In nearly every corner of Los Angeles, residents have complained about RVs that park on their streets, giving shelter to the homeless, so last year Mayor Karen Bass promised to take action and start dismantling some of the encampments.
But three months later, some of those promises remain unfulfilled, and thousands of homeless RVs still monopolize entire blocks across the city, like in the Harbor Gateway area in the southern tip of LA.
“Everyone's afraid to come into the areas where the RVs are because we don't know what's in the RVs," said Dave Matthews, a community activist and the head of the Harbor Gateway Chamber of Commerce.
“When is the city going to clear away these RVs?” Matthews told the I-Team.
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“People are afraid to walk by these RVs,” said Lisa Pascoe, one of 300 employees at a furniture company near Harbor City where RVs line the street near the entrance to her office.
“[The workers] tend to go into the middle of the street because they're not comfortable walking down in between the RVs and the gates of the building,” Pascoe told the I-Team.
Across LA, the I-Team has documented how some homeless RVs dump raw sewage into the streets, how trash piles up around them, and how some RVs go up in flames, creating a fire hazard for residential neighborhoods.
In November 2023, the I-Team began asking Mayor Bass if she had plans to dismantle RV encampments, as her “Inside Safe” program had done with some tent encampments.
When “Inside Safe” has dismantled tent encampments, outreach workers offer services and motel rooms to those living in the tents.
"The RV situation is a lot more complicated," Mayor Bass told the I-Team. “The city doesn’t have the ability to tow the RVs… they actually have only one tow truck,” Bass added.
But the day before the I-Team was going to air a report in early December on the growing RV problem, the city somehow assembled numerous tow trucks and dismantled an encampment with over 50 RVs on Forest Lawn Drive in the San Fernando Valley.
The Mayor’s office told NBC4 that in 2024 it would dismantle other "RV encampments through Inside Safe... in South Los Angeles, on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley” … starting "in February [with an RV encampment] in the Harbor City area."
But February came and went, and not a single RV encampment has been cleared since last December as promised.
Some homeless people who live in RVs say they’d like the city to dismantle their encampment and offer them alternate housing and services.
“I would much rather be in a motel or an apartment than in an RV,” said Chris, who has lived in an RV on a street near Harbor City since he lost his wife and mother last year and then lost his job.
“I would welcome any services to help get my life back together. Any kind of resources to get back up on my feet,” Chris told the I-Team.
Mayor Bass made another promise to tackle the RV problem that is so far unfulfilled: Developing “safe parking lots” where RVs can park off city streets with 24 hour security and bathrooms.
"We're working on that right now," Bass told the I-Team in November 2023.
In January, the Mayor’s office told NBC4 it was "nearly finished with an evaluation of publicly owned land" to create RV “safe parking lots.”
The I-Team asked for a list of those locations, but still hasn’t received it.
