FREMONT — The Fremont City Council on Tuesday night unanimously passed a ban on RV parking, but by Wednesday morning nobody camping on Albrae Street had heard about it.
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“They’re going to keep trying to get rid of us,” homeless resident Joey Alvarez, 59, said on Albrae Street. “We’re taxpayers too.”
Alvarez was parked on Cushing Parkway near an auto mall until last week, when he said city workers handed him a paper saying he had to leave. He brought his RV and small SUV with him to Albrae Street, along Interstate Highway 880 — a place he’s camped before for the last year or so.
He said he wasn’t aware the City Council the night before passed the 72-hour parking ban, which also prohibits parking in residential neighborhoods and public property such as churches and schools. It goes into effect on Dec. 12.
“They’re just making it hard on us on purpose,” Alvarez said. “Nobody’s out here because they want to be.”
Fremont joins a growing list of cities statewide that have aggressively ramped up homeless sweeps and policies after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s orders earlier this year. Similar actions have been taken in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sunnyvale and more.
Vehicles along Albrae Street on Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in Fremont, Calif. Fremont city officials have a passed a new RV parking ban which limits parking on city streets to a 72 hour limit. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
Across the street at the Fremont Honda Kawasaki Suzuki motorcycle dealership, salesman Bill Keys said the city should “bring out the bulldozers and get them out of here.”
Keys, who grew up in Fremont and now lives in Castro Valley, has worked at the dealership for the past 18 years. He said he’s watched the environment over the past two years in front of his shop along Albrae Street degrade into a “ghetto,” with dozens of RVs and homeless residents setting up temporary campsites for themselves beside the roadway.
Keys called the new ban “a good idea,” though he added that the city should find a place where people living on the street can go.
He said homeless people have left garbage, feces and other waste all around the shop, and at one point he said he witnessed someone dump and abandon raw sewage in his dealership’s parking lot from their RV. Keys also said that his customers complain about driving to the shop and witnessing the many homeless residents’ living conditions where there are no public bathrooms and no public dumpsters available to the unhoused.
“They don’t care about the poor person trying to make an honest living. They don’t care about the lives they’re disrupting,” said Keys, who added that he’s “getting out of the Bay Area” and looking to buy property on King Island in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in King Island.
Another neighbor in the area, homeless RV resident Tim Geist, said he’s lived around Fremont for the last four or five years, moving from place to place. He also recently got kicked out of the nearby auto mall before settling in front of the motorcycle dealership. The new RV ban was also news to him on Wednesday morning.
Enforcement logistics for the ban, such as where the city will possibly tow vehicles and where residents could be able to reclaim any items, was not immediately clear. Geist said nearly everything about the ban was unclear to him.
“We don’t know anything about that,” Geist, 57, said. “They don’t tell us.”