Richmond abandons plan to offer safe RV parking
Richmond abandoned plans to open the city’s first safe RV parking program, instead opting to maintain current encampments and create a committee to plan services for those sites.
The new plan, approved Tuesday, will use $260,000 in state funds and about $300,000 in city funds to provide security, health and housing navigation services at two vehicle encampments. The city would work with the county to provide services at the two encampments — one on Rydin Road and the other on Castro Avenue.
City staff estimated in 2019 that 80 people live at the encampments and recently said the number has grown.
The proposal was criticized by Mayor Tom Butt, who said council members caved to strong opposition from residents who didn’t want the safe parking program in their neighborhoods. Butt was the only person on the council to vote against the new plan, introduced by Council
members Claudia Jimenez and Eduardo Martinez.
“They’ve rejected potential site after site because of neighborhood opposition,” Butt said. “It was essentially a copout. Rather than make the hard decision about where to do it, they just took the backdoor out and it just leaves the situation in the status quo.
“The City Council majority is just derelict in their duty to do something about this,” he added.
Last month, the Richmond City Council reversed plans on opening a safe parking program at Hilltop Mall after more than 2,200 people signed a petition against the proposal. Instead, the council directed city staff to look into a small site at Civic Center that would fit 25 vehicles instead of 100.
The directive was in response to the two growing RV encampments. Homelessness in Richmond has spiked 23% from 2017 to 2019, to 333 people.
On Tuesday, Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia said Jimenez and Martinez asked him how to best use the $260,000 in state funds if the city doesn’t move forward with the RV safe parking program.
Jimenez told The Chronicle that she decided to shift away from the Civic Center site because it was too small to help all the RV dwellers. Jimenez initially voted to direct staff to study whether Hilltop Mall would be a viable option, but later voted against it, saying she was concerned after the city manager told her the future owner of the site would allow it, but “with strings attached.”
Jimenez said she didn’t know what the developer wanted in return for allowing the site.
Jimenez said the city failed to engage the community on past site proposals and that’s what she hopes to do with future plans for homeless solutions. The plan passed Tuesday will allow for that type of engagement, she said, and will meet unsheltered people where they are while identifying longterm solutions to move into housing.
“I would love to have better leadership in the city,” Jimenez said. “Instead of pushing their own single agenda, they push a collective agenda where everybody feels like they are part of it. That way we would move through all these ideas with the collaboration of everybody.”
Daniel Barth, executive director of Safe Organized Spaces Richmond, a community organization, said it’s critical for the city and county to offer numerous solutions that include providing sanitation, water, toilets and longterm options for unsheltered people.
Providing basic amenities could be more difficult in curbside communities, Barth said, rather than at a safe RV site. Having a protected area with security is key. Barth said it’s also important to engage both housed and unhoused residents.
“We have to create a number of interventions from immediate to longterm that would allow for meeting people where they are at and what they want to do,” he said. “We have to work with people for their needs.”