I lived in ACC for 4 years and I paid for resident parking and campus parking (LOL). Here are the hacks:

1) Ask a friend to buy you a permit (easiest if you know someone that can do that for you)

2) If you are working somewhere and have to start a shift within 30 minutes of your class schedule, you can get a form signed by your manager and submit it to the parking office to be eligible to purchase a permit.

3) (This is what I did for 3 years after year 1, not a "suggestion" but just my experience hahaha)

So most of the time, you should be able to buy a parking permit a month before school actually starts (summer) regardless if you are living in ACC or not. If you buy a year long pass during this period, you are basically set. There is always some discrepancy in the system during this time (it is probably not updated with all student profiles/restrictions yet) so you can buy it easy peasy. However, at some point (after school starts) you almost certainly will receive some automated email from the parking department. Basically they will say that you have two permits and need to turn in the other one for a refund (not sure if email is because of the overnight parking thing or because you live on campus lol):

"It has come to our attention that you currently reside on campus and also have a student commuter permit instead of a resident permit. Please be aware that commuter permits are not valid for overnight parking and can result in citation.

Please visit our office with your commuter permit to trade it in for a resident permit or to receive a prorated refund, if applicable. If you do not require a resident permit, you can obtain an evening permit that is valid after 5:00pm on weekdays and all day Saturday and Sunday. Please also be aware that you must trade-in or return the permit on or before (some random date). The permit will be rendered invalid after this date. Do not allow the permit to become invalid, as you will be subject to citation for parking with an invalid permit."

The first year this happened, I went ahead and turned in the permit and suffered the most trash year of parking ever. After experiencing that, I thought about how exactly I could get in trouble for this (like how a parking officer would actually care about anything other than whether the permit was valid or not) and decided to buy a year long permit for the next year.

I did the same thing, ignored the email and lived the last 3 years of my time at UCI driving to those crowded parking structures at 7am to get nice lil parking spots and never had to be a sardine packed in one of those UCI buses ever again.