Nick Welsh is perhaps the only journalist left in town sympathetic to the homeless and the indigent, and I am hesitant to correct his story , but I think I should point out a couple of its errors.
(1) Nick makes me the center of the story. In point of fact, RV dwellers were well-organized and rebellious long before I came on the scene via an organization called Homes on Wheels, headed by Nancy McCraidie. The group I run, the Committee for Social Justice (CSJ), joined them back in 2005 in what was known as the HOW suit, and which resulted in a defeat for the city's earliest attempt to bar RVs from the streets.
(2) Nick is therefore wrong to point to the futility of CSJ's efforts. We succeeded back in 2007, when the suit was settled, and, we also back then, though everyone seems to have forgotten it, designed and brought into being the earliest version of the Safe Parking Program, which is still in existence today. We also had a hand in the development of the warming centers and, more recently, the hot weather cooling centers. Moreover, in 2009 we invited the ACLU into Santa Barbara to investigate the city's treatment of the disabled, and this resulted in what was called the Ryden Agreement via which the city agreed to modify its behavior in relation to ticketing and housing. More important still, we seem to have recently succeeded in getting the city to modify its habit of towing RVs without prior warning at the drop of a prejudiced hat on the flimsiest of excuses — a policy that may yet, quite possibly, cost it a large sum of money should it be looked at unsympathetically by the left-leaning Ninth Circuit, where our suit has been filed.