Family stuck in S.F. after RV home got towed
Marielle Lowes spent the past five years traveling the nation in buses and recreational vehicles as a dreadlocked hippie, trailing the remnants of the Grateful Dead and hitting Rainbow Nation bohemian gatherings while selling her art. Then, eight months ago, she gave birth to her first child, and she longs to go home to New Orleans “to settle down and be a mom.”
But she’s stuck in San Francisco. The recreational vehicle that she and her boyfriend have lived in for nearly two years and just fixed up to take them to Louisiana was towed by city parking officials more than a week ago — and they can’t get it back.
In the five months they’ve been living in San Francisco in the RV — “waiting out the bad
weather so we can drive east,” Lowes said — they’ve racked up 27 parking tickets and penalties worth $2,095. On the afternoon of July 27, parking officials knocked on the door as the RV was parked on Lincoln Way near 25th Avenue alongside Golden Gate Park, told the sleeping Lowes and her baby to get out, and hauled the vehicle to the city tow yard. Mom and child were left on the sidewalk.
Now, with a $980 tow charge and $2,171 in storage fees tacked on, Lowes and her boyfriend owe a total of $5,246 — for a 1986 Travel Craft RV that cost them $2,500 when they bought it last year. And they have virtually no money.
Poverty advocates say Lowes’ predicament is a prime example of how low-income people are victimized by exorbitant parking and tow fees in San Francisco, which charges about two times more for such penalties than nearly every other city in the United States, a Chronicle investigation last year showed. Parking officials say they need to charge that much to recover their costs, and that towing is necessary to keep the jampacked streets clear.
Lowes, 24, says all she wants to do is leave, but everything she and her boyfriend — Paul Wassell, 28, the baby’s father, who was not at the RV the day it was towed — own is in their vehicle. Which is in the tow yard. Which neither can access, they say, because they haven’t been able to negotiate the red tape involved.
Those locked-up belongings include all the equipment Wassell needs as a gemstone and crystal miner and jeweler, and the tools Lowes uses to make paintings and medicinal salves — along with the product they had on board to sell. Without those supplies, the two have quickly run out of cash and have been crashing with their baby boy, Donovan Wassell, on the couches of acquaintances they can’t stay with long-term. Complicating matters is that Lowes was recently diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a painful inflammation of the digestive tract that limits her mobility at times.
“We’ve had awesome adventures traveling, and I really wanted to do that to learn about the country and the people, but that’s not my focus now,” Lowes said the other day as she fed Donovan creamed spinach and apricots from baby-food jars. “I want to normalize my life for Donovan. I want to go back to be around relatives, give him a good education, go back to school.
“I’m a mom now. I quit partying and am more modest. Things are different. I just need to get home.”
Paul Rose, spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said it’s unfortunate that the family lost their rolling home, but rules are rules for a practical reason.
“No one wants to see a family left without a home, but we have to ensure we are providing objective enforcement so people follow the parking and traffic rules,” Rose said. Without a towing system, he said, vehicles could be left indefinitely blocking parking spaces and roadways — and traffic conditions are already notoriously crowded in San Francisco.
“Towing is necessary,” he said.
The agency received a request by voice mail from Wassell on July 27 for a towing review hearing, where MTA officials can determine if the tow and fees were warranted. But officials and Lowes and Wassell have played phone tag since then.
Paul Boden, an activist on homeless issues, called the seizure of Lowes’ vehicle “unconscionable.”
“The fact that there would be no humanitarian thought about putting this woman and her 8-month-old out on the sidewalk is so callous and dehumanizing,” said Boden, organizing director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project in San Francisco, an antipoverty advocacy group. “This is what happens to poor people who can’t pay these outrageous parking tickets and tow charges — they wind up losing their rolling homes.”
Boden called Jeff Kositsky, director of the city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, who has been working with MTA officials to help the couple get access to their vehicle in the tow yard. But Kositsky has no power to waive the tow and storage fees — that can only come, he said, through a towing review hearing. Rules for the hearing state, “Financial hardship is not a valid reason for appeal.”
Kositsky’s workers and Lowes have been talking about the family going back to New Orleans through the city’s Homeward Bound program, which reunites homeless people with family or close friends who can put them up.
If Lowes and Wassell can’t pay the fees or get them waived, they will have to leave the RV behind and it will become city property to be sold.
Meanwhile, Compass Connecting Point, the city agency that places homeless parents and their children in shelters, has put the couple and their baby on a waiting list of 50 other families without permanent housing.
“We get this kind of thing several times a year, with a family losing a vehicle that was their home,” said Carla Praglin, agency case management director. “When you lose your car and your valuable documents like ID, it’s an additional trauma, can really set a family back on getting things done.”