SLO County grand jury got it wrong. Safe parking on Oklahoma Ave. is a success | Opinion

To the SLO County Grand Jury regarding your recent report on the Oklahoma Avenue Village:

This site was put up in answer to problems at Palisades Avenue in Los Osos. Someone, somewhere posted that this was a free place to park your RV, and in they came, from all over the country.

Opening the Oklahoma Avenue site to safe parking was a way to get people living in their RVs to leave Palisades.

Regardless of what anyone thinks, this site is successful. There is community. People watch over one another and care about one another other. There is a well-run, refrigerated food pantry that supplies the villagers with nutritious food.

The goal of the county administrator was lofty, given there is no truly affordable housing in SLO or elsewhere in the county. Not everyone has housing vouchers (even if there were landlords who accept vouchers), nor does everyone belong on welfare. So trying to find the villagers permanent housing is unrealistic at best.

There are drugs in any population — housed or not. Professionals and houseless people use alike. And there are fires and theft in any population.

SLO County is doing the best it can. They truly believed people could move on to more suitable places to be. But there is no place to be.

Case managers are trying in vain to find places for folks to go, but to where? Most have little-to-no income or they’d be somewhere else. Many don’t have families to turn to. RV park rates are sky-high and they won’t take your vehicle if it’s over 10 years old.

Thus, cost-effective tiny house villages are a solution.

It’s easy to sit at our desks and criticize and think we have all the answers, but when you point the finger, you have three fingers pointing right back at you.

Becky Jorgeson is founder and president of Hope’s Village of SLO, a nonprofit organization working to establish a village of tiny homes in San Luis Obispo County.