Office workers were still at their desks when Thomas Goodwin's 1974 motor home clanked out of a downtown parking lot one recent evening, power steering groaning as Lego blocks flew around the plaid interior.
The 54-year-old single father moved the newly acquired camper to clear a parking place for the van where he and his 7-year-old daughter sleep — with the city's blessing.
Goodwin makes use of Santa Barbara's "safe parking" initiative, a homelessness program that Los Angeles is studying as a possible model for responding to its own explosion of people sleeping in RVs and cars.
The Santa Barbara program takes 115 vehicles off the streets overnight, placing them in designated spaces in 20 city, county, church, nonprofit agency and industrial lots in Santa Barbara and Goleta.
New Beginnings Counseling Center, which runs the $270,000 program on a city contract, furnishes the bathrooms and spot monitoring.
The 12-year-old program gets homeless people off the streets at night, but the lots close at daybreak, sending the RV dwellers back into the neighborhoods.
Officials say the lots make it easier to connect homeless people to services and housing. New Beginnings says it has placed 47 in homes in the last nine months.
...some L.A. officials see safe parking as a useful strategy as part of their $2-billion homelessness plan. More than 3,300 inhabited cars and RVs were counted in 2015, part of an 85% countywide jump in homeless encampments that has aroused fury from San Pedro to Verdugo Hills.
The city's plan says safe parking "would provide stability and safety to individuals living in their cars or recreational vehicles, while reducing the impact on neighborhood street parking and perceptions of safety." The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is studying where to create a pilot program that could include safe parking.
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