California law softens parking ticket fees for homeless, indigent drivers

California’s latest homelessness fix is barely dry — and it’s already lighting a fuse.

A new state law that kicked in on New Year’s Day lets homeless and indigent drivers wipe away parking tickets — pitched as compassion to keep minor fines from snowballing into debt and car loss.

On the ground, critics say it drops into cities where parking enforcement is already gutted — and vehicle dwelling has quietly hardened into a de facto policy, not a stopgap.

“Let’s face it. Enablement is the primary policy directive for dealing with homelessness in California,” said Barry Cassily, a Venice resident who has spent years battling long-term illegal RV parking in the dense beach neighborhood. “We, the public, tax ourselves by the billions in an attempt to humanely deal with the problem, but only a trickle of that money reaches the streets. Nothing changes.”

Under the new law, cities and parking agencies may reduce or waive tickets based on “extenuating circumstances,” explicitly including homelessness or financial hardship. Drivers can seek relief at any point, even years after ticket deadlines have passed.

For drivers deemed indigent, penalties are significantly softened. Monthly payments can be capped at $25. Late fees and penalty assessments are frozen while a driver is enrolled. Processing fees are limited to $5. DMV registration holds must be lifted simply for signing up.

Miss a payment, and enforcement pauses for 45 days.

In Los Angeles, City Hall took its foot off the gas during COVID — and Los Angeles has been stuck with the wreckage ever since.

As the pandemic hit, LA slashed parking enforcement, halted towing for vehicle dwellers and piled on amnesty programs instead of consequences.

RV encampments exploded during the enforcement freeze — and even after COVID faded, the rules never snapped back. Neighborhood streets became long-term storage yards, and what was sold as temporary compassion hardened into a permanent policy of non-enforcement.

In East Gardena and West Rancho Dominguez, large RV clusters have cycled through neighborhoods, cleared from one block only to reappear on another.

Along Avalon Boulevard, business owners have tied the encampments to illegal dumping, fires, and theft.

One business owner said his building was stripped of copper wiring and piping in a single weekend — about $100,000 in damage that forced him to move, he told ABC7.

“I had no water, no power. They cut it at the pole,” he said in earlier interviews. “They trashed the place.”

A similar pattern played out on Jefferson Boulevard in Playa del Rey, where the Ballona Wetlands RV encampment stood for years as one of the region’s most visible examples of unchecked vehicle dwelling.

Dozens of RVs lined the roadway, with waste dumped into sensitive wetlands and fire hazards created by generators and heaters. The encampment persisted under then–lefty DSA City Councilmember Mike Bonin, whose office opposed parking enforcement and declined to authorize action against illegal RV parking in the area.

The area was finally cleaned up in 2023 under Councilwoman Traci Park, who lifted the towing ban, stepped up parking enforcement, and ordered major RV removals and debris cleanups.

To Cassily, that history is exactly why the new law alarms him. He sees it not as a course correction, but as the state locking in the very failures that allowed encampments to grow unchecked.

“Now the state institutionalizes the consequences of this dysfunction in a perverse version of ‘caring,’” he said. “People with untreated drug addictions are literally assisted by government policy in rotting to death in their cars outside people’s homes. I’m sorry, but this is not caring. It is madness.”

On the block level, the impacts are blunt: blocked driveways, obstructed sight lines, trash, human waste, fires, and oversized RVs parked for weeks where families walk and children play.

“If I park next to an RV in a no-parking zone and I get a ticket I’m forced to pay, but the RV doesn’t, I’m being targeted based on a perception of my ability to pay,” said Susan Collins a Sherman Oaks homeowner who is a member of the local neighborhood council. “That’s discriminatory.”

Collins said the same imbalance shows up in citations for expired registration and lack of insurance.

“One demographic is being held to a completely different standard,” she said. “Laws are supposed to be enforced based on whether a violation occurred — not who the driver is.”