After years of pushing block-by-block restrictions on recreational vehicle parking across Council District 11, Los Angeles Councilmember Traci Park is now proposing to ban RV parking on every city street, 24 hours a day, and make it easier for the city to immediately impound vehicles that violate the ban.
The October 20 motion, Council File 26-1505, represents a major escalation in Park’s campaign against vehicle dwelling. Under existing law, the City Council can prohibit oversized-vehicle parking on designated streets between 2am and 6am. Park wants to eliminate both limitations, effectively leaving people who live in RVs with nowhere to legally park on the streets of Los Angeles.
But the proposal goes further than parking restrictions. It seeks to expand the circumstances under which the city can seize vehicles without a warrant, raising serious constitutional questions about the government’s authority to take what is, for many Angelenos, their only remaining shelter.
Park’s motion acknowledges that vehicle impoundments are seizures under the Fourth Amendment and that warrantless impoundments generally require a recognized legal justification. One such exception is the community caretaking doctrine, which allows police to remove vehicles when reasonably necessary to address public safety concerns, traffic hazards, or other legitimate “caretaking” needs.
An RV obstructing a traffic lane or blocking emergency access, for example, may qualify for removal under this exception. But an RV parked safely along a curb on a wide street does not necessarily present the same justification simply because it violates a parking restriction.
Park’s motion attempts to bridge that gap by establishing a legal basis for immediately impounding all RVs, rather than relying exclusively on the hazards posed by individual vehicles. In other words, she wants the city to establish that RVs as a category pose sufficient public safety concerns to justify warrantless impoundment.
Her motion directs the City Attorney to prepare an ordinance containing “findings that satisfy the community caretaking doctrine in order to permit the immediate impoundment of Recreational Vehicles in violation of this ordinance.” It also instructs LAPD, LAFD, and LADOT to provide data, including calls for service, to support those findings. So she has already decided what enforcement power she wants and is asking city departments to assemble the evidence needed to justify applying it across the board.
The motion cites wastewater discharge, fires, crime, and visibility hazards associated with RVs. These are real concerns when they occur, but the proposal makes no distinction between vehicles creating such hazards and those that are not. Instead, it seeks a blanket prohibition and a legal framework for immediately impounding vehicles that violate it.
The question is whether the city can justify towing any RV without a warrant by claiming that all RVs are inherently dangerous, even when the particular vehicle poses no danger.
Los Angeles has a long history of litigation over its treatment of people living in vehicles, and several cases are relevant to Park’s proposal.
In Desertrain v. City of Los Angeles, the Ninth Circuit struck down the city’s vehicle-dwelling ordinance in 2014 as unconstitutionally vague. The law had allowed police to cite people for using vehicles as living quarters, and the court found that its unclear language encouraged arbitrary enforcement. The city subsequently relied more heavily on parking regulations to restrict where vehicle dwellers could remain.
Other cases have addressed the limits on vehicle impoundment. In Miranda v. City of Cornelius, the Ninth Circuit held that police violated the Fourth Amendment by impounding a vehicle safely parked on private property without a legitimate community caretaking justification. The court made clear that having legal authority to tow a vehicle does not automatically make the seizure constitutional.
More recent decisions complicate the picture. In Potter v. City of Lacey, the Ninth Circuit rejected a facial Fourth Amendment challenge to a Washington city’s ordinance restricting RV parking and authorizing impoundment. The court recognized that removing illegally parked vehicles can serve legitimate community caretaking interests even when they do not present an immediate traffic hazard. But that ruling did not establish that every impoundment under such an ordinance would necessarily be constitutional.
In March 2026, the Ninth Circuit also issued an unpublished decision in Fitzpatrick v. City of Los Angeles, rejecting a Fourth Amendment claim involving an unregistered vehicle parked on a public roadway. The court distinguished earlier cases because the vehicle could not lawfully remain where it was or be driven away without continued unlawful operation.
That reasoning could provide the city with an argument in support of Park’s proposal: if RV parking is prohibited everywhere, the city might contend that impoundment is necessary to end an ongoing violation. But there’s a difference between an unregistered vehicle that cannot legally operate on public roads, as in Fitzpatrick, and an otherwise lawful RV that the city has decided cannot park on any public street. Whether that distinction would matter constitutionally remains unresolved.
Park’s proposal appears designed to test those boundaries, potentially replacing individualized determinations of whether towing is justified with broad legislative findings about RVs as a category.
The motion is also the latest step in Park’s yearslong effort to make vehicle dwelling increasingly difficult across CD11. Since taking office, she has introduced repeated motions expanding overnight oversized-vehicle parking restrictions throughout the district, covering dozens of street segments. Those restrictions did not create housing or additional safe parking spaces. They simply reduced the places where people living in vehicles could legally remain overnight.
Park has also pursued legislation targeting so-called “vanlords,” people who rent RVs to unhoused residents, while supporting efforts to expand the city’s ability to seize and dispose of vehicles.
In January 2026, a Los Angeles court blocked the city’s attempt to implement AB 630, a state law establishing a pilot program for the expedited disposal of certain impounded RVs. The court found that the city lacked authority to implement the county-level program.
That ruling concerned the disposal of vehicles after impoundment, rather than the authority to tow them initially. But it was another legal setback for the city’s efforts to expand enforcement against RV residents.
Park’s latest proposal goes much further than her previous district-level parking restrictions. Instead of prohibiting overnight parking on designated streets, it would make parking an RV anywhere on a Los Angeles street unlawful at any hour.
The only explicit accommodation is a temporary permit process allowing RV owners to park outside their homes to load or unload their vehicles. There is no comparable provision for people whose RVs are their homes.
Park points to neighboring cities, including Beverly Hills, Culver City, Santa Monica, and El Segundo, as justification for a citywide prohibition. Her motion argues that inconsistent parking regulations push RVs into Los Angeles from surrounding jurisdictions.
But that argument exposes the fundamental problem with this approach. When one city prohibits RV parking, vehicle dwellers may move to another. If Los Angeles adopts the same restrictions, the people living in those vehicles do not suddenly acquire housing. They simply have fewer places to go.
Other cities have faced legal challenges over similarly sweeping restrictions. In Pacifica, California, a lawsuit challenging the city’s oversized-vehicle parking ban resulted in a 2021 settlement and permanent injunction requiring the city to preserve designated streets for oversized-vehicle parking, establish a safe parking program, and provide sanitation facilities. The settlement was not a judicial ruling that all citywide bans are unconstitutional, but it demonstrated the problems created by eliminating parking options without providing alternatives.
Napa has also considered expansive oversized-vehicle restrictions, but its approach expressly recognized the need to evaluate individual circumstances before impoundment and identified assistance for affected RV residents.
Park’s motion contains no such safeguards or alternatives. It does not propose expanding safe parking, increasing access to sanitation, funding repairs for inoperable vehicles, or helping people transition into permanent housing. Instead, it proposes eliminating legal street parking for RVs altogether.
For someone who uses an RV recreationally, a parking citation or tow may be an expensive inconvenience. For someone living in an RV because they cannot afford housing, impoundment can mean losing their home, belongings, transportation, and last remaining measure of stability. Recovering an impounded vehicle can also be prohibitively expensive, particularly as towing and storage fees accumulate.
Just days before introducing this RV ban, Park’s sweeping proposal to expand Municipal Code Section 41.18 stalled in the City Council’s Public Safety Committee. That proposal sought to dramatically broaden restrictions on where unhoused people can sit, sleep, or keep their belongings in public spaces, while giving individual councilmembers greater authority to establish enforcement zones.
Taken together, these proposals reveal a particularly cruel progression. People who cannot afford housing may end up living in vehicles. Park wants to prohibit those vehicles from parking anywhere on city streets and make them easier to impound. And when people lose their vehicles and end up sleeping outside, she wants to expand the city’s authority to remove them from sidewalks, parks, and other public spaces. At every stage of housing insecurity, Park’s answer is another restriction on where people are allowed to exist. These policies don’t eliminate homelessness. They simply push unhoused people out of one place and into another, without addressing why they have nowhere to live in the first place.