In the early hours of Jan. 29, volunteers found 4,505 people living unsheltered on the streets of Seattle and King County. More than 900 of those people were living on what Seattle University law professor Sara Rankin calls “the thin tin line,” sleeping in the relative safety of their cars rather than on the streets outside.
According to a brief released by the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project (HRAP), a team of Rankin’s law students, Seattle and other sizeable cities in the state of Washington have been systematically criminalizing that life-sustaining activity over the course of the last decade, a practice they contend violates the civil rights of people experiencing homelessness.
The students found that the number of laws in Washington restricting vehicle residency has exploded in recent years, from 96 at the end of the 1980s to 263 by 2015. Those measures fit on a spectrum, subtly restricting activities associated with vehicle residency, including parking between the hours of 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., or overtly prohibiting sleeping in your car.
It feels “morally wrong,” said Justin Olson, a third-year law student and co-author of the report, but it may also be unconstitutional.
According to the authors, the vehicle residency laws are often vague and, if enforced in their entirety, might unintentionally criminalize normal behaviors such as eating in your car or taking a nap before a long drive.
In practice, they’re used against low-income people or those experiencing homelessness, who can rack up tickets and other charges that pile up until the car is impounded. In many cases, that means the last major possession in people’s life put in a system with a zero percent success rate — nearly all impoundment cases in Seattle remain “unresolved.”
Vehicle impoundment takes away the last safe place people had to sleep as well as their ability to travel, find a job or otherwise get themselves out of homelessness, which amounts to a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”
“It’s a schizophrenic approach to the problem,” Rankin said.
Seattle uses mixed tactics, enforcing laws that restrict vehicle residency while creating exceptions to them. The Seattle Police Department works with the Scofflaw Mitigation Team, a project of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness that does outreach to people with multiple tickets before police boot their cars.
City Hall also launched a brief effort to create safe zones for people who live in their cars, providing utilities hook-ups and sanitation facilities, but quickly pulled back in the face of mounting costs. According to SeattlePI.com, a single safe lot was expected to cost $35,000 per month on top of $24,689 in set-up expenses.
That’s far more than a safe lot would cost if anyone but the city put it together, said Bill Kirlin-Hackett, director of the task force and volunteer with the Scofflaw Mitigation Team.
“They put out a [Request For Proposals], bid on it, have an agency do it, take a percentage for administration and have caseworkers,” Kirlin-Hackett said. “It’s the most expensive way to do this.”
There are other models out there, generally run through partnerships with organizations like Kirlin-Hackett’s, that would provide a measure of safety to people living in their cars while also resolving City Hall’s concerns about the environmental repercussions of encampments.
Seattle City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw, who represents Seattle’s District 7, advocated for temporary toilets at an unofficial camp on Myers Way in West Seattle (after walking the vehicle camp in April) to get basic needs met while keeping costs low.
City and county officials declared a state of emergency around homelessness in December, but the response that followed doesn’t look like that, Rankin said. In the absence of safe, accommodating shelter spaces for Seattle’s homeless, officials need to stop criminalizing people’s attempts to take care of themselves.
“If this was a natural disaster, public space would become a triage center,” she said. “That’s not what we have here.”