The San Diego City Council recently approved a nearly $3.2 million settlement in a federal lawsuit case, Michael Bloom, et al. v. City of San Diego, which challenged the existing Vehicle Habitation Ordinance. The settlement set new rules for how the City is allowed to enforce its ordinances against unhoused people who sleep in their vehicles or RVs during a three-year period.
VEHICLE HABITATION ORDINANCE
City Municipal Code Section 86.0137 prohibits the use of streets for storage, service, or sale of vehicles or for habitation stating: It is unlawful for any person to use a vehicle for human habitation on any street or public property, unless specifically authorized for such use by the city manager:
- between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.
- At any time within 500 feet of a residence or building used for living including a house, condo, apartment, or similar dwelling.
- At any time within 500 feet of a school, not including a community or junior college, college, or university.
- There must be evidence of vehicle habitation by humans using it for sleeping, bathing, preparing, or cooking meals, furniture set up in or around the vehicle, evidence of portable cooking equipment, or evidence of human waste around the vehicle.
ENFORCEMENT
- Officers should consider why a person has certain items associated with habitation inside their vehicle.
- Officers responding to Get-It-Done and non-emergency calls should investigate the complaint, and when appropriate, enforce the law.
- Enforcement should be avoided when a vehicle is lawfully parked in a location open to the general public.
- Enforcement of the VHO should not occur when a person who shelters in a vehicle is using the vehicle as transportation.
- The VHO shall not be enforced between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. when legal parking options, including Safe Parking lots in the City, are full, closed, or not reasonably available to involuntarily homeless people sheltering in their vehicles.
- A person sleeping, sitting, eating, or drinking inside a vehicle parked on a street or in a public park lot is not in violation of the VHO.
- Parking violation(s) alone will not trigger enforcement of the VHO.
- After taking enforcement action, officers should evaluate whether the vehicle can be legally parked, and if so, refrain from towing the vehicle.
The settlement also allows San Diego police to resume full enforcement of the ordinance after receiving appropriate training, which began on March 21. Enforcement of the City’s VHO was paused during the pandemic, partly due to a legal challenge brought on behalf of vehicle dwellers. Some coastal residents have complained ever since about the non-enforcement of the VHO, in effect since 2019.
Mayor Todd Gloria:
“This ordinance was introduced in conjunction with a planned expansion of the successful Safe Parking Lot program, which designated safe spaces for people sleeping in their vehicles to park overnight without risk of citation, and allowed them to access services and case management to help them work toward permanent housing. The ordinance was challenged in court, which halted our ability to enforce.”
“The City has reached a settlement that allows officers to resume enforcement. Officers are permitted to take enforcement action after receiving the appropriate training. The VHO can be enforced so long as the City can provide a suitable alternative for people sleeping in their vehicles, which we have. There are currently four active Safe Parking sites across the City, two of which are open 24 hours. Currently, I am working to create more Safe Parking options so we have places for people to go, and this enforcement can continue.”
Attorney Ann Menasche with Disability Rights California, a nonprofit founded in 1978 that defends, advances, and strengthens the rights and opportunities of the disabled, was a party to the recently settled federal lawsuit challenging the VHO. She talked about how the settlement restricts City enforcement of the VHO.
“This enforcement is going to be with the narrowest of circumstance. They can’t enforce it against any law-abiding people. You have to have suspicion of a crime other than parking violations, which they have to allow you to correct. Secondly, they must have a place for you to go legally, like the so-called Safe Parking lots, otherwise they can’t enforce it (VHO).”
“Thirdly, they can’t restrict you from using your vehicle that you live in for transportation. If you want to visit the park, the beach, your doctor or to visit a friend with your vehicle, and you’re parked temporarily, you can do those things.”
Noting that living in your vehicle is preferable to “living on the streets,” Menasche pointed out that inflation, coupled with the housing shortage, has meant that “people who are disabled, sick and elderly are unable to get housing even though they need it badly.”
What is needed to alleviate the crisis housing situation forcing people to live out of their vehicles? “We’ve been saying since day one that we need permanent, affordable housing,” answered Menasche. “There are just no options right now for people who are poor, sick, or elderly. We need to find a way to provide housing as a basic human right.” Concluded Menasche: “It’s a bad situation – and it’s getting worse.”
The above is an edited version from sdnews.com here.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with attorney Ann Menasche on one thing: “There are just no options right now for people who are poor, sick, or elderly. We need to find a way to provide housing as a basic human right.”
The thing that I disagree with is that vehicle habitation is an appropriate option for perhaps anyone other than young van lifers. The people I see living in their vehicles are living in squalor! We cannot accept this an appropriate solution to the problem of an unsheltered population. We must do better at providing decent, safe and sanitary housing. And that means somewhere other than a vehicle.
The city could be setting up RV parks on public land. Many retirees willingly live full-time in RVs. The city could buy habitable RVs easily under 10K. And could provide safety inspections, sewer/water/electricity/propane services. Compare this to the 500K being spent on housing units.
I agree, living out of a hatchback is not safe or sanitary.
This is a bridge program that credits it’s success, in large part, with the sustained access point to City, County and State services and private advocacy groups like the Lucky Duck Foundation.
A safer place to park and crash out has resulted in increased participation in the program as these folks usually return to the same safe spot after work, making assistance more readily accessible to actually follow up to better ensure they might receive those services.
Unfortunately, those folks that are inconsistently wandering in and out of various shelters seemingly have a lot more difficulty receiving the help they need in absence of the consistency of a sustained access point to services.
There are thousands of people living in their vehicles already. With no hygene facilities that is even more unsanitary, and dangerous than a secured parking lot.
Once again, this is not a proposed permanent housing solution.
Safe Parking Lots have been the MOST EFFECTIVE AT THE LOWEST COST TO TAX PAYERS. Lori Sadaña brilliantly addressed the fiscal irresponsibility of the City approved a disastrous homelessness budget shuffle from “silo” to “silo” when the City Council gutted funding for the Safe Parking Lots Program budget a few days back.
Our City’s most proven effective and cost efficient homelessness program ever; suffered massive cuts to reallocate that funding to favor Todd Gloria’s asphalt-frying-pan internment tent camps for those suffering abject poverty.
Safe Parking lots are beneficial in many ways. Most importantly a reliable and sustained access point to City, County, State services staff and Regional Advocacy Charities.
Safe Parking lots help keep animals out of shelters.
An under-discussed and rather huge contributing aspect to homelessness remains the fact that a lot of people that can no longer afford to re-enter the rental market, love their animals and are not going to give them up.
I for one, would take a bullet for my dog.
By living in their cars. folks can keep that critical psychological and emotional bond with their animals, while they are trying find solutions, while they try and figure something out.
If we are to believe that we are building so much affordable housing; is our homelessness catastrophe not “temporary”?
Why sign a lease for another toxic property for 35 years for a “permanent shelter when everybody is going to be kicking back in their affordable units in the next few months?
Think about it, vehicles are already pre-existing, hard, protective, lockable temporary shelters. that don’t cost the taxpayers a dime to build and cost nothing for us to maintain. This streamlines a budget that only cost the taxpayers for security services, maintenance for bathroom/hygene facilities and City services staff to onboard those in need into PERMANENT housing.
We have an obligation to provide mental health services because of the PTSD that these poor folks endured as collateral damage of the mindlessly greedy corporate real estate housing policies that have impaled common decency and any respect for the public good.
Safe parking has proven to be safer for our neighbors. Participation in this program is higher and the program provides a sustained access point for City, County and State services. And it frees up resources to get assistance to more folks that need it, because we’ll have these folks taken care of.
So, the City Council gutted a huge chunk of funding for the successful Safe Parking Program budget, of course!
The various exceptions to enforcement unfortunately render the Ordinance useless.
/s/ Chris Kennedy
To reiterate, the City has voted to reallocate the funding for the Safe Parking Sites in next year’s budget.
Any victory lap Gloria is taking from a pre-scheduled expansion of the Safe Parking Sites program is wholly unreflective of the drastic cuts ordered to the program by the City Council and Mayor for next year’s budget.
The very limited expansion of the Safe Parking Sites program going forward for this fiscal year are the results of several different factors. It should not be misrepresented as some benevolent act of genious by our compassionate Mayor (sarcasm). The program’s funding will be cut drastically in just a few months anyway. All smoke and mirrors.
People who support the right of others to sleep in their cars have never had someone sleeping in their car in front of their house.
I’m all for helping people who want a hand-up, who want to get off the street. But in my experience, many folks living in their car/van are panhandling bums or addicts. Robb Field used to be a great place for kids, now it’s a place where van bums hang out all day. Not cool.
Robb Field is NOT a Safe Parking Site, and the same can be said of all of Mission Bay and no one is proposing designating them Safe Parking Sites. There needs to be a very important distinction made between stifling the program that has shown progress taking at least some of these vehicles out of our parks, and in front of our houses, condos or apartments and into designated parking lots, often provided from local parishes, where those that would like help, can access the services they need.
My point exactly. It may not be a Safe Parking site, but it is a de facto overnight spot for guys in run down motorhomes. Just because you offer Safe Parking doesn’t mean everybody will use it.
Correct, although the reality is, that 100% of those enduring living in their cars will definitely not use Safe Parking Sites if they no longer exist because the City cut their budget for the next fiscal year.
Have we not learned by now from Micheal McConnel that homelessness isn’t one thing?
My next door neighbor works with someone, a 28 year old university degree holder working for a major hotel chain that just got a promotion and raise to $67,500. He had to leave his apartment after the property changed ownership for “rennovations” and told he can’t come back. He lives in his car unable to re-enter the rental market. What kind of services can he access floating around town night after night trying to find a place to crash?
Aren’t generalizations falsely equating “van-lifers” with the men, women, the indigent, the elderly or women with children facing similar vehicle inhabitation circumstances doing them all a disservice? So those that would bennefit from a secured parking lot be damned, you are irrelevant because this one program doesn’t solve every issue, so therefore we should abandon it by gutting the it’s budget?
When secure lots are established, including hygeine facilities and the ability to better personally familiarize with service providers it has been proven to increase their chances for a more viable housing solution.
It also gives the police an alternative to present to van lifers to move them along and maybe return our parks back to us as much as we can. Your ideal achievable outcome, correct?
Please remember this legislatively accelerated immoral catastrophe is the result of dedicating fewer than 3%-5% of the homelessness budget on prevention. City, County, and State.
I never presented this as an end all be all solution, it would be absolutely preposterous to imply that about any program or proposal.
I have, however provided an exhausted list of reasons why this Safe Parking Sites program’s budget should never have been cut for the next fiscal year.
The Safe Parking Site Program has registered the highest participation and has proven one cost effective solution for the most largely unaccounted for, literally uncounted, contingent of the homeless population.
23% of San Diego’s community college students are homeless. How many live in their motorhomes down at Robb Field? How many of these students are van lifers down at Mission Bay? Probably none.
Now how many of our future San Diego nurses, school teachers, firefighters, police officers, EMT’s, paramedics students are working there way through community college as barbacks, barristas, waitresses, cashiers that haven’t a snowballs chance in hell of paying the average rent?
23%