{"id":1118,"date":"2026-05-24T20:05:51","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T20:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1118"},"modified":"2026-05-24T20:05:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T20:05:51","slug":"in-homeless-crisis-california-is-waging-a-war-on-rvs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1118","title":{"rendered":"In homeless crisis, California \u2018is waging a war on RVs\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<div>\n<p><span>On any given night in California, estimates suggest, roughly 34,000 homeless people will take shelter in their vehicles. Tori Larett, a homeless rights lawyer in Sacramento, thinks the real number is double that. For half of them, their home is a recreational vehicle, converted bus, or travel trailer parked on the street.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1116\">What\u2019s the rent where you live? See the latest rental costs in towns around Mass.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>In January, a new California law went into effect in Los Angeles and Alameda counties, allowing authorities to quickly demolish oversize vehicles worth up to $4,000, up from $500, if the owner cannot move the vehicle without help from a tow truck.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThe whole state is waging a war on RVs right now,\u201d said Larett, who is also the research director at the National Vehicle Residency Coalition.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p><span>For three cloudless days in March, Sam Lutzker and I crisscrossed Los Angeles hearing stories about life in RVs. Lutzker, 33, has weeks left before three years of field research for a doctorate in sociology at UCLA gives way to writing his thesis. \u201cI care about these individuals deeply,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><span>Get Starting Point<\/span><\/div>\n<div><span>A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.<\/span><\/div>\n<div>\n<div><label>Enter Email<\/label><\/p>\n<div><button>Sign Up<\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><span>The center of his field work is City Council District 11 in Los Angeles, where council member Traci Park spearheads towing sweeps. When RVs are removed, she publishes social media posts about her success cleaning the streets. Local businesses and residents organize against oversize vehicles and sometimes hire private security companies to press RV dwellers to move \u2014 even when the vehicles are legally parked.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Park describes RV dwellers as living in mile-long encampments of dilapidated \u201cnuisance vehicles\u201d where crime and unsanitary conditions are rampant. \u201cThere\u2019s widespread illegal dumping, including of human waste,\u201d she said. \u201cThese encampments are a public health emergency, a public safety emergency.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Lutzker, whose study includes about 90 people living in vehicles, places the population along a spectrum that includes economic hardship, drug abuse, personal trauma, and a deliberate choice to live outside conventional housing. He said many were scattered solo or in small groups on side streets, not in encampments.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Lutzker acknowledges it\u2019s a problem when homeless people live in unsafe RVs, but he disagrees with a regulatory approach that tickets, impounds, and destroys vehicles \u2014 sometimes with the owner\u2019s possessions still inside \u2014 without providing services to their owners.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThere is currently a two- to three-month wait to be assigned a caseworker to help you get into a shelter,\u201d he said. The people who are unable to move their vehicles are the poorest and most vulnerable. \u201cA lot of these operations will force, like, 15 RVs to move,\u201d he said. \u201cThey know they\u2019re not going to get all those RVs. They\u2019re doing it for the three or four that are left over.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Advocates say RVs are seen as an eyesore \u2014 the most visible sign of California\u2019s homelessness crisis. Neighbors and politicians want them gone. \u201cIt comes down to aesthetics,\u201d Larett said. \u201cCompassion fatigue around unsheltered homelessness in California has never been higher.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>I was riding shotgun as Lutzker turned the corner onto the industrial side street behind Google\u2019s Los Angeles office in the Venice neighborhood. I counted five oversize vehicles, including a 27-foot pale-yellow school bus. That\u2019s where we met its owner, Chanel Lara, 29, a Fresno transplant.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Lara came to Los Angeles to avoid the oppressive heat in the Central Valley and to escape poverty. Her family relies on welfare, she said, adding, \u201cWhy not go somewhere where I have more opportunity?\u201d Five years ago, Lara drove to Los Angeles in a Nissan Maxima, even though it meant sleeping in it. The Maxima broke down, becoming a \u201cmetal tent,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1114\">Track layoffs in Massachusetts<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>Since then, Lara has lived in various vehicles while working \u201csoul-sucking\u201d jobs in coffee shops and home care. She found her current home \u2014 the Freightliner school bus \u2014 through a Facebook group for \u201cskoolies,\u201d converted school buses used as homes, acquiring it for $3,500 including her airfare to Washington state and the drive back. Her dream is to convert a mini school bus into a mobile salon selling her handmade spa products.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>She\u2019s a young Afro-Latina woman parked on the streets of a neighborhood where the romanticized \u201c#vanlife\u201d of social media \u2014 yoga mats, sunsets, and spotless Sprinter vans \u2014 is valorized.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cIt\u2019s cool when it\u2019s a blond doing it out of a Sprinter van,\u201d she said. \u201cThe rest of us are homeless.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>One day four months ago, she returned from work to discover police officers and city staff members threatening to tow her bus. She climbed to the vehicle\u2019s roof, dropped into the cabin through the emergency hatch and sped away.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>For decades, Los Angeles has alternated between sweeping encampments and court-ordered restraint. In December 2022, Mayor Karen Bass began Inside Safe, a program to move people from encampments to hotels until permanent housing \u2014 which remains in short supply \u2014 becomes available.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>After the city spent $300 million, the results are mixed: two years of declining street homelessness (though a Rand analysis suggests an undercount), offset by a 40 percent return to the streets among Inside Safe participants. RV dwellers are routinely promised housing in exchange for surrendering their vehicles. Those promises often don\u2019t materialize, advocates say.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><span>Lutzker and I spent an afternoon with Kathy Coates, 62, and Amir Edwards, 52. Coates has struggled with severe depression. Edwards wears hand-sculpted horns on his head so he can\u2019t be misidentified by police. He adopted the strategy, he said, after a security guard once accused him of a crime committed by another Black man.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>After Coates received an inheritance from her mother, the couple rented an apartment in the Mar Vista neighborhood. When the money ran low and their $2,000 in monthly rent became onerous, she bought a used motor home for $9,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>They found their way to the Playa del Rey neighborhood and the Ballona Wetlands, where about 50 vehicles had gathered. Three months later, tow trucks arrived. The couple fled to a nearby street behind a Home Depot and then to an arterial, accumulating $4,000 in parking tickets. In June 2024, a vigilante threw a boulder through their back window, and it landed a few feet from Coates. \u201cThat thing could have hit me in the head, and I would have been gone,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Last May, the couple accepted $500 for their vehicle and a path to housing. After five months in a city-funded motel, they moved in October into Elderberry Village, permanent subsidized housing with on-site services. They feel relieved to no longer be living in an RV, where they felt targeted. \u201cAll in all, I\u2019m happy here,\u201d Coates said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/bostonrelocationinsider.com\/?p=1112\">How Breaktime\u2019s Connor Schoen hopes to tackle youth homelessness in Boston<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span>This article originally appeared in The New York Times.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In January, a new California law went into effect in Los Angeles and Alameda counties, allowing authorities to quickly demolish oversize vehicles worth up to $4,000, up from $500, if the owner cannot move the vehicle without help from a tow truck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - 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