Comments to the County are due by Monday. I’ve made it super simple to comment by sharing the link and a proposed comment for you below.
As you might know, the City was sued a few years ago by a group of homeless people who had been prosecuted under the City’s “no vehicle dwelling law.” The 9th Circuit (one step below the Supreme Court) said that our law was vague and unconstitutional and the City paid out $1.1 million to the attorneys as a result of losing that lawsuit.
The Court basically told the City how to fix the law, but the City was gun-shy and did nothing for several years. The ultimate response by the City was LAMC 85.02 with the map that we’ve all heard about. 85.02 became effective in January 2017 and enforcement was supposed to start in February.
Fast forward a few months and 85.02 is still not being enforced! The RV problem is getting worse everyday in 90045/PdR. If you look at the map, Manchester from Sepulveda to the beach is either red or yellow. Red is no parking ever, and yellow is no overnight parking. People are counting RVs parked on Manchester in the double digits and those rigs aren’t moving (violations of both 85.02 and parking laws against parking longer than 72 hours in one place).
One of the issues raised in the civil rights lawsuit was that the City shouldn’t be prosecuting people for being homeless. This is still a conundrum under the new law and possibly why the new law isn’t being enforced (along with, apparently, the problem of having to enforce in person with RV dwellers simply not answering the door).
One of the suggestions that I learned about when I attended a homelessness forum last year was to offer Safe Parking to the RVs in exchange for a promise to get on a City-sponsored path to housing. If a vehicle dweller (lots of people are living in cars, as well as RVs) doesn’t agree to the offer, they can be legally removed from our streets. That is, they are not being prosecuted for being homeless because homeless people will agree to the City’s offer of housing help (not 100% true, but we’ll leave that part of the discussion for another day).
Thus, having a safe parking alternative for the homeless RVers gives law enforcement the ability to run everybody else out. Presumably, this solves the issue of the rolling crime scenes posed by other RVs, as well as the lifestylers who want to live in our beach community without paying taxes or for services.
It’s a fair and legally enforceable solution.
So today I saw on NextDoor that Los Angeles County officials are seeking public comment on the preliminary spending proposal for the estimated $355 million to come annually from the Measure H sales tax increase approved by voters in March to reduce homelessness. Possibly it isn’t on their radar because the Safe Parking proposal is a City idea, but I’m bothered that the County isn’t allocating any of the money that I’m paying and that I voted to support to a solution that gets rid of the RV’s.
The Safe Parking Program is the solution we need.
I’m asking everybody to take one minute to register a comment with the County right now. Here is the link to submit comments.
Feel free to cut and paste the comment that I left at the bottom in the General Comments section:
Where is the money for a Safe Parking Program? We need to immediately start separating the RV’ers on our streets who need housing assistance from the rolling criminal enterprises. This is critical and glaringly absent from what I see above. Please, please allocate some of the Measure H money to this important initiative.
The “above” reference is my comment refers to all the categories of $ allocations that you’ll see on the form before you get to the General Comments section. Here is the link again to submit comments.
Please take two seconds right now to click that link and leave that or another comment asking for an allocation for Safe Parking so that we can start cleaning up the criminals and lifestylers. And then, take another minute and share this post with 10 friends. Even easier, post a link to this article on your Facebook page. Comments are due Monday by 5 pm. 
Living90045.com 