Eugene sees a tripling of impounded vehicles

The number of vehicles impounded in the city of Eugene tripled from 2020 to 2022. Advocates for people experiencing homelessness say that cars, recreational vehicles, campers and other vehicles serving as makeshift homes make up a significant portion of what’s impounded. Many cannot afford to get their vehicles back and lose all their belongings and what little shelter they had, worsening their plight. Others may not have the title for their vehicle. Towing companies sometimes have to pay to get rid of the vehicles they’re stuck with, some of which contain hazardous materials that are expensive to dispose of. We talk with Register Guard reporter Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick who looked into these numbers and the broader policy implications.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The city of Eugene tripled the number of vehicles it impounded between 2020 and 2022. Advocates for people experiencing homelessness say that many of these vehicles, cars, RVs, campers, trailers are actually makeshift homes, homes that can be very difficult to ever get back. The reporter Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick wrote about this for the Register Guard. She joins us now to talk about it. Welcome back to the show.

Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick: Thanks so much for having me.

Miller: I’d like to start with one of the personal stories that you wrote about. How did Aaron Dumke end up living in a trailer with three cats?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: Aaron has been homeless since he was a teenager. He’s now 50. He said at the time, it seemed like his options were to make a fat cat fatter or have his freedom, so he opted for the latter. But the lifestyle gets harder as you get older, harder on your body and harder to get out of. He’s also struggled with addiction for many years. So for him, the situation was the safest, most comfortable option that he could afford.

Miller: So he was living in a trailer in Eugene. When was his trailer taken?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick In early May.

Miller: And how much warning did he get?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: He was not warned, but that’s because his wheels were off the roadway. If he were here, he might say “just barely!” There’s a photo that the city shared with me so I could confirm their story. His wheels were kind of on the curb, so in that case, the city doesn’t have to do a warning, they can just tow on sight.

Miller: So what kinds of challenges did he face as he tried to get his vehicle back?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: Often, recreational vehicles end their life cycle in this area serving as pretty poor shelter for people with nothing else. In this survival economy that many people in our state are in, these RVs and trailers will be swapped, gifted, and sold very informally. Very often people don’t have the registration, and that’s something that you have to have to get your vehicle back and to get your stuff. I will add that tow companies tell us that their hands are tied. It’s the law, they can’t just have anyone come in and say this is mine, give it back. Even if they want to reunite people with their possessions, it’s kind of out of their hands at this point.

I think it’s worth noting that no one really stands to gain from the cycle as it is, because when these vehicles are not reunited with their owners, oftentimes these vehicles that are serving as people’s temporary homes are not in any condition to sell. So then tow companies are stuck disposing of them, and some are not easy to dispose of, whether that’s hazardous material from its occupant, or older ones are often built with a lot of asbestos. So that’s the problem that he and, and many I talk to face, is that they just don’t have the registration. It’s kind of impossible.

Miller: Well, what about his three cats, or his belongings? As you outlined, he wasn’t able to get the vehicle back. But what about the stuff in the vehicle?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: Most of the time, my understanding is that animal control might get involved when there’s pets. In this case it seems like a pretty extreme example. His note, which he attests was a big note, was missed. I’m sure that no one in the process was intentionally towing something with animals in it, but that’s what happened. The tow company went ahead and let him get his cats out, which they didn’t have to do, but I think they just didn’t want to be dealing with the cats, or more horrifically leave them in the trailer. When he found out he was towed and he found out that his cats were gone, he really had a moment of crisis. And after calming down and having some friends help him call every tow company in the area, he found where they are and they let him get his cats back.

But his stuff was still gone. And that’s really hard for folks, because that can be survival supplies, how you cook, extra food, sleeping bags. And it can also be your trinkets, your art supplies, the things that make you you. And that can be a huge loss as well.

He had a bit of a goose chase that many can’t do. As I explained, these vehicles will be pretty informally swapped and traded, so finding the title can be like an impossible task. But he actually managed to find the original owner who didn’t want to be involved, but she agreed to call the tow company. That didn’t allow him to get the trailer back, but they did allow him to get his belongings before they disposed of the vehicle. So he was about a month without any of his survival gear, without any of his personal belongings, and after a lot of leg work was given permission to get his belongings, which was kind of out of the generosity of this tow company, if you could call it that, because they didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have the title.

Miller: How does this one story fit in the larger picture of what’s been happening in Eugene over the last few years?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: With not many places to park, and many, many people experiencing homelessness, a lot of people’s full time jobs are outrunning the meter maids. I’ve talked to many folks who said they just can’t get jobs, they can’t get to their appointments, things that they need to improve their health, further stabilize, when their job is to find a new place they can be for a moment. Because when they fail, they get impounded and they become effectively more homeless.

Many people are invested in finding solutions to this homelessness crisis that we see in Eugene and throughout the state and even the country. To me, this cycle is a bit of a trap door because what happens is people just become more stabilized, and maybe in a chutes and ladder kinda way, this is something that sends people back. For housed residents, there is a lot of frustration to be having a lot of these huge vehicles in their neighborhood. They can be an eyesore, imperfect neighbors perhaps. Some housed residents express feeling like they’re these de facto park hosts, so they have a lot of frustration with the situation as well.

Miller: How did the people that you talk to explain the increase you found of a tripling of impoundments of vehicles between 2020 and 2022?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: The first huge thing to look at here is that stay in place orders really mellowed impoundments. I think that’s a major factor based on who we talked to. And then also there’s, every year, more and more people are experiencing homelessness. And then as the population grows in Eugene, parking becomes a bigger issue for all the residents. I don’t know what city doesn’t have drama about parking downtown, so Eugene is certainly one of those cities. Parking around campus can have its difficulties. More people doesn’t always mean more parking, and we don’t have a way of knowing which impoundments were shelters and which impoundments were just people’s vehicles that gets them to their job or what have you.

Miller: Well, I was actually wondering about that. So the city doesn’t track the number of impounded vehicles that are actually people’s homes?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: No. So if anyone has any brilliant ways to maybe figure that out, please email me. We have the number of people impounded, and we can spend days and days talking to people and try to gather a sense anecdotally of how often this happens. And so that’s what we were able to put together here. But there’s not a clear answer about what percent is people’s homes. All we know, from talking to folks experiencing homelessness and living in these kinds of vehicles, is that it’s a super common experience. I talked to one man who was on his fifth RV or trailer, because it’s kind of par for the course if that’s the way that you’re surviving. You almost expect to be impounded at some point because there’s just no place you can be for long.

Miller: What’s the normal process before a vehicle is impounded?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: Most of the time folks get a 72 hour warning, but certain violations don’t require them. So in Aaron’s case, he had violated something that allowed the tow company to take it right away. So oftentimes there’s a warning, but people can be impounded for other reasons, and then that’ll happen a lot faster.

Miller: How do the number of impoundments compare to the number of those warnings?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: The city said they don’t want to tow people’s homes. I don’t think anyone expresses interest in being the one to tow or dispose of people’s homes. They said that they issued more than 2500 warnings for storage on the street in the time frame that we were looking at, from January 1st 2020 to November 2022. That compares to a few hundred impoundments. That gives you a sense of a big emphasis on warning, warning, warning as much as possible, knowing that this further destabilizes people.

Miller: As you talked about, it can be very hard for people to get access to a title to prove ownership of their vehicles, just because of the sometimes complicated chains of unofficial ownership of these vehicles. But even if they do have access to a title, they can’t get their vehicles back often without paying potentially thousands of dollars in fees. What do people do if, for either of those reasons, they can’t get their vehicle back?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: I talked to many who, with one impoundment, go from having a door with a lock, windows that they can cover, storage where they can put their gear and their supplies, to just being on the street. I talked to one couple literally in the process of getting their things out of an RV and getting ready to spend the night on the street. Sometimes it makes more sense for people to start over if they do have a little bit of money. So with the people that I talk to, it’s not uncommon to be impounded and then take some time to scrape together what you can and buy another very cheap, very poor quality RV, just because it’s a little more secure, it’s a little warmer, it feels a little safer than being on the street.

Miller: Did you come across any meaningful solutions in your reporting?

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: Yeah, I literally stumbled upon one. My partner and I spent days interviewing folks around the city, approaching a lot of people who appeared to be living out of their vehicles, and did our best to respectfully open up conversations about their experience. And one of these days, we saw a pretty tidy and larger collection, and it seemed semiformal. And so we were curious about what was going on there, and we found out that this was an effort that the city was providing a bit of support for. It was getting a lot of assistance and support from Pastor Gabe, an advocate for hosted folks and of course a pastor in our area. And this was, like I said, semiformal. A lot of sanctioned, approved rest stops, camp spots in this area here are pretty expensive, and there’s huge wait lists for them because oftentimes people require a lot of support for them to be safe, organized for surrounding neighbors to be ok with that spot. So it can take a long time to approve, a long time to set up, and cost a lot to support.

So we have a few models that the city is excited about of safe spots that camping is allowed. But there’s just not enough, at all. What Pastor Gabe told me is we can’t make them fast enough. So, is there a less expensive solution? That’s what he is trying to prove with this model, or at least hoping can be proved with this model. A little over a dozen RVs and trailers are pretty tightly parked in an abandoned street that leads to nowhere, just this area in a more industrial part of our city. They have some trash support, they have a dumpster, and they have a porta-potty. And just that little tiny bit. They don’t have what a more formal situation would, they don’t have running water, they don’t have electricity. It’s still really expensive to just exist, propane, figuring out everything without those basic supports. But a little bit of support of “I can stay here and I won’t be towed. I can throw my trash away here, I can go to the bathroom here” was life changing for the folks that I talked to. One man told me that he has no doubt he would be in jail if he didn’t have the support, because he was so desperate before. And with a place to be, with that little security, he could leave his home to work, and save a little money, and think about what might be next. I heard that a lot in that area.

This is, like I said, a little over a dozen, for a problem that is way, way bigger than that. But the advocates that I spoke to are hopeful that maybe other people could notice that this is an arrangement that could work. And if you have land, if you have property, if you have an area that might be able to host something like this that could help, because solutions are badly needed. There’s frustration across the board and, and what’s happening currently just further destabilizes people, is not getting us any closer to a smaller problem.

Miller: Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick, thanks very much.

Parafiniuk-Talesnick: Thank you.

Miller: Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick is a reporter for the Register Guard. She wrote recently about the increase in vehicle impoundments in Eugene. As a reminder, we had a relayed conversation yesterday about the loophole the city of Eugene has found that’s enabling it to sweep homeless camps after only two hours’ notice. You can find that conversation on our website, opb.org/thinkoutloud.

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