Redwood City safe parking program ends

Following numerous community meetings held over a year’s time, the group came to the council with a proposal. The city would change its laws to prohibit overnight parking of RVs on city streets while instituting a program where RV dwellers would be permitted to safely park their vehicles 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Even the people who complained because they were facing the impacts of the RVs on the street, those same people were encouraging us to do what we did. Even the people complaining were recognizing that these were our neighbors,” Chin said. “And at the time we were working on this, our city leadership was very clear, the folks living in RVs on the street are our residents, just like people who live in an apartment and the residents who are also business owners. We want to listen and serve all of our residents.”

Staff identified 1405 Maple St., a vacant lot near the Maple Street Correctional Center, as the ideal site for the program and proposed a cap of 120 participants. Staff came to that number by surveying how many RVs were residing in the city and considered it their home. By capping the program, it prevented the city from taking on an influx of RV dwellers from other cities.

If all RV dwellers residing in the city opted to participate in the program, only about half would have fit on the lot. To accommodate the rest, staff proposed instituting a permit program where excess RVs would be allowed to park on the street and would move onto the lot once space became available.

Regardless of where the RVs were parked, the dwellers had to agree to receive support from a social worker who would help participants find more permanent housing along with other services like career readiness assistance and behavioral health services.

The council approved the program as a two-year pilot and infused it with an initial allocation of $1.7 million, tapping LifeMoves to operate the site and provide casework. The program was initially meant to sunset last October but councilmembers voted last August to extend the program through this February.

“The real advantage of having this site is that we’re really meeting clients where they are, that we’re bringing services and planning to folks who have been living in RVs and giving them a place where they don’t have to live nearly as stressed about life living in an RV, where they’re having to park from place to place,” Sarah Fields, director of Community Engagement and Public Affairs for LifeMoves.

Program by numbers

No program is perfect, said Brian Greenberg, LifeMoves’ vice president of programs and services, but the Safe Parking Program experienced success based on the number of participants assisted.

A total of about 98 households joined the program. The rest of the 120 or so RVs in the city likely left town to avoid ticketing. Of program participants, about 60% have been transitioned into permanent housing. Another 20% to 30% opted for other options such as moving on to a different safe parking program, to an RV park or a shelter, Chin said. Ten families moved into Casa Esperanza, a county-owned hotel turn housing in the city.

Some received rapid rehousing vouchers through the city or county, which serve as shallow rent subsidies to help pay portions of rent until the tenant is able to fully fund their living independently. Others moved on to find permanent housing without subsidies or were provided support through philanthropic donations meant to help those without legal status who typically cannot access funds through state or federal programming.

“Most people went to housing, which is cool,” Greenberg said. “I mean, no program is ever perfect but it’s been incredible in reducing the number of RVs on the street and getting people out of RVs and into housing.”

Now at the end of the program, a few participants remain at the site, which the city plans to transform into a public park — a promise to the community made as part of a land swap deal with the county. The deal enabled the county to move forward with plans to build a 240-bedroom navigation center directly across from the Safe RV Parking Program site.

One couple who participated in the RV program will transition to living at the Navigation Center once construction is complete. The site is expected to open by the end of March and LifeMoves has been asked to operate that site as well.

Continuing the work

The fight to end homelessness in the county and Redwood City, in particular, isn’t over. The city has signed onto the county’s goal of reaching functional zero, meaning homelessness will become rare, brief and never chronic.

The county’s biannual One Day Homeless Count conducted last February found 1,092 people were sleeping on the street, in tents or in vehicles, a 20% increase from the previous count conducted in 2019. The number of those in shelters also grew, up to 716 from 611.

Redwood City is home to the largest number of unhoused residents compared to other cities in the county with 245 people without housing. Complaints about RVs have been practically eradicated since the program began but residents continue to express concerns about the 20 encampments located in the city, most of which are on property owned by the California Department of Transportation.

Councilmembers have committed more than $8 million toward combating homelessness between 2019 and 2022 and another $1.8 million in state funding has been granted to the city to specifically address encampments.

Some of those funds have gone toward standing up a city-operated outreach team and hiring a housing specialist. Meanwhile, nonprofit groups like LifeMoves and Street Life Ministries have helped provide outreach work as well.

“Having this much more robust, coordinated, interagency homeless outreach team that’s Redwood City focused, that’s exactly what we’re talking about and our whole goal is to be able to, in a very robust way, provide options and services to folks,” Chin said. “We can’t make somebody do something but what we can do is we can in a very conscientious way, provide that.”

Chin and Fields said it’s hard to say why the number of homeless residents is so much higher in Redwood City than in other places in the county but theorized it could be because the city acts as the county hub making it home to many centralized resources or that the weather is nice.

Greenberg applauded the city for their work to address homelessness in the city though and argued that more jurisdictions should be taking a similar and urgent approach toward combating homelessness and developing solutions.

“Part of it’s the governmental responsibility, part of it is the nonprofit’s responsibility and part of it’s the people who are unhoused their responsibility,” Greenberg said. “Everyone has to step up in equal measures.”