Palo Alto mulls new RV park to aid vehicle dwellers

With the number of vehicle dwellers on the rise, Palo Alto’s elected leaders are considering further expanding the Geng Road “safe parking” site, which provides spaces and social services for individuals and families who live in RVs.

The program, which is administered by the nonprofit group MOVE Mountain View, has been gradually evolving since the City Council first established it in fall 2020. In fall 2022, it unveiled a suite of services for its residents, including a children’s library, laundry facilities and a closet with donated clothes. And last year, the City Council backed an expansion that will allow it to house up to 22 RVs, which is 10 more than it does today.

Since formally opening in 2021, the site has placed 58 individuals into permanent housing, according to Amber Stime, executive director of MOVE Mountain View.

“These are people who have worked in this community, the rent is too high and their income is too small so therefore they are in their cars,” Stime said during a Feb. 10 public hearing on Palo Alto’s homelessness programs.

Yet just about everyone acknowledges that this is not enough. The 2023 point-in-time count administered by Santa Clara County estimated that there were 181 individuals in 102 vehicles in Palo Alto, including 69 RVs. The survey also indicated that homeless people in Palo Alto are less likely to sleep in shelters and far more likely to sleep in cars. It found that 88% of Palo Alto’s unhoused individuals lived in vehicles that year, while across Santa Clara County, the proportion was just 32%. The survey also showed that 91% of Palo Alto’s unhoused population is unsheltered, compared to 75% countywide.

The supply has not kept up with the demand. The city currently has 40 “safe parking” spots, which includes the 22 on Geng Road and 18 in smaller programs administered by local congregations. A new report from city staff notes that while there is often excess capacity at the congregation sites, which only allow overnight parking, there has been a waiting list for 24-hour RV parking.

Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims led the push on Monday to expand services for local vehicle dwellers, including providing them with places that can accommodate their garbage disposal and bathroom needs. The city currently doesn’t have any pump-out stations or waste-dumping areas for RVs.

“These are humans who just like the rest of us want to live in dignity and want to be safe and don’t want to be in constant violation of societal rules,” Lythcott-Haims said. “They want to throw out their trash, but you’re not allowed to just put your trash in someone else’s bin or dumpster. If they’re in the RV, they want a place where they can pump their sewage, but where are they supposed to do that?”

Her preferred solution, she said, was to create a new park for RVs and car campers.

“More safe parking lots are, in my view, the most immediate and cheapest solution,” Lythcott-Haims said. “I think it’s high time we move toward building a proper RV dweller- and tiny home community, over an acre or two.”

While the council has yet to fully discuss this idea, at least one council member agreed that the city can establish more safe parking spaces near the Geng Road site, east of U.S. Highway 101. Council member Pat Burt noted that the city had set aside 10 acres of land for playing fields when it approved a major redesign of the Palo Alto Municipal Golf Course a decade ago to boost flood protection near the San Francisquito Creek. Those fields had not been built and the land remains vacant, Burt said.

“Just one acre of those 10, immediately across the road from our current MOVE Mountain View site, would be a big improvement,” Burt said.

The council’s discussion comes at a time when cities across the region are reconsidering their homelessness policies in light of last summer’s Supreme Court ruling that removed restrictions on clearing out homeless encampments on public property. In response to the Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded his efforts to clear encampments from state land and announced a $130.7 million grant program for local governments to clear encampments and provide support services for unhoused individuals.

The Palo Alto council showed little inclination on Monday to move ahead with homeless sweeps, though council member Greer Stone argued that that the city should coordinate its policies with those of neighboring jurisdiction to ensure that policies in one city don’t simply lead to unhoused individuals moving across the border.

“What I’m concerned about is inconsistent policies in the region that will be basically, rather than solving the problem of homelessness, just move people around to different cities with less restrictive measures,” Stone said. “And of course is never going to solve the actual problem.”

Council member George Lu agreed.

“I absolutely think we should not apply a criminalization of homelessness in the style of Grants Pass, which is a race to the bottom we don’t want to be part of – moving people around,” Lu said.

In discussing their options for addressing homelessness, council members agreed that enforcement needs to be part of the solution. But Police Chief Andrew Binder noted that in many cases, the incidents that police officers respond to do not rise to the level of law violations. Most of the department’s actions are noncustodial arrests in which an individual is issued a citation and released at the scene. Those who are physically arrested are often released from jail within hours and return to the community, he said.

Even so, Burt and Mayor Ed Lauing both stressed the need to address complaints from local residents and businesses about homelessness in the downtown area, particularly when individuals engage in aggressive behavior and block doorways. Lauing suggested that the city needs to balance its “compassionate care” approach with the enforcement.

“It’s real for businesses, it’s real for residents,” Lauing said. “I’m hearing both sides of that story all the time.”

Burt noted that creating more transitional housing for unhoused individuals could help the city identify those individuals who are homeless because of financial reasons. Expanding the Geng Road site could be part of the solution.

“That will really be a turning point because then our carrots become much more attractive,” Burt said. “And we can distinguish between folks who are declining help and a subset of those who are really bad apples.

“We have an ongoing problem with a minority of our unhoused population downtown who are really problematic to our community for public health, public safety, economic development. It’s a real issue.”

While expanding the Geng Road site will give the city more options for temporarily housing some of the city’s unhoused individuals, Palo Alto still faces a broader problem: a lack of permanent housing that residents can move on to.

According to the city, Palo Alto has zero units of “permanent supportive housing” — which pair permanent residences with social services – and about 120 people who are waiting to get placed into such housing. While the city is now in the final stages of building a transitional housing project on San Antonio Road, the 88 rooms that this project will create are not intended for permanent occupancy.

“The ultimate issue if we don’t have adequate permanent supportive housing is we don’t have a means for people exiting those shelters,” said Melissa McDonough, assistant to the city manager. “The shelters at some point don’t have the means of accepting the inflow. It becomes increasingly problematic.”

This story originally appeared in Palo Alto Weekly. Gennady Sheyner covers local and regional politics, housing, transportation and other topics for the Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Online and their sister publications.