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FREMONT — City crews early Thursday morning swept in and cleared out what was left of a once-burgeoning shantytown of truckers and homeless vehicle dwellers along a roughly 1,700-foot stretch of Kato Road near Tesla, Seagate and other companies.
Later in the morning, a large truck with a flat trailer full of pallets bearing brown boulders about two feet tall pulled up along the road’s dirt shoulder in front of Seagate. Workers unloaded the boulders using forklifts and tractors, spacing them along the shoulder to prevent any large vehicles from parking there again.
The crackdown on illegal parking came in the wake of this news organization’s story last month about a 1.3-mile stretch of Kato Road where a growing number of big-rig drivers over the years have used the road shoulder as an improvised truck stop while waiting to haul away new electric cars off the assembly line as well as other materials from the Tesla plant.
Over the past several months, many homeless people living in RVs and trailers began parking among the truckers after getting booted from other spots in Fremont or surrounding cities.
Thursday’s placement of no-parking signs and boulders along Kato Road was the first of three phases designed to clear the entire 1.3-mile area where truckers and RVs had converged, officials said.
Lynn Shipman, 55, who lives in an RV with her boyfriend along Kato, said she thinks city officials are only cracking down because they don’t want to see homeless people in the area.
“I don’t think they minded the truckers, they’ve been here a long, long time,” Shipman said. “Because we’re in their eye, just a constant reminder that there are homeless people around,” she added.
But city officials insist they’ve simply heard too many complaints to ignore the problem any longer and noted it’s not safe for people to park or live there because the area is sandwiched between Kato, where cars often exceed the 40 mph speed limit, and Interstate 880.
“The complaints have been about traffic safety concerns and property damage, trash, debris, parked vehicles along the side of the roadway, and muddy streets,” Fremont spokeswoman Cheryl Golden wrote in an email.
She said “multiple businesses” along Kato Road, including Tesla and Seagate, “have complained about this issue.”
Electric signboards and A-frame signs warning people about the coming parking changes were put up by the city on Jan. 27.
Although Golden told this news organization police would start enforcing the parking restrictions on Feb. 6, one man interviewed for this story said he received $123 parking tickets on his trailer and pickup truck Feb. 1.
As a result of the warning notices, signs and some ticketing, many truckers started moving out of the area entirely over the past 10 days.
But many of the homeless RV and trailer dwellers, along with a few remaining truckers, simply moved farther north or south along Kato, to areas where the city has not yet enforced parking rules, creating new little communities.
The boulders cost the city about $2,500, and crews will continue installing them Friday, Golden said.
“We need to create some type of physical barrier so that a large vehicle or truck cannot get in to park, and a sign wouldn’t do that alone,” Golden said.
The boulders and signs are part of a pilot program that will be evaluated for “cost, effectiveness and any relocation impacts,” Golden said.
The city could then follow up by breaking up other clusters of vehicle dwellers north and south of the cleared road shoulder. That second phase could begin as early as a week or two from now, Golden indicated.
As for the homeless people in the area, who may soon be kicked out for good, Golden said city representatives will try to assist them.
“We’ll have our human services staff go out and talk to them, see what services we have available, provide resources, do what we can to help,” she said.
Tesla didn’t respond to requests for comment on this story, though Golden said the city has “been very clear with them that vehicle carriers/trucks will not be able to park on Kato Road.”
The Fremont City Council in September approved building a controversial homeless navigation center behind city hall, with the goal of helping up to 90 people a year find permanent housing.
The city also has a permanent homeless shelter, Sunrise Village, and its senior center doubles as a winter overnight warming shelter from November through March.
Shipman said she hopes the city considers establishing a safe parking area for RV dwellers and people who have to live in their cars.
If the city continues clearing the rest of the road, Shipman said, she and her boyfriend might try to find a spot in Newark.
“It’s hard to feel secure when you have to hop around,” she said.
