“Some are in the streets now, some with friends”

The beach lot at Rose Avenue in now all but free of RVs.

Hand-painted with slogans like “The Spirit of Venice” and “Jesus Was Homeless”, Abraham and Diane’s RV has for years been a symbol of the beach parking lot at the end of Rose Avenue where dozens of RVs parked every day.

But now it’s the only RV in the lot (far right in picture). And they’re not just gone from the lot: dozens, maybe hundreds of RVs are gone from Venice.

A little more than a month after signs went up banning large vehicles from the Rose lot, the ranks of Venice’s vehicle-dwellers have thinned dramatically.

Around Sunset Avenue and 4th Avenue, for so long an epicenter of RVs where dozens of vehicles parked each night, there’s hardly an oversized vehicle to be found. The only RVs in the area are behind the Public Storage and Gold’s Gym on 3rd Avenue, the skid row of RVs where many of Venice’s other vehicle-dwellers won’t go. Even there, numbers have dwindled to a dozen or so vehicles.

So, where have they gone?

Some have started spending their days in the beach parking lots in Santa Monica, just a stone’s throw north of the Rose lot, across the city line. The lots are more expensive—and don’t allow vehicles with handicapped placards in for free—but at least they’re still allowed in.

Others have lost their vehicles. Vehicle-dwellers complain of an LAPD crackdown—with vehicles ticketed and towed for minor infractions—and, once the vehicle is impounded, many of them lack the financial resources to get it out.

“Some are in the streets now, some with friends,” Abraham said.

Diane and Abraham on the boardwalk across from Venice Bistro.

“Some in jail,” Diane said. She told the story of a friend, D, whose van was impounded, with her three dogs inside; D was taken to jail. She’s out now, staying in a friend’s van, but the dogs are van and the dogs are gone.

Others have simply moved on from Venice. Antonio and Tina are gone—Tommy said Tina is back in Palmdale where they met; Antonio is in Highland park with the RV, trying to get the money to go back to join her there.

Tommy is trying to leave as well. He had a deal to sell his van lined up, and planned to move to an apartment in Hollywood or $200 a month, but the housing fell through right before the first of November. Now, he’s hoping his family in Rhode Island can find the money to fly back east, where he could stay in a cousin’s basement for a while.

All his friends who used to live here and work on the boardwalk are gone, he said.

“I’m getting air lifted out of here,” Tommy said. “I’m like the last one left.”

A few RVs still line 3rd Ave.

Even those still trying to work on the boardwalk, like Tommy and Abraham and Diane, face a new, longer commute. While Abraham and Diane have an RV small enough that it’s still allowed into the Rose lot, most RVs are too big, which means their owners have to cart all the supplies for their livelihoods to the beach—an arduous process that Tommy was forced to undertake for almost a year, after his van broke down last fall. Some vendors can’t do it themselves, and pay someone else to help them. Some now find it yet another reason to leave Venice.

(Post forthcoming on carting his stand to the beach.)

Abraham and Diane, though, are staying. Abraham said a year from now, he expects to be right where he has been for year, painting on sacks on across from Venice Bistro.

“I think there’ll be an even bigger community of RVs here in a year,” Abraham said. “Because of the economy. There’s two wars going on. That’s the reality.”