10/15/2026
From the Lake City Taskforce on October 15, 2026
Dear Seattle City Councilmembers and Mayor Wilson:
We are writing as the Lake City Task Force on Homelessness about the proposed Vehicle Registration Assistance Program (VRAP) legislative package. Our task force works to prevent and reduce homelessness, and to support services, transitional shelter, and permanent housing for our unhoused neighbors. Our members include Lake City residents, business owners, members of religious congregations, unhoused people living in local shelters, and organizations that provide food, shelter, and other services to unhoused neighbors in our community, including those currently living in vehicles.
We appreciate Councilmember Strauss introducing legislation addressing a challenging area of our homelessness crisis that has long needed attention. We support the Council’s efforts to create pathways to housing because we don’t believe living on the streets in a RV is safe, healthy, or sustainable. However, we are concerned that components of this legislation will unintentionally increase the number of people living unsheltered, creating additional challenges for both the individuals evicted from their RVs and the surrounding neighborhoods, given the lack of RV safe parking lots and the severe lack of deeply affordable housing.
People sometimes have to resort to living in vehicles, including RVs and trailers, due to lack of affordable housing, unexpected expenses, job losses, and many other factors. We are aware of people living in RVs in Lake City who are on wait lists for permanent housing, but those wait lists are long. Even when temporary shelter is available, it does not guarantee appropriate housing will follow. With long waits for deeply affordable housing and length-of-stay limits at many shelters, people who lose their RVs through enforcement may become unsheltered immediately. Others may enter temporary shelter and eventually become unsheltered if they are unable to secure permanent housing before their stay ends.
There is understandable community concern about illegal activities conducted by some people in RVs in Seattle. However, there are existing laws that can be utilized to address those behaviors without burdening all the other people who are living in their RVs because they have no better option.
We are especially concerned about the components of the legislative package that establish the VRA permit system, institute restrictive 2 hour parking limits and overnight parking bans except in limited industrial zones, and allow impounding RVs that people are living in without any notice. We are concerned that the permitting and enforcement system as currently formulated would be complicated, rigid, exclusionary, and overly punitive. We expect this will result in many vehicles being impounded and their residents losing belongings and being forced onto the streets. The enforcement timing is unreasonably fast for the city to create enough RV safe lots and adequate amounts of permanent housing to offer to people currently living in RVs in our city.
The proposed $5 million funding is clearly insufficient to fund all the needed activities, including creation of enough permanent housing. The costs of the permitting and enforcement system alone will be large, and it is not clear that the city has the capacity to implement it. We feel these resources would be more productively used for outreach, services, shelter, and permanent housing to assist people living in RVs.
We urge the Council to make improvements in the legislation to help achieve the goals of assisting people living in RVs to move into appropriate shelter and permanent housing.
Postpone the VRA permits, parking restrictions and enforcement until after conducting an informative census of people living in RVs and after establishing RV safe lots, RV storage, shelter, and permanent housing to meet the needs of this unhoused population.
Allow for ongoing censuses and opportunities to obtain the VRA permit so that Seattle residents who become homeless after the initial census can obtain a RV permit and gain access to safe lots, shelter, and housing without the city seizing their vehicle.
Expand the eligibility for VRA permits to people living in a RV who are not the registered owner or who do not possess the title, in recognition that this ineligibility would create a barrier to the program for too many people.
Require multiple warnings with supportive outreach to owners or residents before any RV is impounded, allowing for reasonable exceptions for situations posing a real safety or health violation that requires immediate towing.
Ensure a system where people can retrieve their belongings and property in a reasonable period of time in any cases where RVs or vehicles are impounded.
We encourage you to focus the city’s programs and resources on addressing the problem of people living in their vehicles by conducting outreach to people living in their vehicles, identifying and addressing their needs, and offering appropriate shelter and permanent housing. Specifically we enthusiastically support the components of the legislative package that:
Designate funding for outreach workers to conduct a census of the number of people living in RVs in Seattle, understand their needs, and assess barriers they experience to finding or accepting housing.
Establish multiple vehicle safe lots, distributed across the city, where people who are living in their RVs and other vehicles can legally stay and where water, sanitation, and supportive services are available. Multiple lots are needed with sufficient capacity for the number of RVs and people living in them.
Create real pathways into shelter and permanent housing that match the needs and number of individuals living in RVs and other vehicles.
Provide RV storage so that people don’t have to give up their vehicle and belongings when they are able to move into shelter or housing.
We believe that with the right approach, this legislation will create an opportunity to address neighborhood safety and livability concerns while also protecting some of the most vulnerable people from displacement and the risk of becoming entirely unsheltered. These goals do not have to come at the expense of one another.
Sincerely,
Lake City Task Force on Homelessness
