Advocates Warn that Impounding and Scrapping Vehicles Will Push More People into Unsheltered Homelessness
In October of last year, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 630 into law, giving a couple of California counties greater authority to dispose of more RVs.
Under the old rules, Los Angeles was limited to destroying only abandoned or inoperable recreational vehicles with an estimated value of $500 or less. Beginning on the first of this year, that limit has been raised to a value of $4,000, so the county can confiscate more valuable cars without sending them to auction. This comes at a time when other Californian cities are also testing the limits of their control over RV dwellers.
Over the objections of advocates in the area, Los Angeles City Council members are working quickly to implement the new rules immediately.
A motion put forward by Councilwoman Traci Park expressed the view that state laws have made it “too easy” for people to get their vehicles back on the road after being impounded because people could just buy them back from state auctions at “a pittance.” That sentiment is not widely shared among people who have actually lived through having their vehicles impounded and had to scrape together the cash to buy back their own property.
What’s in this Bill?
Under AB 630, Alameda County and Los Angeles County have been authorized to remove and dispose of abandoned or inoperable vehicles with an estimated value of up to $4,000. The process starts with a notice that must be placed on the vehicle at least 72 hours before its removal. Once those 72 hours have elapsed, the vehicle will be towed.
When a vehicle is removed from the streets, the removing agency is required to send a notice to the owner of the vehicle at their registered address. The owner or any person associated with the vehicle will have 10 days from the date of the notice to request a hearing to determine the validity of the removal. They also have a period of at least 30 days to reclaim the property by paying any relevant fees.
Obviously, receiving and responding to mail in a timely fashion may be challenging for someone who’s just had their only home towed away. Those 10- and 30-day periods are likely to pass by before many people can get informed and prepare themselves to deal with the situation, along with the cascade of other problems this removal has set off in their lives.
If the grace period of at least 30 days passes without a person reclaiming their removed property, the vehicle will be destroyed.
Legal Disputes to AB 630
Attorneys representing the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and the Western Center on Law and Poverty, are already challenging the City of Los Angeles over its planned implementation of the bill, which they say is illegal.
In a demand letter sent to Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto in December, attorneys for the CD11 Coalition for Human Rights wrote that AB 630, “allows the Counties of Alameda and Los Angeles, not the City of Los Angeles, to implement a program to dismantle, rather than sell RVs worth up to $4000. As such, the City’s planned implementation of AB 630 is illegal.”
It goes on to explain that, “to promote statewide uniformity and avoid a confusing patchwork of local regulations, the state of California has expressly preempted the field of vehicle and traffic regulation. The Vehicle Code provides that ‘local authority shall not enact or enforce any ordinance or resolution on the matters covered by this code, including ordinances or resolutions that establish regulations or procedures . . . of matters covered by this code, unless expressly authorized by this code.’”
This legal challenge may put up a small roadblock in LA’s path to destroy people’s homes, though the concept of “legality” seems to be an ever-thinning one at the moment. It seems unlikely that Los Angeles County would stand in the way of the City of Los Angeles accomplishing this goal. The end result is likely to be the same, just with a little more red tape thrown in the mix, which is a valuable strategy that can save people valuable time. However, there’s still more that needs to be done to change outcomes for the vehicle dwellers of LA.
Destroying RVs Targets Survival, Not the Housing Crisis
This new law is once again approaching the problem backwards by attacking the symptom instead of the root cause. There are very few people who would choose to live in a broken-down RV if they had safe, secure, and accessible permanent housing made available to them.
Because the available shelters are insufficient to meet the needs of many with no other options, many people are left living in their vehicles as a last resort. Destroying these means taking away the last roof over someone’s head and making them unsheltered — all for what, a better parking spot closer to your house? A better view from your 4-bedroom Craftsman? When the tent encampments spring up to shelter the people displaced from their RVs, you’ll complain about those, too.
NIMBY lawmakers are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. They don’t want to provide housing for all their constituents. They don’t want to stand up to the corporate interests that are destroying their local housing markets. And they certainly don’t want to see the homelessness that results from their actions. They seem to prefer magical thinking and the idea that homeless people will somehow disappear if they just make being homeless illegal.
Since the state has failed in its responsibility to provide the carrot, all it has left to offer is the stick. This system is inherently unsustainable. It punishes the victims while worsening the problem for everyone. This can’t go on for too long before the growing number of people with nothing left to lose get tired of complying with a system that offers them less than nothing.