County wants Los Osos homeless to move to safe parking. They say it’s ‘middle of nowhere’
The unhoused community in Los Osos is living between a rock and a hard place.
On any given day, about 25 to 30 vehicles — mostly vans and RVs — line Palisades Avenue downtown.
Many of the people living on the street are making the best of tough situations — a good number unexpectedly lost their permanent housing through eviction, or even natural disasters. Some grapple with mental illness or struggle to maintain conventional lifestyles.
With few other options, they’ve forged a small community. But their vehicles are parked on a public street, frustrating neighbors who feel the unhoused aren’t receiving the services they need and are making the area challenging to access.
Instead, San Luis Obispo County officials want the people parked on Palisades to move to a safe parking site that opened on Kansas Avenue in August. But few see the site as a viable alternative to their current situation — citing their ties to the North Coast and a lack of resources within walking distance of the parking area.
“We’re human beings,” said Deana Clarke, who lives in an RV on Palisades. “We don’t have to be put in the middle of nowhere.”
How did the Palisades encampment happen?
Unhoused residents have been living on Palisades for months, or even up to a year, in some cases.
Some people told The Tribune they’d previously parked in Morro Bay or other places after losing housing, but law enforcement told them to leave and suggested Palisades as an alternative.
The county created three safe parking sites toward the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, including one at the Los Osos Library on the same street. The county contracted with vendors to provide mobile showers and bathrooms, as well as security and on-site staffing, said Carolyn Berg, county principal analyst for housing and infrastructure.
“One driving (reason) was that other facilities like public restrooms, libraries, State Parks, gyms, etc., had closed during (the) shelter-in-place order, taking away some of the common access points for hygiene, an important need during this particular pandemic,” Berg wrote in an email to The Tribune.
The county has since ended the safe parking program at the library, but some Los Osos neighbors believe it contributed to the creation of the Palisades encampment. A Change.org petition calling for the county to help move unhoused people off Palisades makes this claim.
“What was once a small group of about 10 people is now close to 40. The widespread advertisement of Safe Parking by the County starting on 3/26/20 has caused it to grow,” the petition says.
In addition to the library, Palisades is also home to Los Osos’ only park, the South Bay Community Center and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, which some residents say they now feel uncomfortable accessing due to the “chaos, unsanitary conditions and drug dealing and fighting,” around the encampment, the petition says.
In addition, the church is serving as a polling place during the Sept. 14 gubernatorial recall election.
Becky McFarland, the Los Osos resident who started the petition, recently asked the Board of Supervisors about the time frame for moving unhoused people off the street in order to “give Palisades Avenue and our public facilities there back to the community.”
“It’s a mess,” McFarland said during public comment on Aug. 10. “It’s an unsanitary mess for the people encamped there and the people using our library, our park, the skate park, tennis courts, and for the Catholic church.”
Unhoused residents find community in Los Osos
But unhoused people living on Palisades don’t see things the same way.
They told The Tribune they’ve built lives on the North Coast, and they want to remain close to jobs, medical providers and friends. Many have few other alternatives, as they don’t have housing or a place to stay while they figure things out.
David Solomon, 76, is one of those people.
He was a North Coast resident for 30 years — now he lives with his fluffy white dog in a camper van.
“Most of the people in the vehicles, we know each other on a first-name basis,” he said.
For most of his years on the Central Coast, Solomon wasn’t unhoused. He previously owned a mobile home, which he sold when he moved north to the city of Paradise.
In 2018, he lost everything when the deadly Camp Fire destroyed the town, sending him back to San Luis Obispo County. Solomon couch-hopped, stayed in hotels and rented a bedroom for a while, until his hips couldn’t take the stairs anymore.
Now, Solomon is struggling to find a place to live because he has too much money to qualify for federally subsidized housing but also can’t find a rental that fits his budget.
He’s diabetic and has prostate cancer, and he wants to be able to stay close to his doctors, support system and friends.
“I’m not broke,” Solomon said. “I’m not even poor. I just can’t afford housing.”
Clarke, who’s living in her RV, lost her housing when her landlord moved into her Morro Bay rental. She’d been renting her previous home for seven years, and she was paying for it with a Section 8 voucher. Her landlord lent her the RV where she’s currently staying.
“The bottom line is, they need to build affordable housing, and they have none,” Clarke said.
She calls herself a “mediator” for fellow encampment residents and says they depend on each other for support and accountability.
“We are a community,” Clarke said. “They’re trying to break us up as a community.”
What about moving the unhoused to El Chorro?
McFarland and other housed Los Osos residents originally developed a plan that suggested relocating unhoused people to El Chorro Regional Park off Highway 1.
But Nick Franco, county Parks and Recreation director, told the Board of Supervisors on Aug. 10 that would likely not be possible for various reasons.
The county owns El Chorro, but it obtained the land from the federal government with deed restrictions that specify the types of activities that can take place there.
“This does not fit within that program, so it would not be approved by the National Park Service,” Franco said. “We could certainly ask, but based on prior things we’ve requested out there and been denied on, I do not see that they would approve this.”
The county would also likely need to compensate county residents with an equal amount of park land to make up for the space being used for the encampment, Franco said. In addition, the county relies on the $500,000 El Chorro generates annually from camping to pay for programming.
Although the county did not take up the El Chorro plan, it spurred officials to speed up the process on another safe parking site.
“It was an extremely constructive idea that did motivate action on behalf of the county,” said Supervisor Bruce Gibson, who represents Los Osos, at the Aug. 10 meeting.
County officials call safe parking ‘a small first step’
The Kansas Avenue safe parking site came about because the county had few options when it came to available land that officials could commandeer quickly without extensive neighborhood outreach.
The fenced dirt lot is located off Highway 1, just down the street from the County Jail. Its only amenities are portable bathrooms and showers, as well as bottled water. Community members also donated wooden picnic tables and shade structures.
Residents must check in between 5 and 9 p.m. and sign a contract agreeing to certain rules. There is Regional Transit Authority (RTA) bus service to Kansas Avenue, but riders must call each time they want to go somewhere.
The site will cost the county about $30,000 to operate over the course of three months, according to Rebecca Campbell, assistant county administrative officer.
Wade Horton, county administrative officer, called the site a “pilot program” and said the county “(wants) to learn as we go and improve upon it.” The county is working on obtaining potable water for the site and is open to partnering with community groups and nonprofits to fill resource gaps at the site, including helping residents obtain food, Horton said.
“We want to be compassionate and help people where they’re at, but that doesn’t give them a right to take over public spaces if there’s an alternative,” Horton said.
Gibson told The Tribune he wants to see more safe parking sites in all communities, but he sees it as a “small first step.”
“I get that Kansas may not be the perfect solution, but it is one,” he said.
Some unhoused residents ‘grateful’ for safe parking, others say it’s ‘degrading’
On Aug. 27, close to a dozen RVs and other vehicles occupied the safe parking site. Those who spoke to The Tribune were previously staying near Oceano and San Luis Obispo and decided to move to the site after law enforcement told them to leave their old spots.
Many were grateful to have a quieter spot where police won’t harass them, although some wished for electricity and other amenities.
“It just got old having to move all the time,” said Juan Mejia, who’s living in a large red school bus with his wife and five children.
Mejia was previously parked outside Oceano and Pismo Beach. He was initially hesitant to move but was happy to find a safe place for his family once he arrived.
However, almost no one involved in the Palisades encampment thinks the site is a ideal place to move people from Los Osos. None of the people staying at the site on Aug. 27 told The Tribune they were from the North Coast.
McFarland and other Los Osos neighbors were frustrated by the county’s inability to make El Chorro work as a potential encampment alternative. They told supervisors they want to see a site that’s more habitable, has ADA-compliant showers and non-portable bathrooms.
“It’s a step,” McFarland told supervisors on Aug. 10. “I don’t know if I’d call it a baby step, because there aren’t any trees — I mean, it’s barren dirt. And I think that the county could look really hard at how, in an emergency situation, they could take something that the federal government says has to be used for recreation and can be used for people in crisis. And that’s El Chorro.”
Other people compared the Kansas Avenue location to a similar sanctioned encampment for unhoused people that Paso Robles set up last summer at Borkey Flats. The site was unpopular, and the city closed it after only a few months.
Unhoused residents living on Palisades told The Tribune there are lots of reasons the Kansas Avenue site doesn’t work for them. They wouldn’t be able to walk to stores to obtain food like they do now — a necessity for people without refrigerators.
Some unhoused people live in vehicles that aren’t functional, or they don’t have enough gas money to drive around.
Benjamin Kincaid, who’s been living on Palisades for a year, stays in a vehicle that doesn’t run. He works as a server at a restaurant in a Morro Bay hotel, and he rides his bike or takes the bus to his job.
He’s worried about bus access at Kansas Avenue during nighttime hours on the weekends, and he fears he may have to quit his job if he’s forced to move.
“Nothing is more degrading to my dignity than sending me out of town,” Kincaid said.
This story was originally published September 7, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
