Bay Area can lead effort to drive out ‘poverty tows’

As counties across the state start easing yearlong pandemic restrictions, a form of normalcy is on the horizon for many Californians.

Yet, I can’t help but think of people like MiQueesha Willis. In 2019, Willis was living out of her car in San Francisco with her young son, Tobias. She worked a construction job to save money for an apartment in the city. But she kept racking up parking citations. One day while at work, her car was towed. Willis couldn’t pay the $500 towing fee or the hundreds of dollars in additional fines to get the vehicle back. A few weeks later, her 20yearold Lexus was sold at

auction.

What Willis experienced is commonly referred to as a “poverty tow.” Months into the pandemic, they were still happening to cars with unpaid parking tickets or expired registration, or to cars parked in the same space on the street for more than 72 hours, according to Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, one of many advocacy groups wanting to end poverty tows in California.

A Lawyers’ Committee analysis of data from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency showed 3,405 poverty tows occurred in District 10 from July 2018 to June 2020. This was the highest figure of any district in the city, though another four districts each recorded more than 1,000 poverty tows, the Lawyers’ Committee found. District 10 includes the BayviewHunters Point area, has San Francisco’s largest Black population and, according to city statistics, the thirdlowest median household income.

Poverty tows disproportionately impact lowincome communities of color.

In California, 20% of all poverty tows happened to American Indian/Alaska Native people in 2019, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation nonprofit. Nineteen percent happened to Black people and 15% to Latinos.

The high cost of recovery fees usually result in the person permanently losing their vehicle. Or, in Willis’ case, her home.

“It feels humiliating. You’re already sleeping in your car and then you lose the car,” Willis recently told me. “You never know what to do after that. You might be in a shelter, you might be under a bridge. It’s just a lot to figure out in that moment.”

The onset of the pandemic last year spurred some Bay Area cities to tweak how they issued parking citations. The SFMTA temporarily stopped ticketing cars that weren’t moved on street sweeping days. Oakland briefly stopped enforcing parking meters or timelimited parking.

But those moratoriums ended over the summer. And while the SFMTA advertises “substantial discounts” for financially vulnerable residents, they come with a catch. To qualify, folks needs to show they’ve received subsidies or are living below the federal poverty level. Those deemed eligible for discounts still have to pay $100 in fines. As for the tow waiver offered to unhoused people, that’s a onetime break.

Elisa DellaPiana works for the Lawyers’ Committee. When we spoke recently, I talked about Willis. DellaPiana in turn told me about a domestic violence survivor who used her vehicle both as a means to escape her abuser and for shelter. The woman lost her car because of overdue parking citations before the pandemic.

DellaPiana said if policies don’t change, more people will lose their cars in the coming months.

“We know there were people who couldn’t work during the pandemic so there are going to be more people who can’t afford the tickets over the last few months,” DellaPiana said. “There’s going to be a glut of people in these situations.”

Poverty tows are a symptom of a larger issue in California — growing economic disparity. Black and Latino people are overrepresented among lowincome families, according to data from Bay Area Equity Atlas. Addressing this disparity will take years.

But Brandon Greene, the director of the racial and economic justice program at the ACLU of Northern California, thinks a permanent end to poverty tows would be a good start. He says the punishment doesn’t fit the infraction.

“Parking in a place you shouldn’t have been parked in, maybe for longer than you should have been parked in — losing your vehicle as a consequence for that is just out of proportion,” he said.

Willis eventually saved up enough money to rent an apartment in Oakland for her and Tobias, who is now 3. As society reopens, we need to rethink the policies that made lives worse for people who were already struggling. An equitable return to normal in California doesn’t exist if poverty tows are a part of it.

The Bay Area should lead this effort, rather than using tow trucks to pull Black and brown residents deeper into poverty.

Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2016 District 10 in San Francisco, which has the largest Black population in the city, has a large number of “poverty tows.”