In a political one-two punch, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Traci Park are advancing overlapping policies that target people living in RVs and other vehicles, punishing them under the guise of cracking down on so-called “vanlords.” While claiming to act in defense of unhoused people, their proposals would, in practice, increase street homelessness, expand state power to seize and destroy homes-on-wheels, and leave thousands with even fewer options for survival.

In Los Angeles, Traci Park’s City Council motion CF 23-0529 would ban the rental of RVs to people experiencing homelessness, a practice she describes as exploitative, framing renters as victims of slumlords preying on desperation. Her motion doesn’t regulate safety standards or provide repair funding. It doesn’t expand shelter or housing access. Instead, it simply criminalizes the act of renting a vehicle as shelter. For the 12,000 Angelenos living in cars, vans, or RVs, this is not a housing solution. It’s an eviction notice.

At the state level, Mayor Karen Bass has backed AB 630, a bill she personally sponsored and is now carried by Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez. It similarly targets so-called “vanlords” but uses a different mechanism: allowing local governments to more quickly tow and destroy RVs used as housing. Currently, vehicles must be valued under $500 to be scrapped. AB 630 raises that threshold to $4,000, dramatically expanding the pool of homes that can be seized and dismantled.

The bill, now narrowed to Los Angeles and Alameda Counties, just passed out of the Senate Appropriations Committee on August 29 and is headed to the Senate floor. But it has generated sharp opposition from legal and housing justice advocates, including ACLU California Action, Equal Rights for Every Neighbor, and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, who warn that AB 630 and Park’s local motion are part of a larger pattern: using code enforcement and property law to criminalize the presence of unhoused people without offering real alternatives.

“When you take someone’s RV and dismantle it, you’re taking away their ability to store water, to cook and save food, to shelter from wind and rain,” said Sean Geary, a former RV resident, in testimony to the State Senate. “You take away their agency, their autonomy.”

Bass has publicly denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision, which gave cities the green light to criminalize outdoor sleeping. But her sponsorship of AB 630 contradicts that message. Rather than providing housing, the bill expands enforcement tools to destroy the very vehicles people rely on for shelter. In a cruel irony, the city’s own data from Bass’s signature policy for tackling homelessness, “Inside Safe,” shows that less than a third of participants have transitioned into permanent housing, while more than a third return to the street, all while costing taxpayers over $104,000 per participant. These numbers undercut the central claim made by AB 630’s supporters that people are being housed as their vehicles are towed.

Meanwhile, grassroots groups like the Venice Justice Committee have released reports like Keep Moving, based on interviews with nearly 100 vehicle dwellers across the Westside of Los Angeles. Their findings make it clear that most people in vehicles aren’t there by choice, but because they were priced out of housing or pushed out by illness, job loss, or eviction. They stay mobile not to avoid responsibility, but to evade tickets, tows, and harassment from police and sanitation crews. For them, vehicles, however dilapidated, offer more stability, privacy, and dignity than the shelter system.

“This is not a compassionate policy. It’s a political strategy designed to disappear poor people,” said one organizer working with vehicle residents in Council District 11.

The real solution, as Keep Moving and many advocacy groups point out, lies not in sweeping vehicle residents or destroying their homes, but in safe parking programs, public sanitation infrastructure, consistent case management, and deeply affordable housing. But neither Park’s local motion nor Bass’s state-level bill contains provisions for any of those. What they offer instead is a faster pathway to vehicle destruction, and an easier process for removing the poor from public view.

Take Action: Use our one-click email tool to tell City Council to vote no on Traci Park’s “vanlords” motion. It only takes a minute to stand up for vehicle residents and stop this harmful policy. Click here to send your message now.