San Jose’s plan to remove RVs from city streets with over 900 likely-occupied vehicles identified
Friday, November 15, 2024
SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) — San Jose is launching a new program that tracks where and how many RVs and lived in-vehicles are parked on city streets.
Staff took inventory and put the data on a map residents can access.
They found over 900 oversized vehicles are likely occupied.
“We’ve got a big problem as you see from the map,” Mayor Matt Mahan said. “We have to enforce our laws, we have to hold people to a certain code of conduct. It is unacceptable whether you’re housed or unhoused for your personal belongings to be blocking a sidewalk or out in traffic creating a traffic hazard.”
The program is meant to identify which areas are impacted the most.
San Jose unanimously passed stricter RV and homeless encampment policies around schools, piloting three campuses impacted the most.
Starting in 2025, the city would establish 10 permanent and 30 temporary tow-away zones.
The hope is those areas can be cleaned up while car-free.
“We can’t have RV encampments set up with a sense of permanence and just grow over time,” Mahan said.
ABC7 News spoke with Todd Langton, Executive Director of the nonprofit Agape Silicon Valley.
“The city, the county, and the state, they do things backward,” Langton said. “They focus on ‘let’s identify where the homeless are, where they live, and lets abate them.'”
RV dwellers parked on San Jose streets will soon be allowed to move into the city’s largest safe parking RV site.
Langton questions this program and feels it may just exacerbate the situation.
“Let’s find a way to get those vehicles operable, help them get registered, and let’s have a place for them to go park. The safe parking sites that the city and the county are proposing, they’re way behind, they spend years and years studying and doing research,” Langton said.
Next year the city plans to open its second and largest Safe Parking Site which can take up to 85 vehicles off city streets. Mahan recognizes that’s where some people can go, but not all.
“We don’t have enough but I also think there’s an element of fairness here,” Mahan said. “If you run a small business, if you worked hard and bought your home or worked hard and renting in a neighborhood it is not fair that a RV encampment will be permanently in front of your home or your business,” Mahan said.
Mahan said this enforcement will be spread throughout the city equally.
“We are going to select at least one RV encampment in each district to at least a temporary tow-away zone so if residents want to communicate with their council members about the RV encampments they hope are prioritized I would encourage them to do so,” Mahan said.