Truckers, homeless converge in front of Tesla plant Truckers, RV dwellers crowding I-880 frontage road shoulder
Across the street from Tesla’s gleaming buildings in Fremont, dozens of truckers waiting to pick up high-priced electric cars off the assembly lines and a stream of homeless people living in RVs have quietly converged, creating what looks like a shantytown to the thousands of freeway commuters who drive by every day.
Along the muddy shoulder of a roughly 1.3-mile stretch of Kato Road in Fremont’s industrial Innovation District, residents without permanent roofs dwell in the shadow of multibillion- dollar companies that have fueled Silicon Valley’s economic boom and, critics say, its spiraling housing crisis.
The semi-trucks that haul shiny new cars across the nation or remove the cardboard, scrap metal and other wastes from the everexpanding Tesla plant started parking on the frontage road a few years ago, but their numbers have grown of late. There’s nowhere else to park their rigs and rest while waiting for their cargo.
Meanwhile, starting several months ago, those who live in RVs and trailers started moving next to them after being pushed out of other corners of the Bay Area. At least for now, they’ve been more or less left alone in their new location.
“Pretty much everywhere we go, you’ve got to move every 72 hours or it’s going to be an issue,” Dave, a homeless man from Fremont who didn’t wish to give his last name, said in an interview last week.
“This spot’s pretty industrial, where there’s not people com
plaining, that’s the main thing,” Dave said, explaining why he took up temporary residence along Kato Road about sixmonths ago.
“It’s loud, but people don’t (expletive) with us,” he said as hundreds of cars whooshed by on the frontage road and adjacent Interstate 880. Dave, who said he’s almost 50, lives in an old, tan-colored RV, flanked by a few cars he is fixing to perhaps resell.
He used to work in body shops but contracted a lung infection and now collects disability checks, which aren’t nearly enough to pay the rent needed for a permanent roof in the Bay Area.
“I don’t have a whole lot of money for gas. So, I figure as long as nobody complains, we’ll stay here as long as we can,” Dave said.
As inmany other parts of the Bay Area, the number of homeless people in Fremont has shot up in recent years — about 27 percent, from 479 in early 2017 to 608 in early 2019. Throughout Alameda County, the numbers increased 42 percent in that same period, according to point-in-time surveys.
Though city officials suggest people living in RVs may eventually be swept out and parking could be restricted for truckers, they did not provide specific plans or a timeline.
Unlike the homeless RV dwellers who tend to stay in the same spot for weeks or months, many big-rig drivers use Kato Road much like a truck stop, leaving
their tractor-trailers overnight or even for a few days and returning to run loads.
Oscar Monge, of San Jose, whose employer, RaRa Trucking Inc., has a contract to haul recyclables from the Tesla plant, said he runs multiple loads in the early mornings, then parks his rig diagonally on a dirt turnout on a bend in Kato Road before heading home.
The west side of Kato doesn’t have any signs restricting parking or prohibiting stopping, even though the east side of the road and many other surrounding streets lined with office parks are dotted with such signs.
That’s good news for car haulers with scheduled pickup times at Tesla, who may have to wait hours or evenmore than a day to get their haul of electric cars fresh fromthe factory lines.
Andrei Loukhy, a trucker from Philadelphia, said Tesla tells drivers to park on Kato while waiting for calls to come get their load.
“Sometimes when I show up, they say ‘Hey, the load is ready, just get loaded.’ And sometimes, the load, one time I was waiting on Kato about a day-and-a-half,” he said in an interview during Tesla’s end- of-year rush to make deliveries in December
Tesla did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story.
Fremont environmental service crews recently posted notices telling “all inhabitants” to vacate the area before workers came to remove piles of garbage and debris that had accumulated near the highway fence line. However, no one from the city forced anyone
to leave, those in RVs said.
Hans Larsen, the city’s head of public works, said in an email the people in RVs may eventually be swept out. But he declined to elaborate, saying the city needs “a couple of weeks to coordinate our efforts and communications” about the “complex convergence of issues” on Kato.
He said the city has done “several rounds of enforcement” there, without specifying exactly what.
“We are working with Tesla to manage the truck parking demand that is created by their business. We will begin implementing parking restrictions and eventually work to physically restrict parking,” he said
The city also will “offer services” and issue warnings to homeless people in the area andwill eventually conduct an “abatement,” Larsen said.
Mayor Lily Mei didn’t return multiple requests for comment for this story, and two council members said they weren’t aware of the situation on Kato.
Even though there’s no nearby diner to get a hot meal or a diesel fueling station, haulers from around the country frequently maneuver their rigs down the two-lane road to snag a spot to .catch some shuteye or await an assignment from their company.
“In the ( Bay Area), it’s hard to find a truck stop. Very hard to find a spot,” Ruben Martinez, a trucker from Los Angeles, said shortly after pulling onto the shoulder last week.
He and other truckers interviewed for this story said the nearest truck stops are in Gilroy and Tracy.
Martinez said he had just picked up a freight load from a nearby company and was Vegas-bound but needed to rest first.
“California, in general, doesn’t have a lot of truck stops,” he said. “Other states, they have a lotmore stops, and you don’t see problems like this,” he said, looking out onto the road from his dark-red cab.
Most of the roughly 15 truckers and homeless people interviewed for this story, as well as a few Tesla employees who park on the shoulder because their company lots are full, say they don’t mind sharing the road.
“Everybody keeps to themselves, no one harasses anybody,” Jesse Daza, 32, of Fremont, said, leaning.out the window of an RV he shares with his girlfriend, who works at a Tesla seat factory close by.
“It’s a sad part of the Bay Area lifestyle now. More and more people are being displaced and not able to afford places to live,” Wai Sang, an operations manager at Tesla, said after parking his car in the mud Tuesday morning.
“If they feel safe here, and they’re not doing anything that harms anyone else, live and let live,” he said of those in the RVs.
Mike, who lives in a trailer propped on jack stands along the road, said he had been forced out of other areas in the city, including Niles, where he used to camp out.
He said he used to earn about $33,000 a year when he was working, but as rents kept jumping, he couldn’t keep up.
“Honestly, it kind of just defeated me as a person,” he said.