Homeless vehicles forced to leave Los Osos as SLO County expands safe parking program
San Luis Obispo County officials want unhoused residents living in their vehicles to move into a fenced safe parking area off Highway 1 — and they’re now enforcing an ordinance to make that happen.
The county instituted a prohibition against overnight camping in Los Osos on Oct. 28, ending months of conflict between unhoused residents staying on Palisades Avenue and neighbors frustrated by their presence on a street that’s home to many community resources.
Now, the county wants unhoused Palisades residents to move to a pilot safe parking site off Kansas Avenue near the jail.
Although the county has improved the parking area and extended the initial three-month program, those staying there say the site still needs work to become a functional place of shelter.
“We all know what the situation is here,” said Nicholas Watson, who lives at the safe parking site in a trailer with his wife and three children. “Everybody needs help, but the only people who know what help’s needed are the ones who are out here.”
Unhoused residents and neighbors grapple over Palisades
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Palisades became a hot spot for unhoused residents, drawing 30 to 50 RVs, cars and vans at any given time. During the summer and early fall, one end of the street — which is home to the South Bay Community Center, the Los Osos Library and Los Osos Community Park — was nearly full of vehicles.
Unhoused residents appreciated the street’s proximity to stores and resources like public restrooms. They felt a sense of kinship with the other Palisades-dwellers and local homeless advocates.
“We are a community,” Deana Clarke, a Palisades resident, told The Tribune in August. “They’re trying to break us up as a community.”
But neighbors said the encampment allowed unhoused people to live in squalor without appropriate access to mental health and addiction treatment. They grew frustrated listening to noise from gas-powered generators and hearing people yelling at night. Some residents visiting the park or playing tennis with their children reported witnessing fights and drug activity.
“Trying to keep people on that street, it was not a good plan,” said Becky McFarland, a Los Osos resident who spent months lobbying the Board of Supervisors for a safe parking area. “That’s not compassion.”
McFarland and other neighbors weren’t initially in favor of moving people to Kansas Avenue, as it was unpaved and had no amenities. But with some improvements, they see it as an adequate transitional space where unhoused people can safely access services and get off the street.
“Let’s not let an imperfect solution stand in the way of letting us move forward,” said Rusty Heffner, another Los Osos resident.
County supervisors on Sept. 28 unanimously approved the ordinance prohibiting overnight camping in Los Osos.
Prior to the vote, Supervisor Bruce Gibson, who represents Los Osos, said the fact that people need to live in their vehicles “is a really sad commentary on on our society as a whole.”
“There’s no doubt that we have a lot of work to do to take care of our unhoused residents in the many needs that they have,” Gibson said. “At the same time, living on the streets, essentially without proper sanitation, produces another set of negative impacts that affect the wider community. So the misery is extended, and that’s in no way meant to diminish.
“This ordinance, really, is just one small part of a much wider effort that we have to undertake,” he added. “We have to provide services. It’s not simply our legal obligation. And it’s something that this county has accelerated its efforts on dramatically.”
How will no camping rules be enforced in Los Osos?
On Oct. 28, the day the new ordinance took effect, only a handful of vehicles remained on Palisades — a stark difference from a few months prior.
The Sheriff’s Office was preparing to enforce the no overnight camping rule, and signs saying ‘overnight camping prohibited on any street’ began appearing throughout Los Osos.
County sheriff’s deputies “(are) starting the notification process for those vehicles in Los Osos,” Tony Cipolla, a Sheriff’s Office spokesman, told The Tribune in an email on Monday.
“This is in response to community complaints we received regarding those vehicles,” Cipolla said. “No fines will be issued. We typically give several days notification before taking action.”
The handful of Palisades residents living in tents on the side of the street can’t move to the safe parking site because it’s only set up for vehicle-dwellers. This means deputies won’t yet tell them to leave the area, Cipolla said.
People still parking on the street after being notified of the new rule have three options, Cipolla said. They can move their vehicle to another location, or they can have their vehicle towed free of charge to the safe parking location if it’s not functional.
If the residents don’t voluntarily move their vehicles or have them towed, deputies would tow them to an impound lot. The impounding option “would not be our preference,” and the Sheriff’s Office would not charge residents to retrieve their vehicles if they’re using them as their homes, Cipolla said.
“In all these cases, we have our community action team (CAT) deputies (who deal exclusively with the homeless communities and those with mental health issues) along with county behavioral health technicians to offer available services and resources to those who need to relocate as well as provide information on alternative housing options,” Cipolla said.
What’s next for unhoused Palisades residents?
The few residents still parked on the street were figuring out their next moves. Some planned to move to the safe parking site, but others wanted to avoid living there. They said they don’t feel safe on Kansas Avenue, and they don’t want to commute from safe parking to jobs on the North Coast.
Benjamin Kincaid, who’s lived on Palisades for more than a year, was preparing to inherit a trailer from another resident after a lengthy stay in his car. He was excited to gain a better place to live, but he wasn’t happy about moving to the safe parking site.
“It’s hard to live on this street and not feel like a piece of trash,” Kincaid said. “It’s going to be even harder to move to Kansas Avenue and not feel like nothing.”
He said he’ll likely need to find a new job, as he thinks it will prove challenging to take the bus from the safe parking site to the Morro Bay hotel where he currently works.
Kincaid sometimes gets off work late, and he doesn’t think the bus will be running by the time he’s ready to head home.
He also worries he won’t be able to live the kind of life he’s lived on Palisades, where he’s had freedom to move throughout Los Osos and access resources like a laundromat, gas station and grocery store.
“Sure, great, I have a safe place to be,” Kincaid said of the safe parking. “But you’re taking away my ability to have a normal life.”
Christopher Dierks, who lives in a tent on Palisades, is among the small group of people who will likely be able to stay on the street until the county can find an alternate location for them.
Even so, Dierks doesn’t like the idea of moving into a sanctioned area like that at Kansas Avenue.
“The idea that (the Sheriff’s Office) wants me to go in there — I can’t wrap my head around the protection part that they say that they have for you,” he said. “Because you’re just putting us right back, all this right back in the same cubbyhole. Caged — got to get permission to come in, permission to go out. I don’t know. I just see it — it stinks, the whole thing.”
Life at the safe parking site
While the unhoused community on Palisades has begun to disperse, the safe parking site has grown significantly since it opened in August.
Even before supervisors approved the no-camping ordinance in Los Osos, unhoused families and individuals from around the county flocked to Kansas Avenue to find a safe place to live and to escape the police harassment they say they experienced on the street.
County officials have been open about the fact that the Kansas site is a pilot project that allows them to test the idea of a safe parking program in an area that didn’t require them to conduct community outreach. However, that means those staying there must cope with the growing pains of a program the county hasn’t entirely fine-tuned.
The site started out as a dirt lot with room for 20 vehicles. After it began to fill up, the county paved the site ahead of the rainy season and expanded it to more than 50 spaces, said Blake Fixler, Gibson’s legislative assistant. Fixler is managing the site until the county hires another person to take over.
The site also has showers, toilets and some potable water. The county is in the process of bringing in a sewer lateral to be able to create a more permanent sewage and water system, Fixler said. Organizations, including the SLO Food Bank, Hope’s Village and CAPSLO, have begun visiting Kansas Avenue, Fixler said.
Nicholas Watson has been living at the safe parking site with his wife, Amanda Tanner, and their children for about two months. The family had to leave their previous housing situation in Atascadero after their landlord renovated the space and new tenants moved in.
They were staying at a hotel in San Luis Obispo, but it proved too expensive. Now, the family is living at the Kansas Avenue site in a trailer to save money so they can move to Tennessee.
Watson said the safe parking site is “a step in the right direction,” but it’s far from being a perfect solution to the homelessness situation.
Watson and Tanner said the lack of an on-site manager sometimes leads to problems. One issue has been ensuring the shower and toilet facility is pumped frequently and has an adequate supply of propane, which is used to heat the water.
If the facility isn’t pumped enough, it can cause sewage to back up into the shower. Fixler said the county now has the toilets and showers serviced five times per week, instead of the initial two times per week.
A bus stop has also been added at Kansas Avenue, but it’s a challenge for residents to take their laundry and other large items on public transit, Watson said.
In spite of the challenges, Watson and Tanner have tried to encourage a sense of community at the safe parking site. After the recent storm, the residents all came together to help each other patch their RV roofs, Watson said.
“No one wants it to work more than us,” Watson said.
This story was originally published November 4, 2021 at 10:05 AM.
