Early one recent Friday morning, sanitation workers, homeless-outreach workers and LAPD officers arrived on a little street in the west of Los Angeles.
Jasmine Avenue is lined with low-rise apartment blocks, an imposing Catholic Church, a school, and a handful of dilapidated recreational vehicles. That morning on Jasmine Avenue, RV residents were offered $500 gift cards and a motel room. The city also offered to tow and destroy their RVs.
One RV managed to leave, under its own steam, with what smelled like sewage leaking along the road as it left. This clearance is one small part of what has been a piecemeal approach by officials trying to tackle a burgeoning phenomenon of people living permanently in RVs on these streets.
“I’ll take a motel room,” one RV owner told me as he packed up his belongings after about six months on Jasmine Avenue. “See what happens.” But he did not let the city tow and destroy his RV. He towed it elsewhere himself, using a chain and a beaten-up SUV. He wants to keep it.
“The idea sometimes our clients have is, ‘What if this doesn’t work? If this doesn’t work, then I’m back on the streets. I’m back to square one,’” said LaTonya Smith, interim CEO at the St. Joseph Center, a nonprofit that helps the city find accommodation for the unhoused. “People who are living in RVs consider themselves to be housed, and in order for them to leave that RV, sometimes we have to incentivize.”
There are, by the latest count, more than 11,000 people living in RVs across Los Angeles County. And that number has been rising. The Covid-19 pandemic forced more people into poverty.
Some of the RV dwellers have jobs but either don’t want to pay apartment rent, or can’t afford to pay it, in a city where the average one-bedroom apartment costs around $2,500 a month.
A huge homeless camp will be cleared after neighbors sued. What happens to its vulnerable residents is an open question Some RV dwellers own the vehicles, but others rent them to the monthly tune of a few hundred dollars to more than $1,000, city Councilwoman Traci Park told CNN.
In Los Angeles, you are allowed to sleep in a vehicle on some streets. There are, of course, parking restrictions on many streets. But as the number of RVs has grown, enforcing those restrictions has become harder.
Large, immobile RVs require large tow trucks. And, according to the city, destroying a dilapidated RV that might contain harmful chemicals can cost up to $9,000 per vehicle.
Outreach workers from St. Joseph Center interact regularly with RV dwellers. A spokesperson told CNN: “Staff encounter a large percentage, probably safe to say as much as 80-85%, of individuals who are ‘leasing’ RVs or may have purchased an RV that is not suitable for habitation or a ‘legal’ sale.”
Park and others argue that these RVs endanger their residents and blight neighborhoods, acting as magnets for crime and damaging the environment. Some advocates for the unhoused agree the impact on city neighborhoods is an issue.
“There might be trash everywhere,” said Smith from the St. Joseph Center. “People come outside their neighborhoods and homes, that’s not something that they really want to see.”
In the five years since Los Angeles County commissioned one of many reports into the RV problem and potential solutions, the number of RVs on county streets has risen by more than 50% – from more than 4,500 in 2018 to more than 7,100 at last count. Reports are regularly requested and written by various city and county departments.
“I’m tired of studies and reports,” Park told CNN recently at her freshly painted City Hall office. She was elected last year on a platform dripping with intent to handle the various homelessness issues plaguing Los Angeles.
Among her first targets: people she calls “vanlords,” some of whom, she says, rent out rotting, unsafe RVs. “There is a thriving trade in RVs being rented out as dwelling units on the internet,” Park said.
Park proposed a motion that would explicitly add RVs to part of the city code that, “Prohibits a person or entity from reserving any street, parking space, or other public space without written authorization from the City while conducting business pertaining to new and used vehicles.”
The motion would also force RV owners to comply with a state law, “which requires that any RV offered for sale, sold, rented or leased within California meet the design safety standards of the American National Standards Institute and Fire Protection Association.”
