Unsanctioned RV park fighting for its survival
City works to close private, affordable housing experiment that 5 people call home
Behind a tall, purple fence on a vacant lot in West Oakland, Adam Garrett-Clark is running a housing experiment.
About a half-dozen people who don’t want to or can’t afford a traditional apartment live here instead, in trailers and RVs outfitted with solar power, hot water and most of the other comforts of home. The bohemian space looks like a cross between a trailer park and a cheerful community garden — colorful and full of plants, with an open-air shower, a portable toilet, a grill and a fire pit encircled by deck chairs.
Garrett-Clark leases the 10th Street lot, and residents pay $600 a month — well below the $1,950 average cost of a one-bedroom apartment in the city.
But RV communities like GarrettClark’s are illegal in Oakland, and the city is trying to shut it down. GarrettClark is fighting to save both the 10th
Street space and his dreams of combating the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis with out-of-the-box alternatives.
“I think I should have a right to set up my own lowbudget home,” GarrettClark said. “As a California kid, there’s no way to buy a house. It’s very, very hard to become a homeowner and get that housing security.”
RVs have become a hot-button issue in cities throughout the Bay Area as residents priced out of the traditional housing and rental markets increasingly are moving into homes on wheels. But there are very few places in the region where someone can legally park a trailer or RV. The vehicles line city streets, sparking complaints about trash, pollution and blight and pressuring cities to come up with solutions.
In Palo Alto, RVs parked next to the Stanford campus get regular tow warnings, prompting them to move down the road and back. Pacifica is fighting a lawsuit after making certain city streets off-limits to RV parking. Richmond attempted to create a sanctioned safe-parking site for
RVs but abandoned the idea last month after community pushback.
Garrett-Clark moved into his first RV in 2014, while working shuttling tourists around the Embarcadero as a San Francisco pedicab driver. For a while, he parked on land leased in West Oakland by Boxouse founder Luke Iseman, who was trying to create tiny homes out of shipping containers. The city shut down that space in 2015 because it wasn’t permitted.
That’s when GarrettClark stumbled upon the vacant 10th Street lot, which was being used to store construction materials. The owner agreed to rent it to him for $1,600 a month, and Garrett-Clark signed a lease that lists the official purpose as “storage” for RVs and vehicles.
Isaia diGennaro moved into the 10th Street lot earlier this year after a long period spent couch surfing. The 24-year-old has been laid off from two jobs during the pandemic — one at an environmental nonprofit, the other at an Oakland coffee shop. Unable to afford an apartment, diGennaro, who is trans and uses they/them pronouns, bought a $5,000 RV with help from two nonprofits that serve queer and trans youth.
“I’ve been housing insecure and homeless for a while, and this is the most permanent place I’ve been living at in the past year,” diGennaro said.
If the city shuts it down, diGennaro and their cat, Harry, might be forced to join the scores of RV-dwellers parked on Oakland’s streets.
Last summer, after the 10th Street community had been open more than five years, Oakland code enforcement cited the property for multiple violations, including the unapproved use of an RV as sleeping quarters, storage of vehicles and RVs, and an unpermitted fence and shower.
The property owes $5,610 in unpaid fines, and a lien has been placed on the land, according to city spokeswoman Autumn King. The fines will keep mounting unless Garrett-Clark complies with city code — but the only way he can do that is to displace his residents.
Zoning regulations ban using vehicles as housing throughout the city — even on private property. Sleeping in a vehicle also violates the city’s blight code.
There are a few narrow exceptions. Because Oakland has declared a shelter crisis, the state allows city officials to set up RV parking sites and tiny homes for homeless residents — but only on public property.
Last summer, Oakland launched a pilot program allowing privately owned vacant lots in the city to host RVs — limited to one RV per lot. No one has signed up.
The City Council is working to loosen the rules around RVs and make them an option for more residents, said Darin Ranelletti, Oakland’s policy director for housing security. He hopes a new policy will be introduced “soon.”
“Adam has been a great resource for us in understanding how RVs and tiny homes function and how people live in them so that we can have an ordinance that is applicable to the needs of Oaklanders. And we’re developing the details now,” he said. “But we’re hopeful that with a set of regulations that provide for a healthy and safe living environment, that we will be able to authorize sites like Adam’s.”
By that time, it might be too late for the 10th Street community, where the landlord is getting increasingly spooked by the mounting fines and may eventually ask the RV dwellers to move out.
Garrett-Clark is looking into appealing the fines, and started a change.org petition to pressure Oakland officials to change the city’s RV laws — so far, it has more than 370 signatures. He’s also working to expand RV and tiny home options in Oakland through his startup, Tiny Logic.
He is also partnering with the city on a sanctioned encampment or tiny home village for people who were displaced when an encampment at Union Point Park was closed last month.
Garrett-Clark moved out of the 10th Street lot and into a studio apartment with his girlfriend last fall, but he still manages and is emotionally invested in the RV community. His mother, Sauda Garrett, recently moved into Garrett-Clark’s old RV, after the family members she had been staying with caught the coronavirus. The 10th Street space has been a “godsend,” she said, especially because the communal spaces are outdoors, offering some protection from the virus.
Where will she go if the space is shut down?
“I honestly don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of options.”