County Fairgrounds Provide Overnight Parking for Homeless

The city of Santa Rosa, California, has “cut against the trend” by implementing a safe parking program at the county fairgrounds lot. What has your surface parking lot done for you lately?

1 minute read

March 16, 2014, 11:00 AM PDT

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


Lee Romney reports on Santa Rosa’s safe parking program, which allows homeless individuals with cars—which amounts to an estimated 20 percent of the 3,300 homeless residents of Sonoma County, where Santa Rosa is located.

“The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors created the safe parking program in late January as an emergency response to freezing weather, making it one of just a handful on the West Coast. (Similar programs operate in Santa Barbara County, San Luis Obispo and San Diego County.)”

“But lawmakers here went one step further. In what Sonoma County advocates for the homeless called a "pinch me" moment and a "watershed," supervisors removed a ban on the "use of vehicles for human habitation" from the county's anti-camping ordinance.”

Saturday, March 8, 2014 in Los Angeles Times

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