A Place For More “Vans Down By the River?”

Let’s do some point/counterpoint on this RV park concept: 

Point: Shelter and sanitation are basic human rights. Providing RV parks for the homeless grants these rights. 

The quasi-homeless living in street-side RVs have it better than most of the homeless population. Thousands are living in tents or under tarps and relieving themselves on or near local landscaping. But those in RVs are also often without heat or water and run into the same problem with waste due to full tanks. Five-gallon buckets dumped in sewer drains or on vacant lots
provide a dumping solution. 

Counterpoint: OK. If you build it, they will come. But what next? 

Once you move the homeless to an RV park, what comes next? “Get a job,” is the most oft-quoted response. It is also the response that shows a lack of awareness about the homeless problem. Depending on where you search for statistics, data shows a quarter to a half of all homeless struggle with mental health disorders and/or drug and alcohol addiction. Giving these people a roof over their heads, water, and electricity might be the right thing to do, but it won’t “cure” most from the underlying conditions that led to their life on the streets. Note: Homeless in shelters have lower rates of mental health
issues and/or alcohol/drug issues—so, quasi-homeless in RVs may have lower rates as well. 

Bottom line: If you’re going to fund the RV park, then you should fund the required counseling and treatment to address conditions preventing your tenants from gaining employment. 

Point: The RV park concept gets all these vehicles and people off our streets 

How about a city we are proud of and not one that looks like a graveyard for 1970s RVs and a repository for blue tarps? If we build these parks with the appropriate infrastructure and support, then our streets will shine again and we’ll look like a city that takes care of its homeless. The San Francisco Pier 94 program is a success story. Built with federal COVID funds, San Francisco will sustain it with state funds. 

Counterpoint: Who is going to pay for it? Who is going to maintain it? 

Great. Who is going to pay for it? It’s a rhetorical question because everyone knows the money will come from the taxpayer’s pocket. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a federal program using emergency funds or a city program run by volunteer organizations (funded by government grants,) this RV park initiative is a burden paid for by taxpayers who did not create the problem but live with it every day. And it’s not like the government has a great track record for effective and efficient use of funds for projects like these. Look what happened in San Jose—$1.3M spent before they relocated the 37
residents and the project shut down for escalating costs. If you’re going to
build it, a long-term sustainment plan is required—one built from guaranteed resources and not from emergency funds and contingency volunteers. 

Bottom Line: You can’t build this concept like an experimental refugee stream. It has to be programmed and developed in the same fashion as a permanent homeless shelter—with consideration for transportation, food, waste management, counseling, job training, and safety factored in before the gates open. 

Point: The RV park concept makes our neighborhoods safer because we no longer have the quasi-homeless parked on every street. 

It’s not just the local residents who feel insecure when walking down a sidewalk populated by the homeless. Other homeless people can feel threatened as well. It’s not the homeless descriptor that frightens others. It’s the known fact that mental illness and drug/alcohol use are more prevalent
among this population than others that makes these streets feel less safe than
others. Centralizing these RVs in designated parks makes more streets safer. 

Counterpoint: Right. You build these parks and now they are all together in one spot. And everyone who lives near that one spot is now concerned about their own safety. 

Does moving these RVs and people to a central RV park really make more people safer? Tell that to the people in Los Angeles County’s Westchester where the congregation of RVs and tents sits just yards from a local school. It doesn’t matter where in a city you build this RV camp, it’s going to be in someone’s “back yard.” And if you build the project far away from the city population, you’ve built a detention center rather than a housing solution that allows for potential future training and employment. 

Bottom Line: There is not an “in-city” RV park solution which will make everybody happy. But centralizing these RVs would make larger sections of the city safer. 

 Point: Providing the homeless a “permanent” home in the RV park helps them restore their dignity. 

A permanent shelter in a neighborhood setting can restore a homeless person’s sense of dignity, giving them a place they can call their own. When the person doesn’t have to spend the day wondering where they will sleep or park next, worried about their safety, or searching for their next meal, it allows them the stability and time to get themselves together. 

Counterpoint: Does it really? 

Some would argue giving the homeless a permanent place to live without asking for something in return does not provide dignity. As Andrew C. Brown, director of the Center for Families and Children at the Texas Public
Policy Foundation and Michele Steeb, former CEO of Saint John’s Program for Real Change in Sacramento noted, “Giving them (the homeless) a roof over their head without expecting them to address the root causes of their homelessness robs them of their inherent dignity and the opportunity to reach their full potential.” 

Bottom Line: The RV park solution alone is not the answer. It has to be connected to an opportunity for the residents to either receive treatment for the disability that factors into their homelessness or training and employment assistance for a future that allows the resident a pathway to becoming a tax-payer who contributes to the type of shelter in which they once lived. 

I said at the beginning of this piece, “it’s complicated.” If it wasn’t, then every city would copy the success stories around the country and their streets would overflow with lemonade stands and kids playing kick-the-can instead of stationary RVs. 

This post looked at one concept with a soda-straw view and didn’t address the root causes of homelessness, the potential of low-income housing initiatives, the scourge of drug and alcohol addiction, or dealing with mental illness. Heck, we didn’t even discuss whether the RV park would provide the RVs for the resident like they did (or planned) in San Francisco and San Jose, or whether residents could tow or drive their current RVs to a designated park.

The point I wanted to make was the same one Colin Powell made prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. “If you break it, you own it.” By this, I mean that if you are going to use our citizens’ fiscal resources on an initiative to help the homeless, then you need to plan it, fund it, execute it, and maintain it. Not half-ass it. Pulling the homeless off the streets and giving them a roof over their head in an RV park is not a solution. But housing opportunities, as part of a comprehensive rehabilitative and vocational effort to reduce the number of homeless, could provide hope for those in need and make our cities a better place to live.