FREMONT >> The Fremont City Council this past week unanimously passed a new 72-hour parking ban on large trucks and other “oversized” vehicles including RVs, requiring the vehicles to be moved at least 1,000 feet within 24 hours.

The ban, which goes into effect Dec. 12 and also prohibits large trucks and RV parking within 100 feet of residential neighborhoods, churches and schools, came as a surprise to people living in RVs along Albrae Street.

“They’re going to keep trying to get rid of us,” homeless resident Joey Alvarez, 59, said. “We’re taxpayers too.”

Alvarez was parked on Cushing Parkway near an auto mall until last week, when he said city workers handed him a paper saying he had to leave. He brought his RV and small SUV with him to Albrae Street, along Interstate Highway 880 — a place he’s camped before for the last year or so.

“They’re just making it hard on us on purpose,” Alvarez said. “Nobody’s out here because they want to be.”

Fremont joins a growing list of cities statewide that have aggressively ramped up homeless sweeps and policies after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s orders earlier this year. Similar actions have been taken in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sunnyvale and more.

Across the street at the Fremont Honda Kawasaki Suzuki motorcycle dealership, salesman Bill Keys said the city should “bring out the bulldozers and get them out of here.”

Keys, who grew up in Fremont and now lives in Castro Valley, has worked at the dealership for the past 18 years. He said he’s watched the environment over the past two years in front of his shop along Albrae Street degrade into a “ghetto,” with dozens of RVs and homeless residents setting up temporary campsites for themselves beside the roadway.

Keys called the new ban “a good idea,” though he added that the city should find a place where people living on the street can go.

He said homeless people have left garbage, feces and other waste all around the shop, and at one point he said he witnessed someone dump and abandon raw sewage in his dealership’s parking lot from their RV. Keys also said that his customers complain about driving to the shop and witnessing the many homeless residents’ living conditions where there are no public bathrooms and no public dumpsters available to the unhoused.

“They don’t care about the poor person trying to make an honest living. They don’t care about the lives they’re disrupting,” said Keys, who added that he’s “getting out of the Bay Area” and looking to buy property on King Island in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in King Island.

Another neighbor in the area, homeless RV resident Tim Geist, said he’s lived around Fremont for the last four or five years, moving from place to place. He also recently got kicked out of the nearby auto mall before settling in front of the motorcycle dealership. Geist said nearly everything about the ban was unclear to him.

“We don’t know anything about that,” Geist, 57, said. “They don’t tell us.”

Enforcement logistics for the ban, such as where the city will possibly tow vehicles and where residents could be able to reclaim any items, was not immediately clear.

Geneva Bosques, a city spokeswoman, said the ban would not be as strictly enforced in industrial areas, though RVs and other large trucks could still be required to move 1,000 feet every 72 hours.

“We of course don’t have the capacity to enforce this in a robust manner, as it would require additional dedicated staffing,” Bosques said.