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# They camp anyway, why not charge ‘em?
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/they-camp-anyway-why-not-charge-em-editor/
- Published: 2003-09-10T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T02:52:27.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Downtown, #archive-import, Homeless

I am a 25-year resident, homeowner in Santa Monica, Los Angeles apartment house owner, owner of a small business that employs five people that supports about 15 people.

While I was recently camping in Jackson Hole for 14 days it suddenly hit me how much I enjoyed camping and that I could do this full time, and it was only costing me about $12 per day to camp in Jenny Lake. I was living essentially as a homeless person in one of the most beautiful locations on earth.

I reluctantly returned to Santa Monica and noticed how many happy campers we had at Palisades Park, on the Promenade and practically everywhere in the downtown area in what used to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And it hit me. Why don’t we charge for camping in Santa Monica just like our national parks do? Why are we giving it away for free?

The way to improve on our homeless problem is to charge a Santa Monica camping fee to everyone living on our streets and parks. We should charge say, $10 day and night per adult to sleep in our parks, doorways and sidewalks everywhere. We feed them, clean up after them when they use our bathrooms, etc., but we get nothing from them for providing these services. If in fact we have 2,000 homeless living in Santa Monica — it smells like there may be more — we could get $20,000 per day or about $7.3 million annually from this revenue source. If they don’t pay, we have our meter maids call the police and escort them out of our small town in a special paddy wagon.

I assume that some of the people sleeping in cars and elsewhere could afford this, but some couldn’t. So this would require that our local homeless advocates, the churches and the City Council, our neighboring cities wouldn’t mind “adopting a homeless” to provide that amount of support. The city is going to spend about $8 million for the new OPCC hotel for the homeless. This is our chance to make the homeless situation self sustaining. Before Peter Uberroth took over the Olympics they were always losing money. Peter showed the world how to make money on something that was always a loser.

I compare my plan with the wholesale extortion plot that Charles Springer advocated (SMDP, Sept. 8, page 4) that the “16,000” empty apartments in the westside could be given to the homeless and rents rolled-back. He didn’t indicate who was going to pay for the scaled back rents.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 10, 2003.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/091003.pdf?ref=smdp.com)