a clean yes.

Eppler gave the most qualified reply, conditioning any support on the city first standing up safe, sanctioned places for displaced dwellers to park; absent that, he argued, the crackdown just relocates people from their vehicles onto the sidewalk. Brookter refused the premise outright — "Keeping the two-hour restriction wasn't the answer," he wrote, pitching city-funded storage in place of what he called mass towing. Ellington sidestepped the yes/no altogether, reframing it as a question of who pays: "District 10 should not carry the burden of citywide problems alone. For years, other neighborhoods banned RVs and pushed them into our neighborhoods." Mission Local, which color-codes the answers, marked his a dodge.

Ellington's fairness complaint is the one the data most clearly supports. Most of the city's remaining occupied vehicles are parked in Bayview-Hunters Point, and the tows have concentrated there too. Five months into enforcement, the city had housed 82 people through the permit program while towing 159 RVs under the ordinance and another 194 vehicles for other reasons — the bulk in Bayview (El Tecolote (external source, opens in a new tab); KQED (external source, opens in a new tab)). Mission Local reached the same lopsided figure in March: 82 housed, far more displaced (Mission Local (external source, opens in a new tab)). Dwellers who were missed in the city's eight-day May survey never got a permit; some now live in a car or a tent.

The alignment scrambles the moderate-versus-progressive script that usually defines a supervisor race. Ellington is the establishment pick, holding the sole San Francisco Democratic Party endorsement plus backing from former Mayor London Breed, state Sen. Scott Wiener, and sitting Supervisor Matt Dorsey (SF Standard (external source, opens in a new tab)). Dorsey was one of the nine supervisors who voted the ban through. His candidate won't say he'd have joined him.

Walton, forced out by term limits, warned as the ordinance passed that the city was clearing vehicles it had nowhere to send. "They don't have anywhere to put anybody," he said at the time, as quoted by Mission Local. A year on, the field competing to inherit his seat — left, right and center — is running on a variation of the same objection (SF Examiner (external source, opens in a new tab)).