SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Dozens of residents at the Cali Lake RV Resort in Santa Clarita are facing eviction come January.
According to the LA County Department of Regional Planning, the RV park is in violation of several zoning laws, and in order for it to get back up to code, the owner of the RV park will have to downsize drastically.
County officials say the owner of the RV park, Stewart Silver, added 56 new spaces when he bought the property back in 2018 and expanded without a permit.
Officials are worried that with more people living in the park, which is in a high-risk area for flash floods and wildfires, the evacuation plans set in place won’t be executed properly.
They are also concerned about the park’s septic system and its ability to accommodate the extra spaces. They say if the septic system doesn’t function properly; it poses an environmental risk to the nearby wildlife, including the endangered stickleback fish habitat.
“They are choosing a fish over human beings,” Stewart Silver said, in response to the county’s demands. He says the spaces they want to remove are already built out, and people are already living in them.
People like Judy Wood-Santiago, one of the newer residents at the park.
Wood-Santiago and her family, including her husband and two daughters, were living on the streets before they got to Cali Lake. They were able to get their RV towed into the park about a year ago and haven’t moved since. They say if county officials force them to leave, they would have to abandon their broken-down RV.
“Stewart’s opening another park … and he said anybody here could go there, but we don’t have a means to move our RV. We would have to pack up our cars and live in our cars and van, because we have no way to move this,” Wood-Santiago said.
Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district includes the RV park, recently introduced a motion that aims to keep these residents sheltered. The motion asks state and county officials to come up with solutions, whether that means using county homeless funds to buy newer RV’s for these residents, to relocate to other parks (most parks observe a ban on older RV’s), or tapping into LAHSA resources to get them housed.
“I think it’s really important for us to recognize that while on paper they may not comply, but we have an obligation both morally and ethically to try to … to provide suitable placement when possible,” Barger said.
Barger insists that the county will work hard to make sure none of these residents end up back on the streets but has stopped short of saying they can all stay in the park. We’ll have more on this story as it develops.