LA County Judge Blocks Plan to Clear Out Homeless RVs

Los Angeles has a serious problem with homelessness and a significant number of those homeless people live in broken down RVs. The city of LA recently made an effort to clean up some of those RVs and put the people living in them into shelters but a judge just shut those efforts down.

A judge has struck down the latest effort by the city of Los Angeles to tow and destroy broken down recreational vehicles, handing a legal victory to a group of Westside homeless advocates.

In a two-page ruling, Superior Court Judge Curtis A. Kin said Los Angeles officials lack the legal authority to carry out a state law that permits the dismantling of abandoned or inoperable RVs in key parts of the state.

Assembly Bill 630 allows just two jurisdictions — Los Angeles and Alameda counties — to create programs for taking apart and ultimately discarding RVs that are worth up to $4,000, Kin said in Thursday’s ruling.

“AB 630 provides no such authority to the City of Los Angeles,” he wrote.

So the state law AB 630 allows LA County to get rid of broken down old RVs. Until it was passed, any RV worth more than $500 had to be sold at auction. The City of LA attempted to put the law into action, but as Judge Kin points out the power to do this wasn’t granted to the city but to the county. LA County is the largest county in the US with just under 10 million people. LA City is a smaller subset of the county that contains about 3.9 million people. When the city tried to implement a power granted to the county, homeless advocates sued.

The lawsuit was brought by the CD11 Coalition for Human Rights, which is made up of organizations and individuals who advocate for the “human and civil rights of unhoused and vehicularly housed people.” CD11 is shorthand for Council District 11, which is represented by Park.

The City Council voted 12-3 in December to instruct Feldstein Soto to “immediately” implement AB 630. The council also asked for a report within 30 days spelling out a strategy for “identifying, valuing, and processing abandoned recreational vehicles.”…

Attorney Shayla Myers, who represents the CD11 coalition, said the council vote was part of a larger pattern of “doing politically expedient things that are patently illegal.” The judge’s ruling, she said, shows that the law was unambiguous — and that “county means county, not city.”

The homeless advocates appear to have won this round. Meanwhile, the villages of broken down RVs that exist in LA remain filthy and dangerous places.

Consider that, back in 2019, the number of people countywide who were living in cars, vans but mostly RVs was about 10,000, according to data compiled by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Now, it’s about 14,000…

…the increase can be traced to the pandemic-era decision, made by city officials in January 2021, not to tow vehicles being used as homes, lest we expose more people to COVID-19. Not that there was much towing going on anyway. Which is why, by the time I met Lockett on a hot afternoon in June 2021, weeds were growing around the tires of her RV.

It took another year for the Los Angeles City Council to feel it was safe enough to reverse that decision on towing, and only after receiving a slew of complaints about fires, piles of trash, human waste and needles.

The city knew it had a problem but kept pushing off efforts to deal with it. So the van encampments became semi-permanent. Pretty soon there were “vanlords” charging people rent to live in them.

The de facto permanency also had the unintended effect of creating a booming market for so-called vanlords — people who lease RVs for a few hundred bucks a month, sometimes full of mold, without running water or working toilets, and park them, confident that they won’t be towed.

As with tent camps, there are frequent fires and violence is also common. The RV camps also can do a lot of damage to the environment where they are located.

No one knows for sure how it started, but over Presidents Day weekend, a fire engulfed their metal home, melting its tires to the pavement and sending a plume of dark smoke billowing over the Ballona Wetlands, Playa Vista and Playa del Rey.

Grady, who had been asleep, saw the flames and dashed outside in panic. Akiedis did too. But then, for some reason, he went back in. Grady tried to chase him down, getting close enough to spot his ankle. But the heat was too much. Others who had run over from their own RVs couldn’t get to him either…

There have been fires and overdoses, and at least one deadly shooting.

Meanwhile, the Ballona Wetlands and adjacent Freshwater Marsh, once prized destinations for bird watching, have taken a beating environmentally, with mature trees cut down, storm drains used as trash receptacles and the entire area doubling as a toilet.

“It’s so messy and so bad now,” lamented Scott Culbertson, executive director of Friends of the Ballona Wetlands.

So, until the county of LA (as opposed to the city) attempts to do something about the RV problem it looks like the cities hands are tied.

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