Torrance May Curb Street Parking of RVs

A new kind of civil strife is stirring along the tidy bungalow-lined streets of Torrance, spawned by some residents’ efforts to keep recreational vehicles off the streets.

Anger-laced e-mails and letters are piling up at City Hall -- 392 pages so far in a litany of neighbor against neighbor.

When one woman wrote that her family should be allowed to park its 38-foot-long Weekend Warrior on the driveway or on the street, a neighborhood leader responded snappily.

“You truly come off as a selfish boor that is only thinking of yourself,” he wrote.

“This place is beginning to look more and more like a Third World country,” another critic bristled. “GET THOSE MONSTROSITIES OFF THE STREET.”

Several Torrance RV owners -- some of whom paid $60,000 or more for their vehicles -- retorted that they feel under siege.

“I had a neighbor turn against me as a result of your proposed new ordinance. You have ‘pitted’ a neighbor against me,” one RV owner complained.

“LET’S ALL LIVE AND LET LIVE,” implored another owner in an e-mail to the city, which may limit RV parking on residential streets.

The tug of war over property rights in South Bay suburbia has all the passion of such contentious issues as water allocations or endangered species laws.

RV owners say parking restrictions would infringe on their right to park their own property in front of their own homes.

Those without RVs counter that bulky trailers and motor homes are not only safety hazards but also eyesores.

Other area cities have rules to curb the practice of parking recreational vehicles on streets. Los Angeles passed restrictions this month, and the Lakewood City Council voted Aug. 8 to put some new rules before voters in November.

But those debates pale next to the vitriolic exchanges in Torrance, where the City Council could vote Tuesday on restrictions that will be made public in advance of that meeting.

“As a city, we are growing and creating an image as a ‘prosperous, higher-end’ neighborhood with family roots,” said an e-mail from a woman who complained that RV street parking “makes us look like Trailer Park USA.”

A historically conservative city about 20 miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles, Torrance is largely white, Asian and middle class, the bulk of it wedged between the beach cities, Carson and the wealthy Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Under current city regulations, drivers must move all vehicles every 72 hours, but some move them only a few feet at a time, effectively storing them on the streets, neighbors say.

Some puzzle over why the RV debate is surfacing now, when Californians and RVs have coexisted for decades. Clues can be found along streets like Macafee Road in south Torrance, where soaring house prices have made residents more conscious of the value and aesthetics of their homes -- and less tolerant of RVs parked at the curb.

Like many streets here, Macafee is lined with one-story stucco homes dating to the 1950s and ‘60s -- a time when the defense and aerospace industries were booming and young couples bought homes. Now, new families are enlarging the houses or sometimes squeezing new homes onto postage-stamp lots.

“We’re very much in each others’ lives, because that’s how we’re settled on the land,” said Don Waldie, a Lakewood spokesman who writes extensively about the Southland’s cultural history.

In the last few years as super-sized RVs with names like Prowler and Raptor have appeared in neighborhoods, some people have become irritated at having to peer around them, fearful of hitting a child darting into the street or a car hidden by an RV.

“They can ruin the whole outlook and ambience of the neighborhood. They belong in the desert,” said Terry Bauer, 62, who has lived in her Macafee Road home for 25 years.

James Rudolph, who also lives on Macafee, paid $40,000 for a 37-foot Keystone Raptor.

“When you own property, I feel you should have the right to park it in front of your own house,” he said.

He found that storage rates could top his $212 monthly payment for the RV. To ease tensions with neighbors, he drove the vehicle to Idaho this month and left it on land he owns there.

Fred Saunders, who owns a theatrical labor service, said he uses his 24-foot RV as his office and drives it to work sites. He said he sees no way he could put the vehicle in storage.

If a street parking ban is approved, Saunders vowed, he will pave his lawn and store his RV right on his property.

Joel Garreau, author of the book “Edge City” and a scholar of suburban trends, said residents may be looking to Torrance officials to impose the types of controls that community associations enforce in Orange County and other areas with newer suburbs.

He and others speculate that as home prices rise, people who might normally seek more upscale cities are moving to or staying in Torrance, and some who long for second homes may buy RVs instead.

Torrance officials have tried to appease both sides in the disagreement.

A city study last winter found that RV storage space is scarce, with rates from $100 to $259 a month, depending on size. When some RV owners said they could not afford that, the city proposed “grandfathering” current owners, exempting them from new restrictions. Critics objected, so the City Council ordered revisions, which are to be posted on the city website, www.ci.torrance.ca.us.

Some believe that the RV battle helped unseat Mayor Dan Walker in the June election, which was dominated by complaints about traffic and density. The new mayor, former Councilman Frank Scotto, abstained from previous council RV votes because he owns a tow-truck company.

The Lakewood rhetoric was more muted than in Torrance. But resident Beth McDonough said she learned from a reporter that neighbors had nicknamed her family’s bright red trailer “the hemorrhoid,” and the label and a photograph appeared on page one of the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

McDonough cringed. She wonders who complained and why her neighbors did not speak with her directly.

In Torrance, Linda England said she has wrestled with the right approach. “If you report it to the city, you assume you can remain anonymous,” she said.

And as cities encourage public comment by e-mail, debates can evolve in a civic cyberspace in which no one need talk to a neighbor.

England said she has suggested that the city set up a citizens commission so people could air disagreements and develop solutions. “Maybe we’d benefit from some neighboring classes,” she added.