Mountain View celebrates history of safe parking program at fundraising event

Looking to ease the hardships of homelessness, one of Mountain View’s most impactful service providers celebrated the success of its safe parking program at an inaugural fundraising breakfast at the Mountain View Community Center on March 15.

Attended by about 60 people, the fundraiser brought together the “movers and shakers” of Move Mountain View, a nonprofit organization that provides safe parking sites and case management services for some of the city’s most vulnerable residents: its vehicle dwellers.

Move Mountain View began as a small pilot program in 2018. Two churches in Mountain View offered up three spaces in their lots for people living in their RVs and cars. Since then, the program has expanded to a network of nine sites that also includes Palo Alto, with about 130 safe parking spaces available for vehicle dwellers.

“I think for the first two years of existence, we saw a total of maybe under 20 individuals. And then in 2020, boom, all kinds of municipal lots opened and now Move Mountain View has four large safe parking lots and five congregational lots,” said Cheryl Thieu, a Move Mountain View board member.

From its modest beginnings, the program now serves about 300 people each year, Thieu said, adding that a substantial number of participants have since moved into more stable and supportive housing. However, as the number of participants has increased, so has the complexity of their cases. “And to be honest, our fundraising base has not expanded to match all the needs,” Thieu said.

The fundraiser breakfast was a step towards filling these gaps. But it also served as an opportunity to recognize community leaders and organizations that have contributed to the success of Move Mountain View over the years.

Brian Leong, pastor of Lord’s Grace Christian Church, provided the opening remarks and described the early history of how Move Mountain View got off the ground. Long before the safe lots opened, the idea was planted by a question that someone asked of him at a conference in 2008.

“If your church burned down tomorrow, would anybody care?” the speaker asked at the time.

The answer was no, Leong said. “Nobody would care because I knew that as a pastor of a church here in Mountain View that had been here for many years, we weren’t making an impact to the community. And probably if our church burned down, nobody would have any idea,” he said.

For the next several years, Leong contemplated the question, meeting with a group of like-minded pastors who came together in prayer seeking an answer to do something big and meaningful for the community. Eventually, Leong reached out to an elected official, Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian, asking what he and his prayer group – who represented 10,000 congregants – could do for the city and county.

Simitian proposed the idea of a safe parking lot, based on what some churches were doing in Santa Barbara. Leong was receptive to the idea, but unsure how his fellow pastors would react, he said. When he brought up the idea at their next prayer meeting, they all said yes.

Simitian, who received a special award at the event, corroborated many of these details, while adding his own recollections. “There were some state laws that made it hard to provide what really is essential in making safe parking work, which is 24/7. If folks really can’t call that place their own 24/7, it just doesn’t happen,” Simitian said.

At the time, Mountain View city officials worried that all-day safe parking operations would trigger state mobile home residency laws, and originally proposing that vehicles would have to clear out between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day. Special legislation, however, allowed Santa Clara County to construct and operate homeless shelters without having to follow all the rules of California’s Mobilehome Parks Act or the Mobilehome Residency Law.

With the county’s involvement, the churches could offer the safe parking sites as temporary shelters, getting around some of the state’s landlord-tenancy laws. The county also spread the word, asking cities to offer up their lots. Mountain View was an early supporter of the initiative.

“We didn’t get a whole lot of lots, but we got more than we had. And that’s why today, we have a partnership with Mountain View that serves those 133 households (or) ‘carholds.’ And essentially, it’s become one of the largest, if not the largest, safe parking provider in our county,” Simitian said.

The program, however, was not without its detractors, as described by the Rev. Eileen Altman from First Congregational Church in Palo Alto. The churches received pushback from neighbors who were concerned about having vehicle dwellers close to their homes. The City Council also was a bit hesitant at first, Altman said. But following the lead of Mountain View, Palo Alto got on board.

The collaboration between civic leaders, congregations and social service providers has garnered national attention too, as Altman has received inquiries from other ministries that would like to try something similar in their communities.

“The seeds that you are planting and we are planting together in this community can flower in other places as well,” she said.