“First, the mayor tried to turn Jerrold into a 200-bed shelter site with no RV parking and no community input. Now, he’s trying to quietly drop in cabins from the Mission and talk about expansion later,” Walton said. “At no point has this administration come back to the community in good faith for this decision.”

About 60 tiny home cabins are currently housing residents at Jerrold Commons, according to Emily Cohen, deputy director for communications and legislative affairs at the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH).

The city is now planning to relocate 60 empty cabins from a former shelter site near the 16th Street BART station because the parcel is slated to be developed into affordable housing.

“With thousands of people sleeping on the streets every night, we need these cabins available to offer those people somewhere inside to sleep,” Cohen said. “But until these cabins have a long-term site, we have a simple choice: dispose of them entirely, delay a critical affordable housing project in the Mission, or store them temporarily.”

Officials said they are working to identify a long-term site and use for the now-empty cabins, which Cohen said will remain unused while they are stored at Jerrold Commons. It’s unclear how long they will be stored at the site.

The department said it intends to notify and work with current residents at Jerrold Commons and community members for any future efforts to fill the cabins or make other changes to the site.

“The city will conduct a robust community engagement process before activating the cabins at any future site or making any changes to the operations at Jerrold,” Cohen said.

The mayor’s office declined to provide a comment for this story.

Walton’s district has been at the center of much debate over where the city should build out new shelters and transitional housing. The supervisor earlier this year supported legislation that would require the city to build new facilities in neighborhoods where data shows there are more unhoused people than services available, and avoid over-concentrating services in a few communities.

District 10 is home to a large portion of the city’s unhoused population as well as residents living in cars and RVs. But the supervisor and residents say their community hosts a disproportionate amount of the city’s homeless facilities and resources, while other neighborhoods lack services.

“We have three navigation centers in District 10. Two are in the Bayview,” Walton said. “We had a safe sleeping site. We have the site at Jerrold now. So we’ve been working hard to obviously address the concerns and needs of the unhoused community. But most certainly, you have to have conversations that include the community about the best way to do anything, particularly when we’re bringing in more sites because services are needed.”

Walton has supported a plan developed over a year with community members and HSH to use Jerrold Avenue to house 68 cabins and 20 RV parking sites, after the city closed the Candlestick safe parking site during the pandemic.

During this year’s budget negotiations, supervisors agreed on legislation that would allow PG&E to expand services for additional shelter at the Jerrold site. According to Walton, “the mayor and his team agreed that if we allow the PG&E expansion, that anything they did at the Jerrold site moving forward would be a community conversation.”

The city has also moved to ban overnight RV parking and is initiating a two-hour parking limit beginning in November, scattering many families and RV dwellers across the region.

The supervisor said the city’s decision to move the cabins for storage to Jerrold Commons “directly contradicts every promise made by the mayor and his administration to the Bayview community.”

Officials defended the cabin relocation, saying it utilizes storage space on land that the city leases and that no new residents are moving in at this time.

Walton is now calling for the city to halt the relocation of the empty cabins to Jerrold Avenue and work with the community there before any changes to the site are announced. The city plans to begin moving the cabins over the next few weeks.