San Jose tries new program to tackle oversized, lived-in vehicle challenges

SAN JOSE — For years, thousands of parked oversized vehicles — many of them RVs with people living inside them — have clogged San Jose city streets, creating safety hazards for surrounding residential neighborhoods and businesses.

City leaders have finally had enough and are now tackling the problem head on with stricter enforcement.

Under a newly created pilot program, the city will set up 30 temporary and 10 permanent tow-away zones near schools, parks, waterways and interim housing sites to reduce the negative impacts on the community.

“We need to do a better job of managing oversized vehicles and particularly reducing the impacts of lived-in vehicles on the broader community,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan told The Mercury News. “It has a huge impact on people’s quality of life, their personal safety and their property values. It’s important that we get people into safe locations with services and help them turn their lives around, but we can not turn a blind eye to the very real and very negative impacts of persistent RV encampments in front of homes and businesses.”

The Oversized and Lived-in Vehicle Enforcement Program, funded through a $1.5 million addendum in this year’s budget, is creating an inventory of parked oversized vehicles or RVs on the city’s streets to identify hotspots and more heavily concentrated areas.

Although each of the city’s districts has large clusters, mapping data shows that the central parts of the city and industrial areas contain a higher concentration of lived-in vehicles.

In total, the city has identified 1,932 vehicles, including 910 that residents live in.

“This solution is a long time coming,” said District 4 Councilmember David Cohen. “It will provide critical relief to neighbors living in RVs and allow us to give them clearer pathways off of our streets. It will also ensure that our communities are less blighted, which will ease the tension between neighborhoods and residents in lived-in vehicles. I’m excited at the prospect of providing a broad set of solutions, and this site is a key step towards achieving our goals.”

While the criteria for determining the temporary zones could change, the city has focused on particularly sensitive areas like schools, waterways — which it must clean up to comply with the Clean Water Act and retain its storm water permits — and the largest encampment areas. City officials say it is also committed to protecting neighborhoods that have taken on homelessness solutions.

San Jose city officials plan to establish the tow-away zones in each district in the first half of 2025.

“I see a multiyear, multiprong strategy that gets us to a place where we don’t have RV encampments spread across the city, but it’s not an overnight solution,” Mahan said. “I think we need to see a 10% reduction year-over-year to show meaningful progress … We need to significantly reduce the number of people living outside and in unmanaged conditions or living in unmanaged vehicles.”

The city has grappled with the problem of oversized vehicles for years. Discovering that the California Vehicle Code created some barriers to enforcement, the city expanded its towing authority this year in cases where vehicles created a public safety risk. It also knows buffer zones can work after testing the rules at three schools this year: Shirakawa Elementary School, KIPP San Jose Collegiate, and the Challenger School — Berryessa.

“They’ve worked incredibly well with people respecting the buffer zone,” Mahan said. “It’s created greater accountability around the schools because the residents living in those RVs know that we’re paying attention and going to hold them accountable for not adhering to our code of conduct. The schools report that they’ve seen reductions in crime and trash and that students and faculty feel safer coming to campus, so it’s been a success.”

The biggest outstanding question is where people living in vehicles will go. Currently, the city has 42 safe parking spots in the Santa Teresa neighborhood and will add another 85 spots on a 6.3-acre site in Berryessa at the beginning of next year but advocates say its not enough and questioned the humanity of implementing the program when residents were already in crisis.

“We need more safe parking,” community advocate Gail Osmer said. “They can’t be taking these peoples’ homes. That’s just not right.”

Teresa Palumbo, who has lived in an RV after losing her home, echoed those comments and added that the city is forgetting that those residents have no place to go right now.

“When my (late) husband bought it for me, he said, ‘This way they can’t take your home and it just so happens it’s on wheels,’” Palumbo said. “It’s hard because a lot of people have no where to go and (the city) hasn’t done a lot of things they said they were going to (regarding shelter space).”