You know what’s not surprising? When a half-assed project fails.
For some reason, though, the county always seems surprised that anyone would believe the Oklahoma Avenue Safe Parking Site was a disaster.
After receiving pressure to do something, anything to get people living in their vehicles out of Los Osos and Oceano, SLO County threw a cool $500,000 at the problem, opened up a dirt parking lot in 2021, and crossed its fingers. No case management. No screening. No real security. Not a lot of sanitation services. No potable water.
All of the issues just relocated from Los Osos and Oceano to the new spot near the jail—and compounded as the number of vehicles at the site multiplied.
It took the county months to try to figure out what it needed and even longer to actually start doing something about the problems.
The county even rebranded the site a few months after it opened from Kansas Avenue to another street named after a Midwestern state near the jail where the site is still located. Whose bright idea was that? It happened after a woman and her cats died in their motorhome that caught fire at the site in February 2022.
And, just for the punny record, changing the name from Kansas to Oklahoma didn’t mean that site residents weren’t in Kansas anymore. Tornados still managed to find their way there.
Remember how the county announced it was closing the site?
Well, there’s still no official close-down date yet—which the SLO County civil grand jury states in an investigative report of the site (“SAFE PARKING? OKLAHOMA is not OK!” What a title!).
As that report notes, when the county announced the closure, this is what it said: “We wanted to provide an opportunity for people to transform their lives, and we weren’t meeting the objectives that we initially thought we would.”
Oh really? “Transform their lives.”
That might be the objective that the parking site morphed into pursuing mid-way through the project after being spanked by John and Jane Q. Public for not having direction, but it definitely wasn’t how Kansas Avenue started.
Here’s a great example of the shortsightedness of the county. A security firm overpaid its welcome at the site, costing more than the county wanted to spend. That firm, Condor Security of America, was replaced with Good Guard Security. Good, strong names, amirite? Well, the security service itself wasn’t quite so strong. It fluctuated, and guess what? Sometimes the site participants themselves provided security. What? I’m not sure how the county let that happen, but it did.
And guess what?
Incident reports dried up when participants were in charge of their own security. Shocking, I know!
In fact, “reports completed by security guards disappeared from the guard shack,” the grand jury’s report said. Double shocker!
Was the county really concerned about site safety?
“We have always maintained daily contact with the owners of the guard company and/or the assigned guard,” the county’s response to the report said. “We address concerns as soon as we hear about them.”
Yah, except for when you don’t hear about them!
The site is also dealing with (and here’s another shocker) “rampant substance abuse and drugs,” and “violence and threats of violence,” according to the grand jury report. The Sheriff’s Office responded to incidents at the site no less than 493 times in the program’s first 15 months.
And—let me just say this without homeless advocates jumping into my gears—duh!
I just don’t understand how the county, which performs a lot of social services for the vulnerable populations, didn’t foresee the problems that actually happened.
Now, the county’s just going to shut ‘er down. What are the lessons the county should have learned? Well, for one, rebranding doesn’t really work! And, perhaps, half-assing projects meant to help, not harm, a specific population isn’t such a good use of taxpayer funds.
The population that the safe parking site is serving is a subset of people who need lots of services, and the “services” coordinated and provided by the county weren’t enough, not nearly enough, to do the job the county now claims it wanted to do all along. That would be to get people out of their vehicles and into permanent housing—an easy task on the Central Coast, right?
Right.
The contracts that the county Homeless Services Division made site residents sign included provisions that stipulated a 90-day limit to stay there—85 percent overstayed that welcome without proper enforcement.
As for the solution? Well, the county will likely have to deal with unhoused folks living in vehicles for the foreseeable future. The report notes that 370 people were living out of their vehicles in SLO County as of January 2022, and 50 percent of those were in RVs—some of which run and some of which don’t.
The grand jury recommends that the county come up with a plan of action for opening and closing safe parking sites. But, in the county’s responses (approved by the county Board of Supervisors on July 16) to the jury’s report, it simply stated that it wasn’t implemented yet, but it will be “in the future, prior to opening or closing any future safe parking sites.”
Hmm. Sounds safe to me. Δ
The Shredder thinks “safe parking site” is a misnomer. Send comments to shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jul 20-30, 2023.
I am skeptical that the county will ever be able to actually close the site. Some residents just won’t leave, either because their vehicles no longer run, they have nowhere else to go, or they just like living there. The county is unlikely to physically evict them, due to the “optics” of looking like they are beating up on the homeless. I predict a long impasse.