The issue of where RVs can park and when has gone on for years in the city of San Diego.
“Here we are again in November 2025 and the city has failed to live up to its part of the bargain,” said attorney Ann Menasche as she spoke at a news conference and rally held Tuesday at Mission Bay’s South Shores Boat Launch.
The “bargain” Menasche was talking about is the Bloom settlement, reached after seven years of court battles. The class action lawsuit challenged the city’s enforcement against people living in their vehicles.
Menasche filed a request with the court Monday night, asking that the city be required to follow the terms of the settlement which include:
- Ticket forgiveness of certain citations
- Limiting how police can enforce ordinances against vehicle owners
- Mandated improvements to the city’s safe parking program
More than 20 RV owners, some of them plaintiffs in the Bloom lawsuit, were at Tuesday’s rally. One of them, Kevin Denczek, was there with his dog, Echo.
Denczek said he found himself in a situation most of these RV owners are upset about. That is, they get parking tickets — either for violating the oversized vehicle ordinance, or other parking violations — and the price of the ticket can set off a costly chain reaction.
“I had to pay for one of these tickets. That was my food money, and so for the last three days last month, I didn’t have food,” said Denczek, adding that he did get food for Echo.
Menasche said things were going well after the settlement was reached last October — until July, right after the H Barracks overnight parking site opened in June.
The city now requires people who live in their vehicles to park in that site, or one of its other overnight lots, or be cited. But those lots are not open 24/7, and occupants have to leave them in the daytime. Menasche said moving back and forth day after day gets very expensive.
“It’s (H Barracks) six miles away from where people are in the day. There’s no daytime parking nearby. They’d have to move, go twice a day back and forth. That’s 12 miles a day on the kind of poor mileage you get with an RV. We’re talking $250 to $300 a month,” Menasche said.
Menasche and the RV owners also said police are ticketing them indiscriminately, which violates the Bloom settlement. But San Diego Police Lt. Matthew Botkin, who’s in charge of enforcing the safe parking ordinance, said that’s just not true.
“That is not how we conduct business. There are two different veins in which we write citations,” Botkin said. “The first is Oversized Vehicle Ordinance, or OVO. That involves always a knock on the door, interaction with the person if they’re there.”
The other kind of citations are the ones anyone can get if they’re violating city parking laws.
The city said it rejects the assertions of the new court filing, and in a written statement said the news conference was “misleading at best.”
The statement also said:
“A reasonable coastal location is available right now (H Barracks), and the city encourages people experiencing homelessness in their vehicles to enroll in the Safe Parking Program where they can receive supportive services to find housing.”
The city’s statement also said it intends to “pursue legal action to correct this misinformation” provided in Tuesday's news conference.
Menasche said it’s not clear when the court will act on her filing.
