About a week ago I saw the car in the featured picture above parked feet from my apartment. It was an incredibly frustrating find because it was so clear what was going on here: this is somebody’s home, and some Parking Enforcement Officer (PEO) slapped a boot on it because it was illegally parked and had multiple tickets. The scene is what’s emblematic about the systematic failure of Seattle as a City government of addressing the broader housing issue. There are solutions to help this household, but the City just plods along with plans and procedures while real humans get crushed between the gears. In Ballard, for example, neighbors are rallying to keep those families out. What happens in Ballard and with broader policy discussions will decide whether every home matters in the city, and whether the City Council really will carry out a course reversal and upzone the city.

I’m no expert, but the car I spotted was clearly being lived in. Yes, it was parked illegally, but kind of askew, like it ran out of fuel or something else stranded the car in just that spot. The boot was slapped on under Seattle’s scofflaw ordinance intended on cracking down on people who have a lot of traffic tickets. Before the scofflaw ordinance the car was simply towed, picked up by the offender, and driven off. The idea behind the ordinance was to save the towing fee and force the person to pay the tickets.

But anyone with common sense could have seen that this vehicle wasn’t just a car parked drunkenly by someone with a lot of tickets. The PEO should have confirmed with the people in the car that indeed this was their home, found out what the issue was, and made whatever calls for assistance that made sense. Obviously the goal of the PEO would be to get the car moved, but there are a few steps that make sense before slapping a boot on the car. Clearly, the couple living in the car can’t pay the tickets because they’re in a bad spot. What made the PEO think that they’d come up with the cash? And based on what is obvious to any onlooker, the car was now really stranded there with the boot.

I did a Facebook post on the situation. A Facebook friend and local activist (and frequent critic of my work) saw the situation and contacted me. Bill Kirlin-Hackett works with the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness (IFTH) and knows this problem well. He got to work making calls and visiting with the couple who called the car home. Turns out the key to the vehicle was lost, and since this was a weekend nobody was available to replace it. They also didn’t have the more than $300 to get a new key. Add that problem to the previous tickets that lead to the boot (tickets likely issued because the couple was using the car as their home) and these people were facing losing their home to the tow yard.

Kirlin-Hackett was able to persuade the City to take off the boot, found money to replace the key, and thankfully the couple was able to move their home to another location. 

But City policy churning along would have ended up seizing this couples home and putting them, literally, on the street with all their possessions; they’d have their possessions if they were lucky enough to be there when the vehicle was towed. A couple making due living in their car would now be outside and looking for shelter, maybe even at the proposed homeless encampment in Ballard. Kirlin-Hackett tells me that this happens all the time.

The solution is pretty simple. The PEO should never have put a boot on someone’s home, period. He or she should have called an organization like IFTH, worked with their outreach people, and figured out how to move the vehicle as quickly and as humanely as possible. It’s not like this happens hundreds of times every day in our city; it’s perfectly within the job requirements of anyone working for the City to solve a problem. And this problem was solvable.

I say this case is emblematic because I want this city to be a place where this couple, in time, can get rid of this car, move into a apartment where they can affordably live and use transit to get to work and wherever else they need to go. As a city, that is possible. We can do that. The problem is that we’ve spent so much time arguing over how to tax new development and growth to try and channel money to government agencies, to put out requests for proposals to non-profit agencies so that they can build very expensive housing units that, in the end, will have a waiting list anyway. Meanwhile, real people are having their houses towed away right now.

The solution for this problem also teaches a lesson. Bill and I have got at it with each other on Facebook for a long time, and we’ve been pretty hard on each other. He thinks I’m a lobbyist for housing developers that only care about profit. I get frustrated with his radical priest persona that seems to focus more on who’s profiting rather than the bigger picture. But when there was a problem right in front of us, we collaborated and the problem got solved. I really didn’t do much other than ask for his help, but he gave it. As a city, all sides need to see housing, broadly, in the same way. Let’s together, no matter what our ideological views, open the doors to people that need a place to stay or help and figure out how to create more options for everyone who wants to live here. That’s the kind of city I want to live in.