BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
Palo Alto’s got a problem. People are parking their RVs on city streets. They’re dumping their waste in the street gutters, which flows through the storm sewers and into the Bay.
It’s happening in residential neighborhoods and business areas.
Now people are trying to solve the problem.
In August, City Council’s Policy and Services Committee proposed the following:
1. Requiring permits for RVs on some streets
2. Banning trailers and broken-down RVs from other streets
3. Sweeping and cleaning up streets more often
4. Launching a buyback program for RV dwellers, and moving those people to a homeless shelter
Roger Smith, a retired banker and all-around-good-citizen, is running ads in the Post that propose more enforcement by police.
There you have the two sides of this issue — increased enforcement, which may seem too punitive to Palo Altans, and more lenient measures — such as permits and a buyback program. Given these two perspectives, the challenge for Palo Alto’s leaders is to strike a happy medium between the two.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
Maybe just start with enforcing the laws already on the books. Registered vehicles must be moved every 72 hours. Unregistered or expired? Cite them and tow them. NO overnight camping in vehicles — we have campgrounds for that.
Let’s be clear: these are not homeless individuals in need of compassion and shelter. The IRS itself defines an RV as a home if it has sleeping, cooking, and toilet facilities. These are people choosing to live in homes on wheels, parked for free on public streets.
Meanwhile, the rest of us pay property taxes, HOA dues, and follow zoning laws. These RV owners don’t contribute a dime — yet they dump their waste into storm drains and clog our neighborhoods. That’s not a housing crisis — that’s freeloading at the community’s expense.
If Palo Alto wants to solve this problem, it doesn’t need more committees or pilot programs. It needs accountability and enforcement. Stop kicking the can (and the RVs) down the road.
Yes, more enforcement and less virtue-signalling already.
And how about charging the for-profit vanlords for utilities, waste, sewers and storm drains, trash — and all the fees that CPAU charges the rest of us?
Increased enforcement is not too punitive for me. Get those trash heaps out of Palo Alto.
If cities don’t want people living in the streets then they need to raise their minimum wage to a level where people can rent housing. This will not happen because the whole economic structure began crumbling when government airheads abolished the gold standard. Now consumer goods are ten times what they were in 1960, and housing has escalated even more than that. We must have currency with solid backing, which would halt inflation so that we can have stability and plan for the survival of lower income folks. I have sought for the use of federal lands for controlled camping but I meet deaf ears.
Thanks for the opinion piece.
Hard problems, but just to clarify inoperative vehicles have been
Illegal to store in city streets for decades. 10.34.020 in the municipal code. Unless this law is illegal under state law at this time, but we haven’t removed it from our code,
It should be ready to go for enforcement.
of course the council and planning and transportation commission and city Attorney may like to update it.
But it is a current law.
Menlo Park has a prohibition from parking on the street over night. And yet, the shanty town of RVs along Bohannon has been there for months. It’s really a shame when your police chief decides what laws he will or won’t enforce.
I agree with “striking a happy medium between the two” but it’s not going to happen in Palo Alto. It’s a liberal city, and these RV dwellers are taking advantage of people who err on the side of emotion and not reason and logic. Wall-to-wall bleeding hearts doesn’t exactly cut it when it comes to taking care of business.
Big ads have been running in both local papers calling for enforcement of these decades-old laws for a few weeks.
Do any of our “leaders” care to comment?
Do any of them read the papers and comments like this or do they prefer to base city priorities on bogus “priority surveys” that never get more than 400 responses?
Dave Price, thanks for this oped and please keep trying to get answers from our “leaders” and the huge highly paid “Communications” ataff.