San Jose plans to clamp down on vehicles with expired tags, which will affect thousands of homeless residents across the city.
Starting Aug. 17, vehicles with a registration more than six months out of date may be immediately towed without warning. This crackdown on expired registration will hit homeless people living in their vehicles. The city has more than 2,000 lived-in vehicles, and about 36% have expired registration.
“It’s going to be horrible, these people (will) have no place to go,” Rudy Ortega, who lives in Columbus Park where dozens of RVs are encamped, told San José Spotlight. “These people are going to be forced into encampments they don’t want to be in.”
California law requires a vehicle to have up-to-date registration if it’s driven or parked on public roads, but enforcement hasn’t been a priority due to the city transportation department’s small parking compliance unit. There are at least 4,200 vehicles with tags six months or more past expiration, a city analysis of 2022-2023 California Department of Motor Vehicles data found.
Six parking enforcement officers will patrol the streets and ticket or tow vehicles with expired registration. The team will be comprised of three new officers and three officers shifted from other programs. In addition, the city is planning to bring four officers to ticket RVs that have been parked for an extended time on streets in lesser impacted areas, with the intention to get them to move elsewhere. The cost for both programs is expected to be just more than $1 million this fiscal year, with ongoing costs of $1.1 million, taken from the general fund. Revenues from citations are expected to bring in approximately $55,000 this fiscal year and $125,000 in future years.
“We’ve always thought that the (transportation department should) not be punitive. We strive for compliance,” Colin Heyne, spokesperson for the city transportation department, told San José Spotlight. “But we and the councilmembers and the mayor have gotten lots and lots of complaints about expired registration.”
Heyne said the plan is to ticket vehicles with tags that are six months to a year expired, and tow vehicles with expired registrations of more than a year, though it depends on factors like the condition of the vehicle.
“We want to get the registration fee in part because it pays for safety improvements on our streets,” Heyne said. “So it helps improve the streets for everybody.”
Heyne said the city won’t tow a vehicle if someone is inside. Instead, workers will contact the police department for assistance to vacate the vehicle before removing it. The department has no plan to coordinate with the housing department or nonprofits to offer services for people who could be displaced, he added.
Ortega is living in a pop-up camper and has a car with tags that expired more than a year ago. He can’t update his registration because the car can’t pass a smog test, and he doesn’t have the money to fix it. He said his life would be upended if his car gets towed.
“I wouldn’t be able to work. I would then have no money to survive,” Ortega said.
The planned enforcement of vehicle tags comes as San Jose expands a program to ban lived-in vehicles on designated streets across the city. Last year, the city instituted temporary RV bans across 30 highly impacted zones through the $1.6 million pilot program known as Oversized and Lived-In Vehicle Enforcement (OLIVE). The city plans to enforce the ban across 50 more sites this fiscal year at a cost of $1.9 million. The new tow-away zones are concentrated in District 7 and near San Jose Mineta International Airport.
The pilot program added a supportive enforcement feature. San Jose will ticket lived-in vehicles parked in lower-priority sites to encourage residents to move.
“We have to be smart and strategic with limited resources, and we feel this move, along with our expanded enforcement of oversized and lived-in vehicles, will address some of the most common parking-related complaints we hear,” John Ristow, director of the transportation department, said in a statement.
Homeless advocate Gail Osmer, who works with people living in their RVs, said sweeps and temporary tow-away zones simply move people from one neighborhood to another.
“What a waste of money,” Osmer told San José Spotlight. “Not a lot of people have been going out and offering them any kind of services.”
The city has two safe parking sites, one on Berryessa Road and another at the VTA Santa Teresa light rail station, where people can park their RVs without fear of getting swept. The combined 128 spaces across both sites isn’t enough for the more than 2,000 people living in their vehicles.
“We need at least four, five more (safe parking) sites,” Osmer said.
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.
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