Mrs. C walks with her daughters to their local elementary school every day. The girls are cheerful, running ahead, and laughing together. Their dad left early in the morning to get to work. They are like families all over Los Angeles.

Except that they live in a small RV in a relatively safe, unexposed street spot. This has been their home since they lost their apartment when their rent was raised, and they couldn’t afford anyplace else to live.

Mrs. C is worried about many aspects of their lives in the RV: parking tickets they can’t afford to pay, unwanted law enforcement attention, and what she’s heard about new laws that won’t allow them to live in their RV. “We don’t want any trouble. We do what we can. Where can we go?”

Families like Mrs. C’s have a fairly stable life, better than they would have if they were forced to move into a temporary shelter – far from their children’s school and Mr. C’s job, without their belongings, and without access to permanent housing. They cannot afford the fees they’d have to pay if their RV were to be impounded.

Restrictive RV ordinances, pushed by CD 11 Council member Traci Park, impose parking restrictions and No RV Zones (including bollards and fences) that reduce public parking. Sanitation sweeps lead to impounding lived-in vehicles, forcing the displacement of their inhabitants. Despite the promises of “Inside Safe,” there is no offer of adequate shelter or permanent housing for displaced individuals, and especially not for families. These practices disrespect, frighten, endanger, and further financially burden low-income people.

The City Council must reject these practices. Instead, it should (1) expand city-wide the humane RV Pilot Program now operating in CD 7, and (2) enlarge the current Safe Parking program, expanding it to include RVs.

The RV Pilot program does not utilize coercion or law enforcement. It allows people to voluntarily transition into interim housing, offers vehicle storage options, and offers incentives to trade in their vehicles for disposal. As of August 10, 2023, the pilot program has placed 75 individuals into temporary housing, eight people have been permanently housed, and eleven individuals have returned to living on the street or to an unknown location since its launch. Eighty eight percent of participants continue in the program. According to West Valley Homes Yes! (the non-profit service partner for the CD7 pilot), this high retention rate is due to their commitment to working with people based on their individual needs throughout the entire process, from the initial contact to achieving permanent housing.

The CD7 Pilot Program would be able to place even more people in permanent affordable housing if the City would energetically approve and facilitate affordable permanent housing projects (like the proposed Venice Dell Community Project) throughout the city.

On March 23, 2023, the office of the City Administrative Officer (CAO) was instructed by the City Council to “provide a plan to establish 24-hour safe parking locations for RV’s” and to expand “Safe Parking programs, to include oversized/larger RV’s in 24-hour locations with supportive services.” This has not happened.

At a recent meeting of the Venice Neighborhood Council’s Homelessness Committee, Juan Fregoso, Director of Homelessness & Housing in Councilmember Park’s CD 11 office, stated that, “Safe Parking lots with supportive services are way too expensive.” He implied that therefore RV Safe Parking could not happen, at least not in CD 11 parking lots. Apparently, the city prefers to spend millions on law enforcement, issuing parking tickets that people are unable to pay, and to continue to use strategies that primarily impound and displace rather than house.

We hope that the City will soon create a budget that will allow the CAO to heed the City Council’s instructions regarding full-service 24-hour RV parking. Our recent surveys of RV dwellers in Venice, Mar Vista, Playa Vista, and Westchester suggest strong support with 65% in favor of Safe Parking.

Los Angeles has an urgent need to find solutions that will really help unhoused individuals and families like Mrs. C’s. Until housing can be provided for Mrs. C and her family, she and others like her need safe parking for their RVs so that they can be secure from assault and bad weather.

A relatively low-cost solution would be to set aside 275 parking spaces in each district for overnight safe parking for RVs. The resulting 4125 spaces throughout the city would be sufficient to cover the number of RVs found in the 2023 Point-In-Time count. These spaces could be divided between designated streets and public parking lots. In Venice alone there are over 1650 LA City spaces in this public-parking-lot-rich area of CD11.

In addition, a humane response to the sanitation problems posed by encampments and some groups of RVs, is to install public bathrooms throughout the city.
There is a huge number of Angelenos whose only home, whose only shelter against weather and violence, is a recreational vehicle. They should not be criminalized, displaced or otherwise harmed. No more streets should be designated as “No overnight oversize vehicle parking.”

Los Angeles can and must respect the dignity of all who live here, housed and unhoused alike.

Submitted by Katherine King and Barrie Levy, CD11 Coalition for Human Rights, a coalition of organizations and individuals in LA City Council District 11 that supports the human and civil rights of unhoused people, advocates for safe, decent and affordable housing, and supports tenants’ rights.