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OPINION
Park Nowhere
How San Diego Fines the Poor for Existing
There were nights I slept in my car — not because I didn’t have a place to live, but because I didn’t have a legal place to park.
In City Heights, where low-income housing rises without parking garages, the city has created a system that punishes people not for wrongdoing, but for existing in the wrong ZIP code. They invest in enforcement, not infrastructure. They write tickets instead of building solutions.
Parking officers patrol like vultures. I remember one in particular — same car, same woman — who gave me a ticket nearly every day for a month. I recognized her from the morning she watched me unload garden soil into the front yard. I was working to beautify the neighborhood. The sweeper hadn’t even come that week. But because the sign restricted parking for another ten minutes, she silently printed a ticket and drove off.
It didn’t matter that I’d spent an hour circling for a spot. There were no garages, no paid lots, and no spaces to rent. My choices were to leave my bumper six inches into a red zone, park half a mile away, or give up and sleep in my car.
The first night I did that, I called parking enforcement and asked, sincerely: What am I supposed to do when there’s no legal place to park within a mile…
