Future uncertain for RV dwellers on private sites
City will investigate possible zoning change that could allow them to stay put
Jimmy Gordon was a drug-addicted transient for about a dozen years before he managed to pull it together, got himself a 32-foot RV and parked it on a private lot in northeastern Antioch that he considers home.
“I love this,” the softspoken 63-year-old grandfather said, spreading out his arms toward a neatly trimmed, partly fencedin backyard at 701 Wilbur Ave. “I am able to pay my bills. It gives me a chance to be accountable.”
But now Gordon and his wife, Dawn, along with nine other families, may have to pack up their belongings and relocate because the privately owned 2.8-acre site they’ve been living on is not a legal RV park, and the city has outlawed vehicle camping since 1994.
Faced with an Oct. 1 deadline to move, the Wilbur Avenue RV dwellers brought their case to the Antioch City Council for the second time Tuesday, requesting a date extension so the property owner and city could try to work something out so they can stay at least a while longer.
Mayor Sean Wright, who has visited the property, had asked that the matter be included on the agenda so council members could determine whether the property should be rezoned or the RV tenants relocated.
“I don’t want to see these people moved out on Oct. 1,” he said. “… We don’t want to make anyone homeless.”
Other council members agreed, saying the best option would be to rezone the property and bring it up to code so the RV dwellers can stay.
“It’s ridiculous to think we could find another option that is going to be reasonable for these people,” Mayor Pro Tem Joy Motts said. “We already have people living on the streets in RVs and in their cars … We need to look at trying to find a solution to keep these people here.”
Antioch isn’t the only city grappling with growing numbers of residents illegally living in RVs to escape high rents. Many city leaders in the Bay Area are setting new guidelines to allow some form of RV living. Oakland recently opened one of three sanctioned RV parks, Union City established a safe parking program in 2016 while Santa Clara County and Mountain View teamed up on a pilot safe parking program last year; East Palo Alto has a similar program.
Meanwhile, East Bay churches in Concord, Oakland, Pittsburg and elsewhere have opened up parking lots for overnight safe RV parking. And on the Peninsula, a Palo Alto council committee this week endorsed a pilot program that would allow churches to host up to four vehicles in their parking lots.
Although RVs have parked on the Wilbur Avenue site since Joe and Debbie Bosman bought it in 2000, the city of Antioch hadn’t done anything about it until two years ago, when it notified the couple they were violating municipal codes by letting people live there. Inspectors found some code violations during a 2007 visit to the site, but nothing was said about the RVs parked there, Joe Bosman told this news organization. City code enforcement manager Curt Michael said last week if the RVs aren’t gone by Oct. 1 or the property brought up to code to qualify as an RV park, the Bosmans will be issued an initial fine of $100 per violation within 10 days to fix, followed by $500 and another 10 days to fix, and $1,000 a day if still not corrected after that.
The state Department of Housing and Community Development oversees RV parks, which must be at least 3 acres and comply with numerous regulations involving setbacks, lighting, sewer, signage and length of stay.
“I get where these tenants and Joe are coming from, but the city has no other option to move forward with the fines,” Michael said last week. “We
have given him time to get the property into compliance. All we’re doing is enforcing the municipal code.”
Bosman said he doesn’t understand why the city is going after him now. “Why after 19 years?” he asked. “Why are they enforcing something that they haven’t enforced for all those years … There’s no better property than mine for housing these atrisk people living in RVs.”
Michael blamed the lag on a staffing shortage. Until sales tax increases under Measure C and its replacement Measure W were approved in the past several years, the city couldn’t afford to fill positions in its code enforcement department, he said. Then in 2017, it received an anonymous complaint about RVs at the Bosman property.
Bosman since has had to fix some code violations such as turning a duplex into a triplex and converting part of a storage space to living quarters. But now he has a new violation notice, for illegally storing RVs on the property, Michael said. That’s in addition to the lingering notice for allowing RV dwellers there.
Bosman said he doesn’t want to see his tenants evicted because almost all of them are seniors on fixed incomes with nowhere else to go. As RVs have left, he hasn’t replaced them, reducing the numbers by about half in the past two years.
But to comply with city code, he sent notices Aug. 1 to RV dwellers, giving them 60 days to move out.
“The city is putting us right back out there on the streets,” Gordon said, noting that although he has been sober for more than five years now, he is struggling with money again after being laid off last month.
Gordon and others pay $625 a month to live on the neatly kept land with a community garden and olive trees, where Bosman also operates a custom cabinet shop and rents out a duplex in the front portion of the mostly gated property.
The 13 residents, who first brought their case to the City Council in late August, say it is a tight-knit, clean and safe community. The rent is also much more affordable than at area mobile home parks, which have long wait lists and require residents to live in trailers that are much newer.
“Joe (Bosman) has been a lifesaver; they don’t understand,” Gordon said.
Gordon, who was injured by an exploding land mine in Vietnam when he was 17 and still carries shrapnel in his knee, said he’s not yet found a new place to live.
Anna Rodriguez, a 48-year-old single mother of four, also is searching for an affordable alternative to the RV she has lived in the past year. After her divorce, she moved to a converted unit on the Bosman property.
But a clavicle injury made it temporarily impossible for her to work so she had to use most of her savings on the $1,700 rent, then bought the old 26-foot RV that she now lives in on the same property.
“I have been looking everywhere, but most don’t take RVs and some have no privacy,” she said.
For his part, Bosman said he has been trying to work with developers more than a decade to build affordable units on his property — one of the few large plots in Antioch.
The city rezoned it in 2012 for high density to comply with a state housing element requirement. But in 2017, a $26 million project with PacWest to build 126 affordable dwellings there fell through.
Bosman has until Nov. 8 to find a new developer, but chances are slim that will happen before the approvals expire and the project “just disappears,” he said.