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On top of the work on Project Tool Belt in 2020, we also administered a Safe Parking program here in Fullerton. Safe, Overnight parking programs that link folks living in a car or RV fulltime to permanent housing interventions and other assorted services. 1/x
These programs are still emerging in certain parts of the country, and I have not seen definitive research on their effectiveness. However, with the abundance of people living in vehicles, and now the risk of that number exploding post-rental moratoriums...2/x
it seems inevitable that we are going to need more space and programming for people in these situations. Its easy to see how there could be a big cascade of them coming, and cities seem to be relentless in their efforts to ban overnight parking, making it even more challenging3/x
For folks living in vehicles. During the time we operated this program, we helped 17 individuals living in 12 cars and were able to permanently house three of those households, two through VASH vouchers. Again, these numbers may not seem impressive on their face...4/x
But the context is really important here. What kind of housing interventions are available for these folks? They are limited in availability and working with people that have made homes out of RVs provides with a whole new set of challenges. 5/x
Even for people we were not able to get into permanent housing before the contract expires, they were assessed and moved into the queue for some kind of intervention, so at the very least we had strong service navigation, linkage to services, and began a path towards housing 6/x
We were delighted to be asked to run this program, happy with the results, and are hoping more cities and regions consider this approach to deal with this population, as we sadly see nothing but expansion in this category of our homeless community members and friends. 7/7
