Seattle University study finds that ordinances are harming the very vehicle residents that the city is trying to help
Bill Kirlin-Hackett, director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, produced a stack of documents half-an-inch thick.
The papers, proposals for modifying Seattle’s policies on vehicle residency, go back to 2010 and turned up in a recent spring clean of his filing cabinets. They don’t capture the extent of work he and cofounder Jean Darsie have done to mitigate the effects of Seattle’s laws on people who have had no choice but to live in their cars, but they do point to six years of frustration for Kirlin-Hackett and advocates like him.
“They won’t step up to remedying and amending the law,” Kirlin-Hackett said.
There lies the rub: Seattle, and other Washington cities like it, have systematically criminalized aspects of vehicle residency. Seattle also has a law, the 2011 Scofflaw Ordinance, that first boots and then impounds a vehicle with four or more outstanding parking tickets, a system that disproportionately punishes people who don’t have the money to pay their way out.
Rather than change the laws, City Hall and the courts have created an informal, largely discretionary system to skirt them, leaving it up to officers, the courts and volunteers to prevent people from falling through the cracks. City officials discussed revisiting the laws in summer 2015, but decided to wait until the Department of Human Services produced a report reviewing policies around vehicle residency.
The law has not been reviewed and people of little means remain at risk of losing the last major possession in their lives and the last stop-gap against living unsheltered on the street.
Because the city has not changed the law, Kirlin-Hackett and Darsie have acted as a two-person team to support car campers who are swept up in the tickets, boots and impounding. Called the Scofflaw Mitigation Team, they are an unpaid service for vehicle residents that tries to fill in the gap between the city’s intent to crack down on parking bandits and the human crises it causes.
“We keep the city out of the headlines,” Kirlin-Hackett said.
The city is working against itself by pursuing both approaches, said Sara Rankin, a law professor at Seattle University and director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project.
“This is the tendency that I see in Seattle and other progressive cities that are well intended,” Rankin said. “There’s one hand that’s trying to do good work, [and another] hand that’s undoing it by criminalizing these behaviors.”
Citations do not come with demographic information, meaning that it’s difficult to tell when a ticket is issued to a person living in their car versus a driver of means that overstayed their welcome in a parking spot.
Rankin’s team at the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project drilled down on those numbers in three ways. The first looked at commercial vehicles parked in non-commercial zones. A “commercial vehicle” is more than 80 inches wide, common for RVs or motorhomes. When mapped, it appeared that those citations were primarily issued in Wallingford and Ballard, two areas of Seattle with a heavy concentration of vehicle residents.
They next looked for citations for parking with expired tabs and parking in prohibited locations, two ordinances that can lead to “scofflaw” status and also fall more heavily on vehicle residents. In each case, citations were concentrated in areas of high vehicle residency, according to the report.
“As long as Seattle continues to aggressively issue citations without mitigation or relief for vehicle residents, vehicles residents will continue to disproportionately suffer the risk of losing their vehicles — their last reasonable refuge from the streets — to scofflaw enforcement,” the report reads.
The system is slow to change, but there have been some successes.
“Commercial vehicles” that cannot park in residential areas are allowed in industrial zones, but they were chased out by a proliferation of parking restrictions that prohibited parking between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.
The Seattle Department of Transportation (sdot) has pulled back from installing those signs unless expressly requested by the police department, said Mike Estey, manager of parking operations and traffic permits for sdot.
“These parking signs don’t address the complicated underlying public safety and human services issues, but just move these issues down the street or around the block,” Estey said.
sdot does forward complaints from residents or businesses to the police department.
Additionally, City Hall tries to work with the Scofflaw Mitigation Team to intervene before a vehicle resident gets towed, allowing Kirlin-Hackett and Darsie to try and fix the problem before the financial implications of towing and impoundment move someone’s home beyond their reach.
Finally, City Hall has established safe parking zones and the Road to Housing program through Compass Housing Alliance to provide parking places with utilities and other facilities to provide safety for the residents and deal with complaints about trash build-up and hygiene.
City Hall created 12 parking spaces for $300,000. None of the spaces are large enough to accommodate an RV, according to Scott Lindsay, special assistant to the mayor.
“Our initial hope of building a vast, citywide network of church parking lots did not work out,” Lindsay told the Human Services and Public Health Committee on April 27.
City Hall is retreating from a recent attempt to provide parking after city staff realized that a single parking lot with 20 vehicles was costing $35,000 per month on top of $24,689 in set-up costs, according to SeattlePI.com.
All Home, formerly the King County Committee to End Homelessness, has a working group that spent three meetings in March and April focused specifically on vehicle residency. It resulted in a series of recommendations that Rankin, a member of the working group, felt were so watered down she asked to have her name taken off the final product.
Although she respects the members of the working group, which included community members, city officials, academics and nonprofit leaders, the resulting recommendations had more to do with targeting and expanding existing services than fixing the underlying legal problems, Rankin said.
The nature of All Home, which is a coalition of governments and organizations, prevented site-specific language, said Mark Putnam, director of the organization.
“We need to reduce harm and look at policies and ordinances that harm people and punish people for doing things like sleeping or parking,” Putnam said, noting that All Home would never give specific directives to one city.
The Seattle University brief advocates for a requirement that police and parking enforcement recognize that vehicle residents can’t avoid tickets and therefore shouldn’t be issued citations, but instead should be assisted in some way.
The brief was one of six briefs on homelessness that the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project released in May. They share a common theme, arguing that in the absence of decent alternatives, criminalizing the activities that homeless people do to survive is a violation of their constitutional rights.
Leaving those laws in place is literally giving with one hand and taking away with the other, Rankin said. “It doesn’t matter how much you’re pouring into services and the supply side as long as you’re undoing that work with intensified and sustained criminalization,” Rankin said. “You can come up with as many ideas as you want on the service side and you may move the needle slightly.”