The Human Story Behind LA's Vehicle Residents: Sam Lutzker on Homelessness, Compassion, and Real Solutions

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

I'm Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail. Welcome to And Now Love. Today we are talking about something you see every single day. If you live here in LA, but rarely get the real story behind the community of people living in RVs and cars on our streets to help us really understand the human side of this, I am so excited to sit down with Sam Lutzker. Sam is a PhD candidate in sociology at UCLA and he is doing some incredible, deeply compassionate research on vehicle residency right here in Los Angeles.

He's the coauthor of the recent keep moving report, and his ground level work has even been featured in The New York Times. What I love about Sam's approach is that he looks past the politics and the neighborhood complaints to actually talk with our unhoused neighbors, bringing so much empathy to a really complex issue. Sam, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome. Thanks for having me, Cynthia. I appreciate being here. I was going to ask you because I know your studio is in downtown or around there. How is it with the Boyle Heights fires right there.

Still burning. And it's been burning for, I think, a little over a week now. And I'm sure you've heard that it is quite the emergency. And if we can, we are to shelter and not spend too much time outdoors being close our windows. But as you know, not all of us are able to do that. Yeah, yeah. And I was thinking specifically because a comrade of mine had tried to connect me with someone yesterday, and I think we'll be in touch soon around supporting some people in RVs in the area, because, I mean, some nicer RVs may have more filtration, but especially if you're dealing with something that's a bit older and may have some issues, you're probably breathing the same unfiltered air as as people on the street, or maybe a little bit better, maybe marginally better.

And I know that there was a recent study done by UCLA and USC team that produced some results around the wildfires in 2025, and showed that people who are on house and specifically on sheltered. So people, whether in vehicles or in tents or on the street with nothing, had experienced more adverse issues because of that. So yes, and we get so focused, you know, and rightfully so, on our own experience that, you know, thinking about it in terms of an unsheltered person is sort of surprising, like, oh, yes, here I am concerned about myself, but other people have no way of escaping this terrible situation.

So you do say that there is perhaps some outreach occurring now. I would assume social service orgs are doing something, but the people I heard from are more informal sort of mutual aid network folks. LA system is already very patchwork. With social services. We have different service provision areas, and in each one there are perhaps a specific provider will be for adults who are single, a specific one for for families, in order to fill those gaps in between their different mutual aid organizations. So organizations like palms and House Mutual Aid Council, district 11, coalition for Human Rights.

What drew you to this work? I would say there's a few key moments in my life that I sort of draw upon in this, in this work, and making sense of why I do it. One would be, as a teenager growing up in the Bay area and just going into Oakland and San Francisco and seeing more homelessness than there was in the suburbs and also interacting with homeless people. So I was I like to spend a lot of time in public space growing up. So I was friends with some people who were skaters, too. So you end up inhabiting some of the same spaces, and you sort of realize that a lot of the preconceived notions that society has of homeless people are false or highly distorted.

I wasn't coming in with some of that same sense of fear that some even close friends of mine have disclosed that they sort of they feel bad about it. But I think, you know, instead of feeling bad about it, think about like, well, how did you end up with that sort of bias? Additionally, then I left California in 2011 and I came back in 2019. Just the increase in invisible homelessness over that period. And that also tracks with the numbers. I think it was really shocking to me coming back and seeing more tent camps, bigger tent camps, RV camps, and then also wondering what is the government's response to that.

And initially, I started doing a project on homelessness and public libraries as part of my PhD work. And then as the pandemic hit, that transition to being directly involved in mutual aid. And I had already done some sort of action research where we weren't just doing research, but we were also doing advocacy and working alongside grassroots organizations. And so what would you say are some of the stereotypical preconceived notions we have about people living in RVs and intense or on benches? Yeah. I mean, it's the kind of classic images of like a drug addicted person potentially with, like, who's drawn to crime to feed their addiction.

It's pathologies. The RVs are seen as decrepit and public health hazards. They're often described by officials today through the lens of public health, public safety and environmental pollution. The vast majority supermajority, I would say, of people I spent time with do not fall into those sort of classic stereotyped images. Even when they do, I find that the truth and their stories are so much more complex and rich in nuance than that pathology, I don't think, helps. I don't I don't think it's it. It helps the person, it stigmatizes them and it isn't.

Also, it often isn't solution oriented in a way that's evidence based. It's sort of solution oriented in a way that's very short term. These are systemic inequalities, homelessness, our health care system. It's not something that we can always fix in the name. I also do appreciate when they do put housing first and when they do house people, because I, I know from just following some of my participants through that process how long and arduous that is. And yes, well, maybe the first step is trying to figure out how to describe it to those of us who really can't see it.

I mean, you're taking the deepest dive, and I think that's important to all of us that you do that. Appreciate that. Yeah. But part of the value add, I think, of being a researcher and academic in the space is that we are in this in between like I'm in the field, I'm with I'm with unhoused people one day and then the next day I'm with students at UCLA. And so unlike an outreach worker, where it's kind of like it's a grind of constantly being out there and they have caseloads that are too high. I mean, I may have taken too many participants into my study.

You have about 90 participants. Yeah. So I have among people who live in vehicles of all types. So RVs, cars, vans, also people who are moving between different forms of shelter and housing. So people who may be in a vehicle at one point but at another point are in shelter. Those are folks where I'm I'm not it's not like a one off survey. You're following their story over time. So they come in and out of the study. Sometimes people fall out of of contact with me for all sorts of reasons. But there's also people in there who I've known for years and who we maintain regular contact and, you know, text and even some people, I would say, who kind of moved beyond being a typical study participant and to being friends and like, we have a relationship that is really goes way beyond that, I think.

So it's also difficult to handle sometimes. Not your typical researcher relationship to to help your participant by paying for part of their car. Note but this person is we have such a deep relationship and also it's it was originally formed in this mutual aid context. It's an actual tension I have to really deal with in the work, because it's I'm not able to keep people at this distance through, like typical study where, you know, there's a survey or there's like a clinical setting and it's very like patent drawing done. It's like people text me at all hours, I can text them.

And that's part of the job of being an ethnographic is to occupy these different positions. I think it would be great to feel like there were more individuals doing what you're doing, or organizations even perhaps, that help create a connectivity that seems to be lacking. I don't know that. I mean, our issue is so pervasive and so hard to get a handle on that if we had more eyes in sort of on on the agencies giving support on those that need support on the sort of outlying services, are there beds, are there parking spaces? You know, I just feel like and I may be wrong because I'm not really in it, but I feel like a lot of agencies are doing such hard work, but kind of in a vacuum.

Yeah. One of my participants, he said, you know, he's like, he's like, I was on my smartphone the other day and I was thinking, I just want an app. I just want to know where I can go if there's a shelter bed there, if I could go there. And instead it feels like you're accessing this very opaque system. And even for me, as someone who's a researcher who almost has a PhD, it's confusing. It's difficult. People need help just navigating the system. And so I think there is a big question around system design and accessibility. I think so. And you may know of this agency already and I'm really excited about them.

They're called Better angels. I've heard of them. And and they're trying to look at the technical side of our unhoused population and how to coordinate such things as finding a parking space or a bed and developing apps for that purpose, and developing apps that different agencies can use to support each other. So I'm really excited to kind of keep an eye on them and see where they head with that. I think that there's a lag too in for me as a consumer. I'm sick of apps, but as if you're talking about public services, I think that's actually somewhere where, like some of the things that we have in tech could be helpful, especially for older folks, especially because we do have a growing population of folks who are unhoused and older.

That's a that's a increasing demographic. It is so important, I find, to not only have the app, but to also have like a brick and mortar to have like a place you can go and just be like, I'm on the street, I'm in crisis. I need to sit somewhere and talk to someone and get in here and get a caseworker. The last time I spoke with someone was a couple months ago, who was trying to access an access center on the West Side. The person at the center said it was a 2 to 3 month wait to even be assigned a caseworker there. The center themselves basically said as much that this was underfunded.

They didn't have enough funding to have enough caseworkers. Much of what we see on the street, people trying to construct shelters, people buying RVs that aren't in the best condition and trying to live in them. These are people trying to resolve their own situations because the state isn't really there for them. And I use the state conceptually, not as the state of California, but the state as the government. It's not there for them at the level we need. Imagine when you go camping like you find it so relaxing, but your day is sort of taken up with like these daily activities, especially when you're backpacking, like, you know, oh, I have to go to the bathroom now.

I have to come back and cook. You do a hike in the middle of it, but that may be kind of it. And that's sort of your day. I mean, that's what someone has to deal with. But also in a system where you have a government authorities and neighbors who don't want them there and who are kind of pushing them around. So imagine how stressful that is. It's not it's not a fun recreational activity then, but it's something that requires a sort of arduous ness that in some ways, you know, we think of as blind to like a sport, like people who are living unsheltered, like, have to sometimes walk miles to do things that for us, you know, we have a car or we live somewhere that's accessible to certain services.

We have a lot of work to do, both with our politicians, but also with the general public, to get people to be more, more tolerant at a time, frankly, when compassion fatigue is pretty low too. So it feels like a bit of an uphill battle sometimes. Yeah, more than a bit. And I guess because there's been so much campaigning of late and there's all these posts that you can see around town. Today we're removing nine RVs from this particular block. Isn't this great where cleaning up? Here's the crew. And I've seen many of these, all without any mention of where those people are going.

I mean, I could do some research and discover where the I deal new location might be, but who really gets to go to that ideal new location? How long do they get to stay? There's so much beyond that picture that is unknown. And I it is, as you say, that right now for many individuals, that is good enough. Just give me back my perfect picture and we'll think about the rest later, if at all. And we're we're not going to make much progress here if we can't all figure out a way to sort of escape that pretty picture. Exactly. And also the the localism of it, like the kind of unconcern for if it gets pushed elsewhere doesn't matter.

It's not in my purview. So I've seen this operate in the real world. I've had someone who leads a community based organization tell me about this was a few years ago about the RVs and various other vehicle dwellings. And also some people in tents at the wetlands basically say, you know, like, I don't care where they go. Like they just should not be there. Like I don't want them there anymore. This is somebody who runs an organization in Playa del Rey, so very well-to-do area. Having followed people from that operation, it was a multi-week operation.

There were some kind of shaky offers of like, maybe if you give up, your R-V will give you a motel room. I at least know of one family that did give up to RVs and never got a motel room. And I know of multiple other people who just ended up moving a few blocks away to a nearby Home Depot. One person's problem and removal of a problem becomes an issue, not only for the people where where that person is being moved to, but also for the person themselves that that move itself is becomes its own sort of problem for the person experiencing it. It becomes a form of of lost trust in the exact people that are supposed to trust, and just further alienates them from the exact society.

I think that should be embracing them and showing them love and showing them compassion. So I have some numbers in front of me between June 2022 and June 2024. So a two year period, there were 372 of these vehicle dwelling operations completed, and this was for just over 2800 vehicle dwellings. And so you may be looking at something around 4000 something people in those of those they ticketed over a thousand. They impounded over 600. But their housing stat was that they only housed 196 people. Only 196 people have. So what does that tell us when our own official statistics betray this?

What these are really about, that they're about moving people and yes, solving some temporary sanitation issues when when really like a more stable structure to give people sanitation services would, would be more beneficial and frankly, maybe even more efficient when you don't have any of that too. You also see more issues like fecal matter on the streets. So like the exact problems that people are upset about. The solution that we use to solve those problems exacerbates them or just pushes them somewhere else. And so and we and we spend a lot of money doing that too.

We published a study at the beginning of this year for the Care Plus operations, which I think that was something like in the tens of millions per year. So spent on basically kind of moving people around and temporarily cleaning up some trash and also throwing away their stuff and throwing away their shelters. So that's additional cost. Some folks have told me that they don't have a housing problem. They have a parking problem right now, especially people who have adopted van life, so to speak. In many cases, I believe people at face value. And I think when when you do, you start to see that we not only have an anti homeless bias, we also have a settler bias, we have a settlement bias, where, as the scholar Graham Process noted, we sort of think that our way of housing with apartments and houses is the only way to do housing.

And I think we can applaud movies like Nomadland, but at the same time, turn around and decide we want to tow those people when they're down the block from us in LA. I did have a question about the way the R-V dwellers are treated when there's a sweep that's coming about, and there is a suggestion, perhaps a promise of housing, but no methodology put to how that happens. Maybe. But just we're going to be in touch, whatever it might be. And then clearly most people are let down. 196 people received housing. I mean, that must just be disaster on top of disaster here.

You finally decided to trust this system, and you're worse off than you were before. With this sort of method, we can't possibly create a system where we're even allowing these individuals to feel safe enough to get help. Yeah. And we hear this concept brought up again and again. Service resistance. Service resistance. The people are just resistant to what we're offering them. And I would say I have encountered people who were not interested in what was being offered to them. But when you dig behind why that is the case, it's often because the offer doesn't fit.

It's going to make their life maybe far more inconvenient. Maybe they receive all their health care in Venice. They don't want to go halfway across the city. They're from Venice too. They want to stay in their area, especially when they're going through this traumatic process like they want to be around what is familiar. I know that they're having as a caseworker there or it's an outreach worker. They're having this pressure to fill these spots like, look, we got you these beds. It's so difficult to even get the beds for these operations. So like, some of these people don't want it.

Like what? You know, like, I'm trying so hard, but listen to their perspective and listen to what they're saying, because I often find that when I actually talk to people about what they want and about what's being offered, that they're less resistant, they're more hesitant that their that there's also a reason behind that. I think we really need to approach them with more humility as, as a society and as officials. And then when they do go well, I'm like, wow, what a gem. You know, like, I really am so thankful to caseworkers who are really on top of their stuff, who are responsive to their clients, to outreach workers who repair relationships that you know are sometimes they're difficult to navigate because they do have to tell them about this enforcement coming down the line, but they continue to work with them.

They continue to build that trust, and they do eventually move people into a type of housing. And so I think like that is amazing when that happens. But that doesn't happen enough. You just brought to light something that I think many of us don't really consider. And that is the case of the case worker that, you know, there's an awful lot put on their plate in terms of trying to navigate this either with some skill or without and the pressure, you know, to get someone in beds A, B and C and then to have that person say, well, no, I've changed my mind and you just blew up that caseworkers, you know, whole project that they've been working on for who knows how long.

But it does seem to me that that's something that happens quite often. I've heard about it quite a bit. It doesn't seem like it should be that difficult to to say, hey, you know, this is going on. This is this is just a pretty simple red flag. What can we do to take care of this one? How do we give caseworkers enough space to be able to understand what they're doing, figure out how to have compassion for the individuals they're serving, and allow them to have their feelings about what's going on, and then address those feelings like, wow, why am I so upset about this?

Let's let me think about that. Why is this like just eating at the core of me? A little time given to sort of the human process would be so fantastic. And it's not just, you know, the community of the unhoused that we need to lift up. We need to lift up everybody who's attempting to to assist. Yeah. And I think people need that space for reflection, too. I really think, like, if you're doing this sort of work, you should have people who you can be honest with and have a good faith conversation with to where they know that your heart is in the right place, but also that there are things that frustrate you.

Like, I come from an extended family with a lot of mental illness and addiction. Sometimes I react quite viscerally to what I can see on the street, and I think by working through my own kind of stuff in therapy, but also just with people in the community, I think you can reflect on that kind of initial knee jerk judgment you may have. Like, there was a guy I was trying to help save his dogs because he had a he was violating his probation. He was probably going to have to go back to prison. And he was really afraid that his dogs were going to be in the pound.

And then we were getting them, you know, trying to, I think, bring them to a vet. And it is research. But also like if you ask most researchers how they spend their time, it's it's not ferrying people across LA County to like, you know, an appointment. But that's not how I work. I work in this deeply relational way. I was frustrated just after that interaction, just trying to spend a little time to process, like my own feeling about it, and then also forgiveness for the guy. Like, I don't hold that against him that that happened. I think also it just to me was another reminder that, like, you need a particular toolkit if someone is really experiencing like the throes of addiction, like you need a particular kind of toolkit to work through that.

And so how you prepare for that, like, I think when I'm working with some participants like that, I prepare myself to be stood up at interviews. I prepare myself for interviews to not go the way I think they're going to go. You know, it's and it's just if you set your bar there, it just makes it more regular and doable. But it's just to say, okay, if we want to be pragmatic and we want to work with these folks, we want to do research with them, that's going to take a certain type of tolerance for what they bring to the table. And so I saw, you know, you had someone who does emergency medicine on the streets on before.

I'm a big fan of that sort of way of doing medicine because I think it I mean, first of all, on a system level, it does take things off the kind of load off the hospital to a degree with repeat emergency visits, but it also gets people into regular contact and services and to really intensive form of outreach coming in there really with the tools, often there's a misunderstanding that those tools are let's have the enforcement ready in case we need it. I don't think those are the tools I'm talking about. I'm talking about, instead of that investing in a mental health professional who can an extra one who can be out there and kind of be more hands on with someone if they need, if that person needs a little more attention?

Well, and thank you for bringing up Bret Feldman. He's with the USC Street Medicine program. And like you, he is a believer that he doesn't need, you know, a police officer standing around the corner. The idea of seeing each other as human and coming to someone who needs help, and offering yourself up in such a way that that person can trust you, can lead to those conversations like, look, I need these drugs. I'm on these drugs. I can't figure out what to do without them. But if you come from a place of compassion, you know one would hope. And maybe this is pie in the sky.

I don't know that that they could ultimately say to you. Yeah, I don't like being this way. And I trust you enough to help me figure out the tools that I need to help myself back off of this. Yeah, exactly. I would also add to that some people don't use them to soothe either. They use them to survive more generally on the streets. So there's documented usage of meth to stay up because your clock can switch when you're on the streets. The night becomes something where that can almost become your daytime, because that's when you may. If you're in a tent, there's a lot of activity.

You may have to fend people off. You have to protect your belongings during the day. Maybe actually when you're able to get more rest because there's visibility and you feel safer, but also then it can also hold them in it. It can hold them sort of in the condition. So Housing First is established. We know it works when it's done well. People need to go into a stable place. That doesn't mean, by the way, that they just you just give them a room and you just whatever, you know, like, it really does mean that there is some accountability for seeing a case manager, seeing a therapist going to services, but also that it is to an extent voluntary too, because when people really buy into something like treatment, I mean, in general a fan of voluntary treatment, but like when they really buy into it, I believe studies show that it's more likely that they're going to actually reap the benefits of it, like especially doing work on the West Side where there's all this reticence to build housing.

There's like a campaign against Venice Dell, which is this 100% affordable, permanent supportive housing complex that like, is I think is beautifully designed. That would be on literally what is a parking lot right now near the canals. People don't want it there because they're like, this is going to bring this type of people here. I'm like, no, they're already here. Like they're already here. And frankly, all these instances that you're upset about where like this person is yelling on the street, they're more likely to be on the street yelling than in their room because we don't have housing for them.

I also think there's another stereotype of unhoused people, which is that they're, you know, extremely needy. They're always asking for things. I have seen so much generosity and mutual aid on the street between people, people giving things out. Also people cleaning up public spaces, in part, I think, to avoid the stigma of them being there and the kind of association with dirtiness, but also because they want to live in a cleaner space than what is a typical LA street, which, by the way, you go to plenty of L.A. streets that don't have homeless camps there, buck the sidewalks buckle.

There's trash everywhere. Like this is not necessarily an issue specific to homeless camps. It's an issue to having this sprawling, huge city that's hard to manage. It's hard to service it. When you first meet a person who's living out of their R-V and you knock on their door and you expressed them what it is that you're trying to achieve or how you would like their help. How do you approach that and how receptive are people typically? Yeah. So it depends. I think one of the interesting things about being an ethnographic is that you take on these different positions in the world, like you're a participant observer, so you are observing, but you're also participating through specific roles.

And so some of the roles was like, I was sort of I would go around with activists and like we would warn people that, like, these are some of the things people are getting towed for, like, we run the citation clinic, if you have any tickets or potentially I would meet people through safe parking, LA calling in or I was on the lot to as a volunteer or just through word of mouth and people kind of knowing I'm working on the issue. But often those conversations, depending on the context, look a little different. So sometimes it was sort of like we were warning people of something that may be coming down the line, like we knew that there was a sweep coming.

We knew there was an operation. Just giving them a little warning. I worked with this activist, Peggy Lee Kennedy, who's amazing and works in Venice, and people just know her. They're kind of like, oh, if you're describing her, they're like, oh, yeah, I know her, I know her. I often find an interview isn't best on the first day. It's kind of best when we've gotten to know each other a bit, and then we can sort of sit down and, you know, breathe a little bit and I can ask some questions I'm curious about. And often people themselves have questions to about, like the research, really perceptive questions about, you know, the amount of media and research literacy I see on the street, I think far exceeds what I see among people who live in apartments, because people have to be familiar with how the representation can actually impact their material circumstances and their survival, because big media piece on a particular camp can basically bring down the heavy of enforcement, you know, a couple weeks later.

So like, people need to be aware of that and how to navigate it. Well, I think that you are unique in your approach. I wish you weren't unique in that you you know, you come from a place of grappling with your own trauma and understanding that that's something that you grapple with. And I think for all of us, it's, you know, part of our our lifelong experience is continuing to learn more and more about who we are. And from the beginning until the end, I think that is something important that we should always be attending to. And when you can separate yourself who you really are from your trauma, I think then you can you sort of have an open heart when it comes to other individuals.

There's no one on the planet that doesn't suffer some amount of trauma, whether it whether it came with you from past generations, whether it's what you're looking at every day in your community or in your newspaper, and to kind of be able to make that human connection and to be able to see past the trauma that someone is experiencing, and that's a huge thing to be able to do. And thank you very much for, for being able to kind of step inside this community and share with us what we should already know. And I understand that our systems are, at the moment, at least here in Los Angeles, pretty wacky.

We have just a giant task. And that's not to take away from the people who are, you know, desperately trying to do good work and and coming from their heart. But to be able to sort this out and to be able to speak with people like you who are attempting to give us the inside scoop is it's a big, big gift for all of us. Thank you so much, Cynthia, and thank you, you know, to the podcast and also the staff setting it up and everything. It's studio I, you know, I so much goes into these conversations and I feel like they're really important. Also I would be nowhere without the trust of my participants who are going through it too.

So you know their own words. Why? I think I have my own perspective to give as a researcher to, I think their own words and what I try to to bring into my work, and frankly, also some of the advocacy that they do for themselves, I think is so powerful and worthy of attention. So anything we can do here, you know, to spotlight some of that, like I'm so down for it. So, so the idea idea of safe parking, is that what that is called. Where where in Los Angeles. Or these places. And are they at capacity? And how easy is it for people who need them to find them.

So there's around 500 or so. Maybe I'm a little off safe parking spaces in the city of LA. You can imagine that's not that many. There's something like, let's see, 11,500 or so people living in vehicles just in the city of LA who are counted as part of the homeless count. And by the way, that's like a three day estimate. That's not a period prevalence estimate. So if you think about it, there's far more people who experience some form of vehicular homelessness over the course of a year than there are just on like the three nights that they count.

So there is not enough of it, but what does exist, it's sort of scattered across the city. Most of these lots are they have a daytime use, and then overnight they shift into a safe parking lot. And frankly, you could live nearby and you wouldn't even know that they are there because they're pretty quiet. And people kind of role in there may be a security guard or a staff member on site. They have bathroom access, they have a space they can park in. And there's often a little bit of community develops to depending on the program and the lot to specifically like the personalities and kind of how people want to relate to each other and the site.

You can go on their website, State Park, LA, they have a warm line that you can call. I believe it's operated seven days per week, around 9 to 5 hours or so. They can refer you into their program or refer you out to another program. There are a few other organizations that also runs safe parking sites, and there's also, if you look online, like Safe Parking, Lhasa, which is the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority 2026 sites. They usually have an updated list that has the numbers of different sites, but to get in, you need registration, insurance and a license.

And so you have to be what I would call street legal. Now, one issue is that one would be that most of these sites aren't 24 hours. So for people in RVs, having to move in and out is going to be very difficult on a daily basis. So most of the people in the site I'm studying or in cars during passenger vehicles, so we're not even talking about the folks in RVs. There are very few programs they're safe to do exist for them. I know of Hope runs one. The other issues are obviously like having up to date registration insurance. Not everyone has that end to fully operable vehicle too, so some of the people who are most in need of a space to stay are the people least able to get it?

People can still come into the programs. I do think they're still valuable. They're really a great way, especially if you're able to resolve your own instance of homelessness through work or through family housing. They can be this really great net to catch you where you're not going to end up on a random street, you're going to be in a parking lot, you're going to feel safe. You're not going to feel like someone's going to go through your stuff. So I am a big fan of safe parking. I work with the organization Safe Parking LA. Check them out. I think they do good work.

And then also I'm a fan of stable parking, which doesn't really exist here at all, but as a model basically premised around for people who may not need homeless services help but need a reasonable place to park, especially in RV where they are self-sufficient and their ARVs in good condition. Like if you want to go to an RV park, you can be spending upwards of 1500 a month just for a space. If you're a senior citizen on fixed income, that may be may not be affordable for you. In those situations, we need more places for people where they have some form of subsidized kind of RV parks or parking where, especially if they have a relationship to Los Angeles.

We need places for them to go because our system cannot resolve this housing crisis and homelessness fast enough for people. People are trying to resolve it themselves. If we have so many parking lots, we have many people who do have vehicles that could go in them that aren't going to be a liability. Like we should be thinking also of those sort of solutions where like basically creating more Doc Wyler beaches where you can go and stay in your V, but for people where it's not just what creation it's like, it's something where they're living in it, it's maybe a bit more permanent.

And also even services could come into there to kind of see, like what people need and things like that. We need more of that. We need more safe parking and stable parking. We do. And then there are the individuals who, sadly, you know, end up with $4,000 worth of citations. And that is a hard thing to overcome. Yes. And we have a program called the Community Assistance Parking Program, La Cap, which we would register people for as part of our citation clinic, where basically what they do is they do community service hours in order to get ticket forgiveness up to $1,500 per year.

The problem is that people get targeted with far, far above 1500. There's different barriers to signing up. You have to do it online or over the phone. For some people, they're not going to be able to access that. For people who have seriously disabled like community service, like they're getting ticketed and they're not able to move their RV in part because of their disability. We then are asking them to perform community service as if they did something wrong like so. And so I think like that program, frankly, if I had to say three things up, the cap don't have $1,500 in the cap increase that easier access, more ways to access it, and also find something else besides community service.

You know, I think some people can like the community service. They end up doing it. Talk to people who've done it, especially in cases where people have a qualifying disability. There should be a way to get out of that requirement. When we know someone can't move their vehicle, why are we using parking enforcement as this kind of thing that just continually like knocking them? Neighbors wanted people want to feel sometimes like that. There's accountability for rules that they have to abide by. Like, you know, not being in a two hour parking zone beyond two hours.

But I would say like put down like the fairness card for a second and think of what's pragmatic and think of how that's how this is going to impact that person in their situation. Because I don't think this is going to make anything better for anyone. We're not going to take it our way out of homelessness. No. And we've already learned that the world is not a fair place. So yes. So there's already yeah. Again, 72 hour parking. We left our car down there and we just left it in SoCal, and we just left it on a street in front of someone's house that we know, and it's going to be there for months.

And I guarantee you it's not going to get a 72 hour ticket. But if you if I was living in that car or if it was an RV, definitely getting multiple and to our parking tickets, meaning you have to move every 72 hours. So there's other forms of unfairness which also benefit people and houses. So like but they just don't they don't connect the dots. Sometimes you need someone to kind of be like, look what you from your perspective, what you see is unfair. You know, there's other things that are unfair to benefit you. Like, I don't think that's the lens through which we should be understanding and trying to solve homelessness.

No, I don't think so. And you're right. There's the dots are so not connected. So again, thank you for helping us connect a few of the dots perhaps. And if somebody wants to see what you're doing, get involved with what you're doing. Ask you a question. Do you have a website a place where people can find you? Yeah. I mean, my my emails public. I'll just give it out and you can search me. I'm on the UCLA sociology website. I have a page, you know, as a as an active grad student there. The email is Sal, my initials, Sal 2176 at UCLA. Edu, I'd love to talk to people.

I'm always willing to hop on a call. I talk to people in neighborhood councils before about some of those issues. Like I've just everyday citizens, like just showing up at a grassroots level. Like it does not have to be a podcast with tens of thousands of followers. But I'm happy to zoom into a room of five people. Like, I think sometimes it was the most impactful places because you sort of start to see kind of dots connecting in people's heads that like, oh yeah, like those people did just kind of all move, but where are they? I think you do.

I think you're an important voice in these conversations. So thank you for offering that. And thank you for all your time today, and we'll look forward to hearing more about what you're up to in the future. Cool, cool. Thank you Cynthia. And yeah, thank you to the podcast. Cool, cool to be on here. Our pleasure to have you. Please follow, rate and share our podcast and pass this episode along to someone who might benefit from it. This is and now love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart till next time.