Keep On Moving! Homes on Wheels Not Wanted in Bay Area

Jason O'Neal, FFWP

Last night, I read an article published by Berkeleyside titled, Berkeley City Council tells RVs to hit the Road.  At first glance it appeared to be another perspective from a long list of narratives about the “blight” of motorhomes and RVs parking on public streets in the Bay Area.  As I continued to read the article I could see it pitted the “boon dockers” ( a common term for RVs that move from place to place with no permanent hookup) against the homeowners and businesses in Berkeley.  

Of course there were the quotes from elected city officials, some who cast dissenting votes in the 6-3 city ordinance approving the ban, but the end result is the same.  If you can’t afford to live in Berkeley, the city’s residents and leaders don’t want you there. And to think this is the same “liberal” Bay Area city that has a “socialist” campus which threatens free speech for conservatives (although Berkeley is far from a socialist school and neither of the individuals in the most recent altercation to gain national media coverage are students there).

What is missing from this story is that Berkeley is a city with almost 120,000 residents and has a median income of more than $70,000 a year.  When I moved there in the summer of 2015, my girlfriend and I earned less than half of that and a studio apartment was renting for $1,700 a month.  Transferring from a community college in San Diego, I was told by an anthropology professor to be prepared for the high cost of housing because she had to live in someone’s garage while receiving her PhD there.  

Two days before my first scheduled class, and with a few hundred dollars in my pocket, we set out for Berkeley in our used RV which we had purchased two weeks before.  My girlfriend and I were not married and we were not eligible for student housing together. We had spent close to a month looking for room shares without success and had limited options by this point.  I would later discover that this is all too common for students at America’s first-ranked public university. The University of California, Berkeley enrolls approximately 27,000 students every year, but has nowhere near the affordable accommodations required to house them all.  For those lucky enough to gain entrance into one of the dozens of co-op houses, prices might be reasonable. But, for those forced into campus-contracted student housing, many have to take on roommates or a part-time job to afford it. A friend of mine, who was also moving to Berkeley, checked in the day before classes without knowing exactly where they were going to live.  

During my two years at UC Berkeley (where I was a fellow student with council member Rigel Robinson) I met hundreds of students who lived in the housing surrounding campus.  Many were using student financial aid, with a sizeable sum forked over to property owners in the area. Some may say this is akin to Section 8 vouchers for low-income housing where the federal government is subsidizing landlords to house poor people.  However, there is one glaring detail about the alumni at Berkeley which was brought to my attention while I was a student there. Nearly sixty percent of the students are not using financial aid and their parents are paying full-price which can reach an upwards of more than $30,000 a year when housing is factored in.  Either way, the university attendance is injecting about $300 million dollars a year in rent money to the surrounding area, and this figure does not include graduate students or professors.

Needless to say, my housing allowances were not spent there.  With relatively few places to park in the entire Bay Area, we were left looking for alternatives.  Even those parks that did accept RVs had strict rules on how old a caravan could be. Most would not take motorhomes older than fifteen years.  My first disbursement of student aid was issued and we applied for several places to no avail.

Like the RV owners who are now shunned by the city, we were hoping to save on expenses needed to live in Berkeley.  I met a graduate student and an employee at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who were living in RVs next to People’s Park.  They had much smaller motorhomes which were easily moved from one block to the next, but my girlfriend and I did could not get that close to campus.  After nearly three weeks at a motel parking lot in El Cerrito, where we spent $20 a day, we found someone willing to let us park in their backyard in Concord.  It was more than twenty miles from campus, but we only had to pay $500 a month. Six months later our landlord was evicted and we moved to the old Naval Air Station at Alameda where we parked in a low-income housing collaborative for the same price.  Another six months went by before we were forced out of there and we ended up at an RV park in Oakley, which put us forty-five miles from campus. This is where we stayed for most of my final year at Cal.

I graduated in 2017 and after a few months we eventually moved back to San Diego and sold the motorhome.  We now live in Phoenix, AZ were our one bedroom apartment costs less than $700 a month including utilities.  Cheaper housing has come at a price, however, because the fifth largest city in the United States has an infrastructure built entirely on individual automobile ownership.  It feels like public transportation is light-years behind BART and AC Transit, although one of the contracted carriers is a multi-billion dollar international conglomerate.  But, that is another story.

My takeaway from the two years I spent in the Bay Area is that the rich liberals don’t want poor people around and the cost of living is out of reach for anyone working on minimum wage.  In Oakland there are tent cities under freeways and nearly 5,000 homeless people migrating through the East Bay. If one factored in those living in their cars and RVs, I am sure the number would be much higher.

It appears affordable housing isn’t even on the table for discussion in these communities. There is not enough money to be made for those in power. While city councils are brokering deals with real estate developers, to gentrify neighborhoods to raise property values with higher tax revenues, human beings are kicked out into the streets where it is getting harder to survive.  Keep in mind, many of them are retirees, or on disability, and have nowhere to go. With this new ban on overnight parking ordinance now in effect, RV and motorhome owners will be joining them. Unfortunately, Berkeley residents and the city council doesn’t care as long as it’s somewhere else farther down the road.