Despite renewed legal threats and earnest pleas from homeless advocates, Mountain View soon will prohibit RV dwellers who largely can’t afford the Bay Area’s high housing costs from parking their vehicles on most streets within the city.

Faced with complaints about litter and safety hazards associated with the RVs, the City Council voted Tuesday night to essentially push all occupied, oversized vehicles away from residential areas and onto a few primarily industrial streets, starting in 2020.

The city joined a growing number of Bay Area cities, including East Palo Alto and Berkeley, in enacting new guidelines and restrictions to deal with the growing number of residents living in vehicles as a way to escape the region’s crushing housing crisis.

But unlike East Palo Alto and Berkeley, which ban oversized vehicles from parking overnight on all city streets, Mountain View will enforce around-the-clock parking restrictions on certain streets in the city.

In a unanimous vote, the Mountain View City Council completely banned oversized vehicles — those measuring more than 7 feet high, 7 feet wide and 22 feet in length — from parking on city streets with designated bike lanes starting in January 2020. And in a separate ordinance, it banned oversized vehicles from parking on city streets measuring 40 feet wide or less — the typical width of residential streets — starting on June 30, 2020.

City staff and council members cited safety concerns, such as oversized vehicles encroaching on bicycle lanes and making it hard for drivers to see around.

The decision culminated several years of discussions on how the city should handle the more than 200 residents living in RVs, campers and vehicles on streets within the city.

“At some point in time, you just have to make some decisions. And they’re not easy. I’m not excited or happy to do this, but that’s what we’re here to do,” Vice Mayor Margaret Abe-Koga said during the meeting.

Barton Lunfort, a personal trainer in Mountain View, has been living in an RV for the past year just outside of the apartment he had rented for four years on Continental Circle.

Lunfort, 57, who lives alone and earns a six-figure salary, said he decided to buy an RV because it was his best option to save money for retirement.

“I don’t do it because I enjoy it. I do it out of necessity so that I can have a future without being completely broke and then have no choice but to live on the streets,” he said Tuesday night.

By June, Lunfort and hundreds of other RV dwellers within the city will be forced to either move to one of the few remaining streets left in the city with unrestricted RV parking or move to a different city.

“I can never recall seeing a child riding their bike or running next to my RV,” Lunfort said about the safety concerns raised by city officials. “This just seems like a very sneaky and tricky way to push RVs out.”

More than 150 people came out to City Hall on Tuesday night to hear their elected officials deliberate once again on the pressing issue, with several dozen watching on monitors outside of the packed council chambers.

Although council members stated that residents had been asking them to handle the RV parking situation for years, the overwhelming majority of attendees voiced outrage, frustration and disappointment that they would even consider the ban.

Ahead of the meeting, opponents held a rally outside of City Hall, yelling chants and holding posters that read “housing is a human right,” “poverty is not a crime” and “no ban without a plan.”

Instead of banning RVs to address safety concerns, they urged the council to improve bicycle lanes across the city and examine how parking of all vehicle types affects mobility on narrow streets.

“If that’s what we really want to do, let’s do it. But let’s not use it as an excuse to go after people living in motorhomes,” former mayor Lenny Siegel told the council.

Of the several dozen residents and homeless advocates who spoke at the meeting, only about two voiced support for a ban.

Mountain View resident Shari Emling called the measures “compassionate, positive and progressive.”

“For the first time, something is being done, and you’re not just kicking things down the road,” Emling told the council.

Hours before the meeting, attorneys from the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, and Disability Rights Advocates sent their third letter in recent months threatening to take Mountain View to court if the city approved the ban.

“Prohibiting the parking of oversized vehicles on narrow streets and adjacent to Class II bike lanes will have the same effect as a citywide ban,” the attorneys wrote in the letter. “We remain prepared to challenge such a ban if enacted.”

The attorneys argued the ordinance speculates that oversized vehicles pose dangers but the city failed to provide any evidence.

“Rather than provide an opportunity for vehicle residents to park on city streets safely by more carefully crafting a parking restriction to target those instances in which the right of way would actually be impeded, the proposed ordinance uses an unnecessarily broad criteria that instead targets vehicle residents themselves,” the letter stated.

The organizations argue that the two measures not only exacerbate the region’s housing crisis and discriminate against the city’s homeless population but also violate the U.S. Constitution because it would constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

Following the second reading of the ban in late October, Siegel, a member of the Mountain View Housing Justice Coalition, says the organization plans to start collecting signatures for a referendum petition to repeal the ban.

The organization would have to gather signatures from at least 10 percent of registered voters in the city to put the question to residents on an upcoming ballot.

In addition to the parking restrictions, the council on Tuesday night refined the safe parking program it recently established to help some vehicle dwellers who may be displaced.

The program, which will provide vehicle dwellers with a parking lot to sleep in overnight and connect them with caseworkers who’ll work to transition them to stable housing, will operate from 5 p.m. to 9 a.m. every day.

But with only about 80 parking spaces currently slated for the program — half of which are on temporary lots that will close by March 2020 — many of the city’s vehicle dwellers will not have the opportunity to participate.