'the whole purpose of this group is to get rid of RVs'

The signs went up on Monday morning, pounded into the dirt with the authority of a tiger pissing on a tree your dog had fancied his own.

No Parking: Vehicles Over 6 Feet High ------>

"It's for visibility," the workman said. "At the intersections."

When the trucks left, the signs covered a couple of blocks around Sunset Ave and 4th Ave--the epicenter of Venice's RV community.

At least 50 percent of the area's mobile home dwellers park their vehicles within a four-block radius of Sunset and 4th--near the Gold's Gym, Public Storage, and parking lots, and away from residences. The signs put at least half that area of-limits--no vehicles over six feet tall allowed within 100 ft of a corner: no SUVs, no pickups, no vans, and especially no RVs. They were being squeezed out.

Visibility isn't really a problem in the neighborhood. The roads are flat, with four-way stops at just about every intersection. But the Venice Stakeholders Association put in a complaint to the Department of Transportation. Fifty complaints, actually. No study is required to determine if visibility is a problem. When residents complain, LADOT puts up signs.

For decades, Venice has been home to a large community of people living in vehicles. Many of them work on the boardwalk, selling what they can make with their own hands--artwork, henna tattoos, tarot card readings.

During the day, the lot at the end of Rose Ave serves as the community nexus, a place from which to move supplies to a vending spot on the boardwalk, or to relax by the beach. But at night, the lot closes, and the community migrates inland to sleep at Sunset at 4th.

The Stakeholders Association, however, wants the RVs out. They complained to police, who conduct raids in the middle of the night, banging on the sides of vans and yelling at occupants to come out. They applied to restrict overnight parking to Venice residents, got shot down, sued, shot down again. So, in the meantime, they're trying to move them off the intersections.

As Mo Blorfroshan, LADOT Western District transportation engineer, the man responsible for actually putting up the signs, put it, "The whole purpose of this group is to get rid of RVs."

And they show no sign of giving up. Just this week, in response to pressure from Rosendahl, the Los Angeles City Council passed amendments to the city's vehicle ordinance that will make it easier for police to remove vehicles more than 22 ft long or 7 ft tall.

What would happen to the community of RV-dwellers if and when they're banned from the streets they've called home for decades?

Tommy, my friend who parks his van on 4th Ave and works as a henna artist on the boardwalk, said, "You'll probably find a lot of RVs that somehow got Venice parking stickers. Just like you find a lot now that have handicapped stickers so they can get into the lot for free."*

Still, a very real possibility exists that this community will soon be sent into exodus, its members dispersing and taking with them a way of life that has been as essential a part of Venice history as the canals or the boardwalk itself.

So, as long as this community continues to exist, my goal is to document it in as great detail as i can manage. Where they sleep, what they eat, where they shit, what they do with their down time, how they make their money, how much they make and how they spend it, their pleasure and pains: what life is like living in a vehicle and working on the Venice Boardwalk.

*A note on attributions: Because many people who live in RVs and work on the boardwalk are understandably nervous about drawing attention to themselves, I have agreed not to use whole names, and in some cases have changed names altogether.