Homeless crisis in Los Angeles, San Diego: Are parking lots a solution?

Cars pass the encampment
of a man in Los Angeles who has been homeless for about two
years.
David McNew/Getty
Images

• As urban housing costs continue to soar, more homeless
  residents are living in cars than ever before.
• Despite local attempts to ban people from residing in
  their vehicles, safe parking programs are springing up in
  cities across the country — particularly along the West
  Coast. 
• While parking lots offer a temporary solution to the
  homeless crisis, they’re also key contributors to the
  affordable housing shortage.

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On the West Coast, homelessness is a visible crisis: Large
swathes of tents line the railroad tracks in California and
streets of Seattle, with clothes and other belongings — shopping
carts, bicycles, coolers — scattered nearby. It’s a
glaring reminder of the region’s
large proportion of unsheltered residents, who spend many of
their days, and nights, outdoors. 

Then there are those people —  tens
of thousands in California alone — who live out of their
cars. For these homeless residents, nights in the city can be
riddled with fear of their vehicle being impounded or their
belongings vandalized.

As soaring
housing costs threaten to increase the number of
homeless people residing in vehicles, cities are turning to the
streets for an answer. In the last few years, multiple West
Coast cities have rolled out programs that allow homeless
residents to park safely overnight.

In Los Angeles, a program called Safe Parking LA has
opened three safe parking lots in the last year alone. After
unveiling its first lot in Koreatown in 2018, the program
rolled out two more: a lot exclusively for homeless veterans on
the Department of Veteran Affairs Campus and a third lot in
Hollywood.
The lots cater to
the
 more
than 8,500 residents who live in cars, vans, and
campers throughout the city. Together, these residents account
for about a quarter of LA’s homeless population, which is now the

second largest among US cities.

The program is modeled off of New Beginnings’ Safe Parking
Program, which originated in Santa Barbara in 2004. As
a nonprofit mental health center, New Beginnings coordinates
with churches, businesses, government agencies, and other
nonprofit institutions to provide more than 130 overnight parking
spaces for homeless families and individuals.

But 14 years after its founding, it still has its work cut
out: The number of homeless deaths in Santa Barbara County

rose to 44 in 2016, with half of these deaths occurring
outdoors. 

As programs like New Beginnings attempt to tackle
homelessness in their city, they have struggled to keep up with
demand. Nationwide, the number of Americans living in their
vehicles
increased by 46% in the last year alone.

In San Diego, a program called Dreams
for Change keeps a waitlist for its 150
parking spaces across three different sites. At its peak, this
waitlist has swelled to 150 vehicles. 
The
program has also found that participants are sticking around for
longer periods of time — these days, about six or eight
months. This is partly the result of San Diego’s oppressive home
prices, which continue to increase.

Though demand for safe parking spaces seems to be rising,
not all city governments are on board. From 2006 to 2016, bans on
living in vehicles increased
significantly in cities across the US. Even in LA, where safe
parking is becoming more common, only 10% of the city’s streets
allow residents to lodge in their
vehicle. 
These restrictions are often driven by
concerns over homeless residents bringing crime, litter, or noise
to a neighborhood. 

A better use of parking spaces 

There’s an irony to all of this controversy. Aside from
their ability to safely shelter homeless residents, parking lots
take up quite a bit of unnecessary space in cities. 

A
recent study from the Research Institute for
Housing America found that cities often have more parking spaces
than their residents require. In certain parts of Seattle,
parking accounted for 40% of the land area, despite the fact that
nearly half of all of households didn’t own or operate a car. And
in Philadelphia, the city had enough parking space to give four
spots to every household. This pattern is likely to grow worse as
the share of drivers in US cities continues to decline.

With many parking lots left unoccupied, these spaces could
easily be converted into a more permanent solution for homeless
residents: affordable housing.

The problem is that developers and landowners profit far
more from parking structures than they do from affordable
development. In many cases, developers are
even required to install a certain number of parking spaces
in residential or office buildings. 
This has
the effect of
driving up rents in cities, making them less accommodating to
low-income residents. 

As cities debate whether to expand or restrict their safe
parking programs, they must confront an unfortunate paradox:
Parking lots might lessen the strain of homelessness in cities,
but they’re also a big part of the problem.