Goleta Grapples with Car-Camping Community

Car camping dates back to the earliest of wheeled transport, but the Grapes of Wrath showed what it looked like when it became a mass movement of necessity. Those times still exist today in urban areas, parked in place 72 hours at a time.

As many as 200 vehicles are being used as overnight accommodations in the City of Goleta nightly. For the people who live within, “Many are working, living on fixed incomes, or using their vehicles as the only shelter they can afford,” said Chuck Flacks. Goleta’s Homelessness Services Coordinator, Flacks has been checking in on the city’s homeless population for the past three years.

For other residents of the streets where vehicles park, particularly along a broad right of way on Phelps Road, the view is somewhat different.

“I saw one guy carrying his dry cleaning to his car, and there are some nice cars there,” said Bob Craig, who lives at Pacific Palms, a development on the edge of UC Santa Barbara’s North Campus Open Space. The preserve’s136 acres were restored from a golf course, and a set of dirt footpaths links to the ocean and the Ellwood Butterfly Preserve. He and his neighbors have watched vehicles park at the peaceful spot in the evening, stay overnight, and depart in the morning, leaving behind trash and worse.

“It’s awful,” said Craig, who walks the open space several times a week. “People ask how we know it’s human waste. I tell them, ‘Dogs don’t use toilet paper.’” Craig recognizes the dire straits that place people in their cars. He and his wife have given food and the occasional bicycle to vehicle residents, but he also knows his neighbors have visitors who are scared to park on Phelps.

The Pacific Palms residents have been meeting with Flacks almost since he started working for the city. They achieved an oversize vehicle parking ban along Phelps and Pacific Oaks roads in spring 2024, which changed the dynamic.

“In the past two years, the RVs were replaced by vans. It’s a sort of a whack-a-mole situation,” said Pacific Palms resident Frank DiMarco, noting the RVs have moved to other areas of the city. Tents and bicycles mark a creek at nearby Girsh Park.

He, Craig, and other residents regularly walk the trails and pick up the debris left by campers. “The folks who live in their cars, they pay their taxes, but they just can’t afford to live here,” DiMarco allowed, “but I have one foot in sympathy, and the other foot in ‘up with this we will not put.’”

The city receives dozens of complaints about homelessness in general, from throughout Goleta. And it responds to each one, Flacks said; they’re mostly about noise, trash, cooking outdoors, gatherings, and safety. So far this year, he’s received only 13 complaints, compared to 82 last year, a decrease he attributes to increased outreach and newly posted signs. After the oversize vehicle prohibition signs went up, “no parking anytime” signs and citations went into effect, and the city passed a law that outlawed habitation in a vehicle on public property. Those signs went up on May 5.

At the same time, the city expanded its sanctioned overnight parking program to include any property interested in hosting through the Safe Parking program. It also expanded its city-funded outreach to the larger Goleta area and directed its police agency, the County Sheriff’s Office, to notify campers before enforcement went into effect.

“The city cares about both sides of this issue and strives not to criminalize homelessness but also understands its responsibility to maintain public health and safety,” Flacks wrote in an email, a careful approach that frustrates Goleta homeowners. By code, a vehicle can only fail to move for 72 hours before being “subject to removal.” Though Goleta can issue a citation for vehicle habitation, with penalties ranging from $100 to $500, none have been given, as the city prefers to first try verbal contacts through sheriff’s deputies, New Beginnings, or CityNet. Towing is not an option in the habitation ordinance.

The approach has had some success. Twenty-eight people have moved into permanent housing or indoor shelter, city spokesperson Kelly Hoover said. But among the hundreds of vehicles that dot the city, only about 47 of their residents described themselves as homeless or said they needed housing. Many declined all services.

Legal overnight parking spaces exist, with some large enough for RVs, but the need clearly outstrips the availability. In Goleta, across five lots — three of them belonging to churches — there are 36 spaces. New Beginnings operates the Safe Parking lots, offering not only a monitored site, but restrooms and social services to any eligible individual with a driver’s license and vehicle insurance and registration. Out of the 36 spaces came the 28 people now living within four walls and a roof.

Over on Phelps, change is coming slowly. The “no habitation” signs reduced the vans and sedans from about 20 to about a dozen, said Craig, but the issue continues at a strip between Devereux Creek and the west end of Phelps, land that is in the coastal zone. Goleta is in the middle of sending its Local Coastal Program for California Coastal Commission approval, a bureaucratic but necessary step that would give the city the option to post its parking and oversize vehicle signs in the zone. The city’s workplans have it scheduled for completion by 2027.