Green Lake resident: City failing to enforce parking for homeless vehicles

A Green Lake resident says when it comes to parking tickets in her neighborhood, justice is not blind.

For over 25 years, Kristin Bogren and her family has owned a neighboring four-plex and a five-plex right, two blocks away from Green Lake. The units are a stone’s throw from I-5, and an unsanctioned homeless camp.

“Couple years ago, we noticed that the homeless started moving in like a hundred feet from our property, parallel to I-5,” she said. “They come and they sweep and clean it out and they just come right back.”

Kristin has lived in one of the units for the last five years, and said that when it comes to the encampment, it is a vicious cycle.

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“They were by the Green Lake park-and-ride and they swept that area — they put up the signs saying ‘stay out,’ and they fix the fence,” she described. “Well of course they move up the street and (WSDOT) will come, they’ll sweep this, they’ll fix the fence, and they put the signs up. Literally within a month they’ll be back, they’ll break the fence open again, [and] tear the signs down.

But recently, her anger over the homeless situation in her neighborhood has taken on a new facet. Right next to the unsanctioned camp is a “no parking” area, and according to Kristin, one of the homeless campers gets the benefit of parking there for free.

“That’s a ‘no parking area,’ always has been,” she said. “They will come there and park. They’re used to be four ‘No Parking’ [signs] and now there’s only one and a half. They’ve kicked down the ‘No Parking’ signs, and then they continue to park there overnight. The one car that parked there for two weeks straight, coming and going, I reported him on the ‘Find it, Fix It’ app, but I don’t think anything happened. They just closed it and didn’t comment.”

Kristen was frustrated. Parking is tight in the area, and in her experience when it comes to parking enforcement, the city is typically quick to respond.

“Usually they’re really good at commenting when I report cars, because we constantly have them parking over our driveway — I have a yellow parking strip —  so they’ve usually really good at getting back to me and telling me to call the non-emergency. But in this case, they don’t even reply back to me; they just close it.”

She claims parking enforcement is a different story for a silver car illegally parked next to the homeless camp.

“Well I don’t know for sure, but he was parking there every day, so I mean I feel like if he was being ticketed he wouldn’t park there,” she described.

Kristen noticed a silver car (pictured) parked in a Green Lake lot for days at a time.

We submitted a public disclosure request on that silver car, and as it turns out, the car got two tickets in the past month. One was from the spot Kristen was referring to, and another at a different location in the city.

Neither ticket has been paid.

The issue of giving the homeless parking citations or towing their cars has been discussed by Seattle City Council before, dating back years.

“When folks are productively trying to get out of the situation they’re in and into permanent housing, to simply ticket and ticket and tow them doesn’t improve their situation, and doesn’t make things any better for the neighborhood,” Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien said back in 2017.

O’Brien proposed a parking ordinance in 2017 that would have given lenience toward illegally parked homeless vehicles, provided that owners tried to get their lives back on track. That didn’t get approved, but, many people like Kristin feel that the city is doing just that: Subjectively picking and choosing who they give tickets too.

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Now, Kristen points out that the homeless she encounters are not making efforts to improve their respective situations. Rather, they are addicted to drugs and stealing to support their habit.

According to her, homeless campers have broken into their apartment storage units stealing bikes worth thousands of dollars. Their mailboxes are constantly pilfered, deliveries are swiped off the doorsteps, and dirty needles and feces left behind in their carport after the homeless break in.

We asked Seattle Police Department representative Sean Whitcomb specifically about the case of the silver car that Kristin says has been illegally parking for weeks, and if it was legal for the city to engage in what appears to be parking inequity.

He wouldn’t agree to an interview, but he did say this:

“Police Officers and Parking Enforcement Officers have a great deal of discretion when enforcing the traffic code,” said Whitcomb. “Enforcement can take the form of written notice of infraction or a warning.”

For residents like Kristen, those infractions seem to only apply to some drivers.