Quick Take
The City of Santa Cruz has handed out more than 200 citations as part of its controversial overnight parking ban, which took effect Dec. 4. City staff say everyone seeking overnight safe parking has been able to access the program, but homeless service providers and ordinance opponents remained concerned about the law’s wider implications.
More than a month after the City of Santa Cruz’s long-debated overnight parking ban went into effect, city officials and homelessness advocates say the program is running as expected, though concerns about long waitlists for safe parking and the impact on the local unhoused population remain.
The city has issued more than 200 citations to oversized vehicles within city limits since the oversized vehicle ordinance (OVO) went into effect on Dec. 4.
The ordinance prohibits vehicles more than 20 feet long or 7 feet wide and 8 feet high from parking between midnight and 5 a.m. without a permit. The law is a one-year pilot project the city hopes will paint a fuller picture of the impact of a ban before it decides to extend or revise it.
City homelessness response manager Larry Imwalle said that so far, the city has filled 32 of 33 overnight safe parking spaces across five city-owned lots. The overnight spaces, known as Tier 2 parking lots, allow people to park their vehicles for up to 30 days at a time, but during only the overnight hours.
“We have never reached the point where we weren’t able to accommodate anybody,” Imwalle said. He said the city has the capacity to expand overnight parking lots up to 46 or 47 spaces if needed. But, while he noticed an increase in inquiries around the end of November, Imwalle said that has quieted down over the following weeks.
“That’s certainly something that we’ll continue to assess based on what the demand is should we meet that capacity threshold,” he said. “We also have a mechanism to provide permits for street parking so folks won’t get cited under this ordinance.”
The city has issued another 19 permits for residents who want to park their oversized vehicles on the street. The permits cost $12 a year and allow people to park an oversized vehicle on the street for 72 hours at a time, up to four times per month. They are issued to those who want to park an oversized vehicle on the street near where they’re living. People who want to live in their vehicles must enroll in the safe-parking program.
But while Tier 2 interest has largely plateaued, and the city has kept up with requests, Santa Cruz’s only Tier 3 parking lot, at the National Guard Armory at DeLaveaga Park, has a lower capacity of about 15 to 20 spaces. Tier 3 allows long-term, 24-hours-a-day parking with social services aimed at getting people into stable, permanent housing.
Santa Cruz Free Guide — the county’s newest homeless services provider which runs the Tier 3 program in partnership with the city — has added more people to its already crowded waitlist.
Free Guide executive director Evan Morrison said the organization’s program currently hosts about 14 households and has added 13 more to its waitlist since it began outreach leading up to the OVO’s implementation. At the beginning of December, there were more than 40 on the waitlist already.
“Since we’re really limited on space in the parking lot, the amount of folks in the program hasn’t really been affected, but the activity on the waitlist definitely has,” he said. “And a lot of people on the waitlist are checking in wanting to find out when they can get in.”
City community relations specialist Siouxsie Oki said that since Dec. 4, the city’s outreach team has connected people to housing navigation workshops, ticket payment plans allowing people to pay their citations in installments, and case management services when needed. She added that participants meet with staff regularly to review progress and end goals.
But while the city is currently compiling data on how many people its outreach team has spoken with, it does not track the number of people who have actually entered housing or accessed other services since the ordinance took effect.
“Since we’re not the service provider, we only have data on outreach staff’s interactions,” Oki said, adding that that data should be finalized in the coming weeks. “We won’t know how many of those people actually took the services.”
Morrison said that some of the feedback he’s gotten from people living in vehicles is concerning. They say that moving their vehicles constantly is a burden, and they regularly fear breaking down or run into difficulties paying for gas — both aspects Morrison identified as potential issues before the ordinance went into effect.
Morrison also said that members of his organization’s outreach team have run into people who did not know that the ordinance had taken effect until they were ticketed for parking on the street.
“People come in and out of Santa Cruz, and some move throughout the county,” he said. “We’ve found a few of those RV-dwellers didn’t know about the OVO, and only found out when they had received a ticket.”
Homeless advocate Reggie Meisler said that those experiencing the issues Morrison points out have attempted to deal with them in a number of ways, typically either by leaving town or by parking in a friend or family member’s private lot. However, he said that he has spoken to people who have entered Tier 2 parking, and that things have gone generally well for them so far.
“I think the main sort of pain people are dealing with is, if they’re in Tier 2, and their vehicle gets hit with a maintenance issue that takes a while to fix, they can get towed,” he said.
Initially, Meisler said, he and other ordinance opponents planned to use a “report-based attack” on the law – submitting reports to law enforcement about uninhabited oversized vehicles and detached trailers that residents had left parked on the street. But he said that proved to be a complex process, as fewer trailers have been out on the streets since implementation. He added that he has doubts about how frequently police check the reporting tool.
Meisler also said that either he or Joy Schendledecker represent the advocacy resident group Santa Cruz Cares in a stakeholder group composed of both proponents and opponents of the measure, but he feels their concerns have not been taken seriously.
For example, he recalls that city staff said that, should overnight safe parking fill up, those waiting for a spot will receive a 30-day placard allowing them to continue parking on the street overnight without being towed. However, that information was not on the outreach document given out by the city to those living in their vehicles. And, Meisler said, city officials did not add it to the document even when proponents recommended doing so.
“[The city] tells us what they plan to do and say that we can give feedback, but then it’s like, ‘No, no, no,’” he said. “It’s just a kind of sad and frustrating situation.”
Oki said the city has not mentioned the placards, nor needed to issue any, since everyone who has wanted to access overnight safe parking has done so successfully.
Even as the city continues to identify pitfalls and ordinance opponents push back, Imwalle said he sees the law as successful, at least when it comes to increasing access to safe parking.
Before the law took effect, he said there were fewer than 10 people participating in the city’s Tier 2 overnight safe parking program, compared to more than 30 today. “We’ve had the program operating for nearly two years now, and for a long time our peak enrollment was six,” he said. “So, in advance of this, we were able to ramp up very quickly.”
The OVO saw a difficult road to approval and implementation, with debates over the city’s approach to recreational vehicles and campers parked on streets spanning about a decade. In July 2022, the California Coastal Commission blocked a previous version of the street-parking ban, and the city received significant pushback from homeless advocates, who argued that the ordinance effectively criminalizes homelessness. Others have said that RVs parked along the neighborhood streets created dangerous conditions and environmental concerns.
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