SAN DIEGO — As an 8-year-old boy steered his bicycle in figure eights, his mother piled three plates with pizza and pineapple slices from an outdoor kitchen shared with more than a dozen other families who call this parking lot home.
She carried the plates past her family’s sedan — their last asset and, until recently, their only shelter — and placed the dinner inside a recreational vehicle assigned to them for the next six months. After dinner, she helped the third grader with his homework, then made sure he showered and brushed his teeth before bed. The next morning, she drove the 10 miles to her son’s school, where she works as a part-time site monitor. Their belongings and beds and private bathroom, meanwhile, remained secure at the city-owned lot, where homeless families like theirs find temporary stability.
“He likes it here,” said the mother, M., who is being referred to by her first initial to protect her family’s privacy. “We can actually cook. I waste less money. There’s a lot to like.”
Since late last year, M. and her family have been living in parking lots opened by the city of San Diego, the local school district and a nonprofit partner. Priced out of San Diego’s housing market, they now call the RV lot their temporary home as they meet with a caseworker who helps them search for more permanent housing.
Family homelessness hit a record high in 2024, as the end of federal pandemic assistance and rising inflation pushed more families with children and unaccompanied youth out of their homes. A sluggish labor market and high housing costs have further strained family budgets. And now, as the number and visibility of unhoused families continue to climb, a handful of school districts are considering their parking lots as a way to shelter homeless students and their families.
The city of San Diego began experimenting in 2017, when it partnered with nonprofit Jewish Family Service (JFS) to convert the first of what are now four parking lots into safe places to sleep. It added its first lot prioritizing families in 2023. A few months later, as the city pushed a sweeping ban on public camping, officials with San Diego Unified School District approached the city with the idea of turning a vacant elementary and other district properties into temporary shelters.
The model is now spreading beyond California. In Ohio, the Cincinnati school district later this spring will open its first safe parking lot for families at a downtown elementary school. The teachers union for Fayette County Public Schools, in neighboring Kentucky, has asked its school board to follow Cincinnati’s lead.
San Diego’s parking program has drawn some opposition, including from nearby residents and private developers who worry about crime and impact on property values. Progressives here also wonder, quietly, whether the program diverts attention and resources from addressing why families lose their housing in the first place. The Trump administration, meanwhile, also has criticized safe parking lots as “dystopian” and “reprehensible” — even as it plans for major cuts to long-term housing programs. With the exception of the Rose Canyon lot where M. and her family are staying, San Diego’s safe parking sites do not offer RVs or other amenities beyond security and portable bathrooms to families.
But some advocates for homeless people argue the safe parking sites are an effective, if highly imperfect, short-term fix, offering autonomy and dignity to people as they search for more permanent housing.
“Parking lots are a terrible option, but there are options that are worse,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives for Poverty Solutions, a University of Michigan project to promote economic mobility. “Often the only other option is literal homelessness, in your car and on the streets. This creates a middle ground where you can get families into the system, where you can try to meet their needs and in a place that keeps them safe.”
The San Diego school district says students can’t learn unless they’re safe and healthy. It refers families to city shelters, but those don’t have nearly enough space to accommodate the need.
“The goal is for this to be a way station,” Kristy Drake, the district’s liaison for homeless and foster youth, said of the school district’s lot. “When families drive onto this lot,” Drake added, “they come into this wider network of support and resources. The goal is to move on. Hopefully no one’s there too long.”
Never before have so many families in the U.S. lived without stable housing, according to the most recent data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Its annual homeless census from January 2024 found nearly 260,000 people in families with children experiencing homelessness — a jump of more than 50 percent since before the pandemic. And those figures are likely undercounts: Experts often note that HUD’s numbers don’t capture “hidden” homelessness, such as families who sometimes pay out of pocket to stay in hotels and motels or couch-surf with friends and families to avoid the streets. And while the agency still hasn’t released homeless numbers for 2025, early data from school districts and states around the country suggest youth homelessness continues to rise.
In California, family homelessness has risen 14 percent since before the pandemic.
“There’s this huge amount of instability that exists for children in this country that goes unrecognized,” said Erb-Downward. “Pretty much the only point of true stability they have is their school.”
M., who grew up in nearby Calexico and has lived in San Diego since 2012, lost her housing after the expiration of the subsidy her family received through a federal rental assistance program Congress created during the pandemic. The program ran out of cash last year, and M.’s subsidy expired just as her landlord planned to hike their rent by nearly a third.
“It was like, there’s no way we can do that,” said M. “We tried to look for an affordable place,” she added. “They’re all asking three times rent and a 650 credit score. That’s impossible right now.”
In San Diego County, there are roughly 1,500 people in families experiencing homelessness, but only a handful of emergency shelters offer space for children and parents. San Diego, the county and several surrounding cities have recently closed their waiting lists for housing vouchers that subsidize the cost of rent. M. did not want to leave the city, but had few options.
As the family packed their belongings into storage, M. contemplated asking friends to allow her son to crash on their couch while she and her husband slept in their vehicle. But then the principal at her son’s school learned of their situation and encouraged M. to sign up as the first family to move into a new safe parking lot at the former Central Elementary School.
A security guard station separates the gates to the Central Elementary lot from construction on a busy boulevard in the eastern City Heights neighborhood. So far, 15 families have used one of the 40 spots for vehicles there. In a pair of old portable classrooms, the district and JFS added microwaves for families to prepare food. Parents can meet with case managers while students access Wi-Fi to do homework or play on the school’s old soccer field.
For M. and some other parents, the lots are preferable to shelters, many of which keep hard curfews, require that minors be supervised at all times and lack quiet space to do homework, said Jesse Mendez, director of the safe parking program for JFS.
By contrast, the Rose Canyon lot provides each family with their own trailer. The city and JFS also recently added the covered communal area, which includes a small library, dining and study area, charging station for electronics and the shared kitchen.
“Here, you’re choosing who gets to sleep next to you and in a place where you’re safe,” Mendez said. “Kids end up here by no choice of their own. I don’t want them to even realize they’re experiencing homelessness.”
Not long after the Rose Canyon lot opened for families in 2023, school district leaders began to consider converting the lot at the Central Elementary school campus into a safe parking site. Eventually the district plans to develop the school into affordable housing for teachers, custodians and other district employees, but construction crews aren’t expected to break ground for years. In San Diego, salaries for many district employees are low: Hourly school staff, like classroom aides and bus monitors, can earn as little as $1,832.64 a month, with median rent topping $2,200 for a one-bedroom apartment as of January. A two-bedroom apartment would cost M.’s family a median of nearly $3,000 a month.
“We have this vacant land, sitting in the middle of a city struggling with the problem of homelessness,” said the school district’s Drake. “Why not put up this land? We just ask that our families get first dibs on spaces.”
As she waited for funding from the city to materialize, Drake began calling every family in her database that listed their residence as either unsheltered or in a hotel or motel — anyone who might be living in their car.
When funding finally came through just before Thanksgiving 2025, she quickly could refer more than two dozen families to the lot. It’s a subset of homeless families who are eligible, notes Drake — families must have their own vehicle to qualify, meaning they need enough resources to own one but do not have enough to pay rent.
The lot at Central Elementary is open to families each day from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. There’s a row of portable restrooms, but families must wait until a nearby YMCA opens and allows them to shower. They have access to its food pantry as well.
M. said she vastly prefers the Rose Canyon lot to the one at the school, though. There’s often construction noise from work on an apartment complex next door, she said, and “the area’s not great. There’s a lot of homeless people on the streets there. It matters, the location.”
Last year, San Diego County recorded a dramatic drop — 72 percent — in the number of families living without shelter. Some homeless and housing advocates say the city’s 2023 ban on public camping just pushed more homeless families out of sight.
Yet research on JFS’s safe parking model suggests it does make a difference for families longer-term: A 2024 study found that 40 percent of households that stayed at a JFS site between March 2020 and November 2021 had moved on to more stable housing, either permanent or temporary. Clients who had used both the parking program and emergency shelters “highly preferred” the lots, the study said. More recently, JFS reported that 53 percent of all households in the program and 76 percent at the Rose Canyon lot found more stable housing. (The national average for people moving from homeless services into permanent housing hovered just below 34 percent last year, according to HUD. And across San Diego, shelters generally reported a similar rate of only 9 percent, the study noted.)
JFS enrolls households for an initial 60 days, as case managers work with them to set goals and make progress toward stable housing. Many families stay longer.
In March, that assistance finally paid off for Dezarae S. and her family.
She and her siblings spent most of their childhood homeless, living in San Diego’s emergency shelters, on the streets or in their mother’s car. Mendez, now with JFS, first met Dezarae years ago during one of her family’s stays at a shelter. They met again recently when Dezarae — whose surname is withheld to protect her children’s privacy — moved with her husband and their four kids onto the Rose Canyon lot.
Her twin sons, 2, are both autistic and met with specialists at the lot to prepare for preschool. The youngest boy, a 1-year-old, is a light sleeper. Her oldest daughter, 4, was potty trained in the RV.
“It doesn’t feel like we live in an RV,” said Dezarae last month, adding that her childhood memories fueled her motivation to keep her own kids out of shelters and off the streets.
Then, after three years on the city’s waiting list for a housing voucher, they finally secured one and moved into a three-bedroom apartment in late March.
“My kids are my world, and my kids are still happy,” Dezarae said. “We do everything in our power to keep their childhood innocence.”
Other districts are trying to help families experiencing homelessness by following San Diego’s lead. The Cincinnati Public Schools safe sleep lot is scheduled to open with a dozen spots; the district will hire security to monitor the lot seven days a week and build a structure to house a private bathroom, laundry and shower facilities.
Rebeka Beach, head of homeless services for Cincinnati schools, visited safe parking programs in San Diego and at Long Beach Community College before adopting the idea.
Beach acknowledged that the safe parking program was just a stopgap, with many more families needing help. She also spends more than $50,000 each year to place students and their families in short-term hotels and motels. “We know it’s not a solution. It’s just a bridge and response to an immediate crisis.”
Educators in Kentucky’s Fayette County Public Schools, which reported more than 1,100 students as homeless this year, shared a similar message. “Schools can’t take care of everything, but we feel we can help where we can,” Laura Hartke, an organizer with American Federation of Teachers-120, a local union, who is encouraging her district to adopt the model, told local media.
M., meanwhile, continues to weigh her options. She considered moving her family back to her hometown of Calexico, more than 100 miles away, but that would have meant leaving her job. The housing voucher program, now closed, isn’t an option for her family like it was for Dezarae’s. And with gas prices climbing and a high monthly bill to store their belongings, it’s difficult to save
“There’s no getting ahead,” she said.
But they find free ways to enjoy time as a family, at the beach and nearby tide pools. M. recently got her son’s bike out of the family’s storage unit too.
Watching him ride the figure eights, she said, “We just got to make it work.”
Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at morton@hechingerreport.org.
This story about homeless students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.