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NO PARKING!!!

NO PARKING between 2:00 pm and 6:00 am

Vehicularily Housed residents in California fight eviction, gentrification, and police harassment

By Kaponda, PNN staff

Like a barge on water, the quaint abode plodded along the narrow, city road. In tandem with the seasoned vehicle that slogged ahead, it signaled the last vestige of free will. Its eyes pored in every direction in search of a piece of parcel on which to rest. Even an old-fashioned drive-in would provide sufficient relief to cool its engines.

But the signs posted on most of the streets -- "No Parking Between 2:00 PM to 6:00 AM" -- represented the disdain which most residents of China Basin have towards homes on wheels. Neither will Officer Swiatco, the code enforcement officer who represents the San Francisco Police Department at the Bayview station, show any compassion for this mobile home in distress. A tacit contract has been put out on vehicles used for sleeping or camping in California.

Officer Swiatco of the San Francisco Police Department has been turned loose by the Bayview Station in San Francisco on vehicles that are used as homes. He aggressively pursues any vehicle which exceeds the 72-hour parking law, or that fails to display the proper registration. Swiatco, however, is a puppet, dangling from a strategically vast conspiracy of economics.

Invoking the time-honored proverb, "The love of money is the root of all evil", these words could have been written just for planners and developers in Silicon Valley and other "growing" areas of California. Not too long ago, inexpensive trailer courts and mobile home parks were sprawled along cities from Sunnyvale to Los Gatos. But the real estate boom in California has curbed the growth of these mobile home communities. Developers are literally snatching the ground from underneath vehicularly housed residents' wheels.

An article in the San Jose Mercury, dated Thursday, June 1, 2000, by Laura Kurtzman, states the deplorable extent to which developers will push for the love of money. According to Kurtzman's article, a 91-year-old woman, Antonia Telles, a former migrant worker who lives on $830 a month from her late husband's Social Security, was given an eviction notice after having resided for 50 years at the Campbell Trailer Court in Campbell, California. To further accentuate the evil visited upon her in the form of the notice to vacate, according to Kurtman's article, Ms. Telles' space is beside the cemetery plot of her deceased husband.

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In Los Gatos, Doug McNelly, owner of Los Gatos Mobile Home Park, admits that it would be very difficult for a person to find other housing in the California runaway real estate market. McNelly has put a moratorium on renting spaces and has negotiated the buyout of every mobile home resident on his property. He has cleared the way, along with the hopes and aspirations of many poor people whose only resort is to find housing in mobile home parks, to sell his land to a developer, Barry Swenson. Again, both McNelly and Swenson will probably earn huge amounts of money in view of the real estate boom in California. But their financial gains will displace poor and low-income people throughout Silicon Valley, because most cities are not creating space for vehicularly housed residents. Santa Cruz, however, is an exception.

As of May 23, 2000, the first reading of legislation to decriminalize sleeping in vehicles or outdoors at night was approved by the Santa Cruz City Council. For years, Santa Cruz had had a draconian sleeping ban. According to the June edition of the Street Spirit, in an article written by Robert Norse of Homeless United for Friendship and Freedom (HUFF), so severe was the Sleeping Ban, "...that the City¹s own Interfaith Satellite Shelter Program (ISSP), which has had homeless people sleeping on the floors of churches for 13 years, is itself illegal in the City (since churches are not considered domiciles under the law)."

The recently approved proposed legislation is the product of a combination of aggressive protests by Campaign to End the Sleeping Ban (CESB) and bold actions by HUFF. According to Norse's article, the new law, if sanctioned at the second reading, scheduled for June13, 2000, "would throw out entirely the Blanket Ban, which now bars covering up with blankets at night...". It would also "...establish legal areas to which the police could direct homeless sleepers, giving everyone (in theory) a legal place to sleep within City limits. For those without vehicles, that would be on thin strips of pavement unless private property owners granted them access to industrial lots. Private property owners would be freed for the first time in 22 years to allow sleeping anywhere on their property, provided the activity does not create a public nuisance or violate zoning laws."

The cause of the vehicularly housed was taken on by activists such as Robert Norse, Becky Johnson of HUFF and David Silva of CESB. These individuals single-heartedly committed themselves to the struggle against the injustice thrust upon one-third of the homeless population in the City of Santa Cruz. They braved the mean-spirited attitudes of the people and leadership of Santa Cruz to gain this historic victory.

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